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Internet

Ah, the internet. It's so wacky isn't it?

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16 July 2008: Food, glorious BBC food: By chance I noticed the an interesting case of BBC related database overload. And it’s in the form of recipe databases. Boy, is there a lot…
30 June 2008: When you’re out to con, there is another way…: Roughly 50% of all the spam for bods.me.uk consists of phising attempts for NatWest customers, repeated over and over and over again.
24 May 2008: Tweet Tweet - connecting with Twitter: Martin Belam has recently been experimenting with Twitter, and has blogged about his month long experience of using it.
23 April 2008: Doctor Who and Dilbert feeds: As I mentioned recently, the BBC’s Doctor Who website recently redesigned and moved their XML feed, without putting a redirect or message in the old feed to point people to the new one.
20 April 2008: So long beeb.net: Launched in 1999 as freebeeb.net, and later renamed beeb.net, BBC Worldwide’s ISP slowly and quietly kept chugging along. By 2001 it had entered profitability with 140,000 users. And it’s been around ever since. But this year will be its last - on the 30 June 2008, Beeb will close down and be no more.
16 April 2008: Who is G and what did he do to my ADSL?: One of the reasons I quite like Plus.net as an ISP is that they’re pretty open and honest with you. For example, for those of us on a capped broadband package, they provide a simple online tool that tells you how much you’ve used in a month. Very simple but you’d be amazed at how many ISPs don’t do this.
7 April 2008: When you move house, you tell people where you’re moving to. Now why don’t websites do the same?: One of the wonders of having XML feeds is that you can keep up to date with what’s going on quite nicely from one place instead of having to go through hundreds of different bookmarks, remembering what you’ve seen and what you’ve not. And it’s something more and more sites are now realising that they should provide, and which will bring them traffic.
24 March 2008: Turn your cache back on: For some time, I’ve been wondering why Movable Type has been, well frankly, so slow on my home PC. And specifically my Linux PC. It’s been an insane situation where trying to add one entry could take five minutes.
26 February 2008: Bespoke vs Off-the-shelf - watching the BBC blogs comment problems: Blogs for me are a great way for the BBC to communicate with the people who use, and pay for, its services and it’s great that they’ve been a success. Indeed, probably too much of a success if the continuing comment problems are anything to go by. The problems in trying to put up a single comment are, frankly, terrible. Timeouts… Server problems… You’re not even sure if your comment has even got through to the server backend half the time.
18 February 2008: MTOS 4.1 - Spam Comment Bug: This will hopefully be the last post on the whole comment spam thing - for now anyway. Today I actually (and accidentally) tracked down the reason why spam comments were going live on this site.
18 February 2008: The Intelligence of Comment Spammers: Ah, I thought. A false positive. A rather crap comment true, but one which presumably was in response to the whole comment spam issue.
16 February 2008: Comments now back - and the battle to get SpamFirewall running: Well you’re a right bunch of miserable people. Not one email to keep me company whilst the comments were down! Tsk! What do you think you’re playing at? Call yourself blog readers… Anyway, they’re back up now following some intensive hunting to find the cause of spam comments somehow making it on the site, despite all comments being pre-moderated.
13 February 2008: Comments Currently Disabled: An observant person might notice that comments on this blog are currently turned off. There’s a very good reason for this - today I logged into Movable Type and found that over the last few days, 44 spam comments had somehow gone live on the site.
5 February 2008: Comment Spam: I confess to being mildly concerned when I logged into Movable Type just now and found a great big whopping piece of comment spam had somehow managed to get itself onto an article yesterday.
17 January 2008: Save us from software that tries to be ‘clever’: The problem is all in the file names Blogger and Movable Type publish out to.
16 January 2008: Web Hosting Ideas?: When it comes to hosting, I’m a bit clueless (having never needed any) I thought I’d open the door to suggestions.
