Seven things you’d never need to know about me

I’ve been meaning to get around to writing this meme post for some time. Thanks to Kat and Bruce for tagging me with this dubious honour.

So, here goes:

1. I once won first prize in a roller dance competition by performing a freestyle arrangement to the theme tune of Paddington Bear.

2. I have advertised alpaca shawls on local Bolivian TV.

3. I was one grade away from fulfilling the requirements of a place offered to me at Mansfield College, Oxford. Given the choice to retake, I chose instead to stick to my plan of taking a year out and traveling the world. I sometimes regret that decision, but mostly I don’t.

4. I was selected to try out for the UK Women’s Waterpolo Team… but didn’t make it in.

5. I fear that the things I do are not quite good enough (especially this sentence, which on the first go was very poorly constructed – see below).

6. I have eaten cow brains.

7. I have had a gun held against my head.

To continue this meme I call upon Julia Gilbert, Chris Unitt, Jaki Booth, D’Log (for he is a man of mystery), dp (as before), Karen Strunks and Fiona Handscomb.

“Everyone just Googles”

This is a quote taken from a conversation I had with a lawyer about her consumption of news:

“The problem is you people in the media are stuck in your own little world and forget that we’re also quite busy in our own little world and we don’t have time to keep up with what you’re doing.
“We don’t want to have to understand your RSS feeds, we just want to get the information that we need as quickly and easily as possible.
“Handing over 50p and getting that information printed on paper is an easy transaction. It makes sense.
“Fiddling around trying to understand and set up an RSS reader doesn’t.
“When it comes to information online the quickest way is to Google for it. Everyone just Googles.
“Then, if you find a useful easy-to-use site in the Google search results, that’s the site you’ll go back to.”

Plugin-tastic: the inevitable WP plugins post

One of the truly wonderful and fun things about having your own WordPress blog is that you get to experiment with all the additional plugins and add-ons that are available for free.

I thought I’d list the ones I am using so far and if anyone has any reccommendations I’d be grateful for them!

So far I have installed:

Askimet – as standard, everyone needs a good spam filter.

All in One SEO Pack – I’m hoping that means Google will pick up less random bits of my blog in searches.

Broken Link Checker – for I had many in the transfer over to joannageary.com.

Google Analyticator – so that I can track my website stats.

WordPress Database Backup – just in case it all goes wrong.

WordPress Reports – allows me to see “at-a-glance” Google Analytics and Feedburner stats in my WordPress dashboard.