Entries from January 2010

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

WordPress plugins I use

A few months ago, when I moved Freelance Unbound to its own host, I wrote that I had got a bit excited about the world of plugins and had, temporarily, broken the site. It’s all settled down now. And finally the vast universe of plugins is starting to make sense. Here are the ones I’m […]

Monday, January 11th, 2010

If Neolithic man went to university

He’d have been doing stuff like this. Because, frankly, carving and moving those 25-ton blocks out of real stone would have been too much work when you’re got your dissertation to worry about. And all that drinking…

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Subbing tip #7: Out there? Don’t go there

Every journalist and his dog seems to add this redundant phrase to whatever story they’re writing (or presenting, if it’s on TV or radio). Here’s a typical example (from the Telegraph): “Amazon releases Kindle for iPhone but are there enough ebooks out there?” Uh – out where, exactly? If the story is asking whether there are enough enough […]

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Commuter chaos: three fires on South West Trains

It seems there was more to today’s unrelenting commuter misery than the “adverse weather conditions” cited on the South West Trains tannoy. My six-hour total commute featured not one but two trains on fire. I ended up stuck behind on for about half an hour at Surbiton on the way in to Waterloo – then delayed […]

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Not Narnia…

…Farnham in the snow last night. Which would be nice if I wasn’t supposed to be going somewhere by train today. I was a bit sniffy about the tannoy announcement by South West Trains yesterday afternoon that it would be running a reduced service because of the “severe weather warning”. At least wait for the […]

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

How to solve WordPress 2.9's schedule post bug

Like many WordPress users, I’ve recently had a couple of scheduled posts fail to go live. It seems this is a WordPress 2.9 problem. If anyone else has had the same issue, here’s what I did to solve it. Upgrade to WP 2.9.1. It seems WordPress has been stung into action by the bad feedback […]

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Modern media is rubbish #1: two examples

Yesterday’s “news” carried two items that should have been shocking in their inability to separate hysteria and PR puffery from proper reporting. If that wasn’t really what the modern media is all about. The stories are from supposedly opposite corners of the media ring – one super serious, the other light-hearted. Each is crap in […]

Monday, January 4th, 2010

The media recession is over – we're drowning in jobs!

Oops – no we’re not. The 273 new vacancies advertised on Journalism.co.uk turn out to be mostly repeats of the same job. Please – don’t do this to us just as we’ve got used to the idea there’s no future in media: we can’t take the disappointment.