14 January 2008: No, I Didn’t Spam Anyone: Every now and then my email accounts suffer what I suspect many people who own domains do these days - log on to your email and find a couple of thousand emails saying ‘Message can’t be delivered’ or that kind of ilk.
3 January 2008: It’s all in the wording…: “Web icon set to be discontinued” screamed the headline from the pages of BBC News’s website.
19 December 2007: Rambling reminiscences of building the BBC’s website: Anyone reading the BBC Internet Blog will have noticed a flurry of posts celebrating the 10th aniversary of bbc.co.uk. All the reminiscing has, to be honest, got me reminising about my old memories of working on the BBC website
11 December 2007: The new BBC Homepage - a bit like myBBC then: Lots of people have blogged about it - with comments ranging from celebrating about the lack of the bbc.co.uk logo, and celebrating that lovely retro clock. So here’s my bit.
16 November 2007: Not Logging On: Here’s one for you. Have a think about how many people you know who do not have an internet connection in their house.
11 November 2007: The 6th Anatomy of Search Results: Also known as “Andrew can’t think of anything to write about, so he cops out and just scours the search logs to see if there’s anything funny in there”.
29 October 2007: BBC iPlayer - why DRM?: Ever since the BBC’s iPlayer’s TV programme download service launched in beta format a few months ago, its use of digital rights management has been a hot topic across various parts of the internet for all sorts of reasons.
6 August 2007: Portrayl and Accuracy: One of the things I try to do on this website when reviewing or commenting on anything, is to give an accurate reflection of an experience at the time I saw it. I don’t believe in being nasty, or badly reviewing anything unnecessarily. And yes, I’ve said a few bad things about certain places before now. Anyone who ever had the chore of reading my comments on Freeserve or GE Money will know that.
4 June 2007: Die Bahn, Das Gute: Last night when I was told that one of the best places for European railway timetables online is to pop off to Germany - in the online sense anyway.
3 June 2007: The Joys of Train Travel Planning in France: If there’s a greater test of website usability, it’s trying to find out information from a site that’s in a language you don’t speak.
28 May 2007: Wandering around the house with a laptop.: Hello. I’m currently typing this downstairs, far away from my main computer.
27 May 2007: Give the spamming man a gunshot…: It’s bad enough turning on your computer after three days only to find some f***er has used your domain name as the from address whilst spamming the bergeebus out of half the known world. But then you find that several hundred of those email addresses the b***ards have used are no longer in operation, so you get several hundred “message not delivered” emails.
16 May 2007: Anatomy of Search Results 5: Generally the things people search for, can’t be found, so here’s Bods making up for that.
1 May 2007: Bye Bye TTLP, Hello City Road: After ten years, a website ends, and another starts.
20 March 2007: Customer Service: Can you tell me why I used to be on 4meg connection and am now on 1meg?
20 June 2006: So long mycokemusic.com, and get stuffed: This morning I received an email from mycokemusic.com telling me the service will be shutting down at the end of July. Can’t say I’m guttered.
10 May 2006: myBBC Returns?: There I was looking through some of the entries submitted to the BBC’s homepage redesign competition thinking that many of them shared a common theme - customisation along the lines of the old myBBC which I worked on back in 2000 when I first started working for Auntie (three month contract… still there six and a half years later…. hmmm). And lo, whilst I was at a barbeque in the pooring rain, there was Martin doing a post on the reboot:bbc.co.uk blog talking about exactly the same thing.
11 March 2006: The F-Word Turns 5: I confess I’m a little late with this, owing to me just not being in the mood to blog much recently, but The F-Word turned five recently.
9 January 2006: Not Londonist: I don’t normally repost comments I make on sites, in my own blog but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Below is the offending entry, and below that, my comment. Just in case it doesn’t survive on the site in question.
13 December 2005: God of Blogs: And a big hello to the God of Blogs, who apparently has been reading this here site, or so I was told today.
22 November 2005: Letters to the Editor: Oh yes, it’s time for another dip into the wierd and wacky world of Andrew’s inbox as we take yet another exciting trawel through the Letters to the Editor!
1 November 2005: A String Of Expletives: Thanks to the script/person who hacked a webform on planetbods.org this evening and started using it to send out junk email to goodness knows who. Enjoy rotting in hell once you and your moronic kind have finally killed off the internet once and for all.
31 October 2005: Oh, Sweet Internet!: Oh thank goodness for that. I have internet access again. I wasn’t quite sure how I could live without checking my emails for a few hours!
4 October 2005: Online TV Gateways: The Guardian’s Emily Bell seems to suggest that that the iMP is the bold new world for the BBC, and that the BBC backed service could be opened up to ‘host’ services from Channel 4 and ITV. The suggestion is a sort of TV programme version of Google News - do a search and find legal-to-download programmes.
31 August 2005: A List Apart is too wide: Because I don’t have my browser set to full screen. And I don’t want my browser to be set at full screen.
17 August 2005: Eighty Pounds?: Got a letter through from Nominet today. Domain’s about to expire - are you sure? Well yeah, actually I am. But there’s an invoice for if I want to renew it - in case my registrant has made a mistake.
16 August 2005: Go… Faster…: My ISP has just upgraded me to a nice 2mb broadband connection instead of the old, painfully tediously slow 1mb broadband connection for free. Which is nice.
13 August 2005: Letters To The Editor: Yes it’s time for yet another of our trawls through the old inbox, as we present another edition of ‘Letters To The Editor’.
24 July 2005: Tale of Two PayPal Emails: I seem to be on the list for attempts to con me out of cash using ebay and Paypal. I get a substantial amount of them per day, whilst Catherine (oddly) gets none.
30 June 2005: We Are Promoting a Dishwasher: We are Promoting a Dishwasher. An immortal phrase from a spam email I receieved the other day. Didn’t say what the job was that the dishwasher had been given, but I’m sure it was the best candidate.
28 June 2005: Closedown Cult: One of the finest BBC websites around. One of the quirkiest, one of the most popular, one of the most imaginative, one of the most distinctive parts of the BBC’s online output. In fact one of the best pieces of online non-news editorial content the BBC has produced. And the BBC’s Cult website is closing.
19 June 2005: What’s The Scam?: Most of my emails are spam sadly. I get far too much of it, but nestling inside the mortgage offers, people presuming I need some pills to get it up, messages from someone called Julie about her webcam, and a barrage of emails about all the email addresses I’ve supposedly added to my ebay account, came this one about buying my domain name.
24 April 2005: De-Hitoping: It must have been 1998 when I first used HTML pre-processor Hitop, and now seven years later, I’m beginning to say goodbye.
7 March 2005: Searching The Memories: Was it really 2001 that I spent months working away on the new, amazing BBCi web search?
1 March 2005: Google, Yahoo and an API: I know, I know. I’m behind the times. But the announcement that Yahoo were opening up APIs to its search engine got me thinking that I could finally replace the Atomz search on this site, with something that doesn’t force me to have crummy ads on it.
11 February 2005: BBC, Wedding and Complaints: One thing has to be said - the internet can be a very powerful tool for finding information. But you’ve got to exploit the medium - make the most of it. The BBC until recently has been a bit, well… traditional in its approach, but times are changing especially with the arrival of two more websites from the organisation dealing with complaints.
12 January 2005: Work and blogging: On the day that we found out about the first UK blogger to be sacked by his employer (well that we know about anyway) it’s fittingly appropiate that the hot topic on part of the BBC’s internal message boards was guidelines for BBC staff who blog about work stuff.
29 November 2004: Broadband Usage: Couple of months ago, I finally went broadband through Plus.net. Consigning the old 56k modem to the never regions of my redundant computer equipment box was a happy moment.
24 November 2004: Spammers…: No. I don’t want an imitation Rolex.
15 October 2004: The Search Life: Sometimes people search this site for the oddest of things - things which I should have blogged about… but didn’t.
5 October 2004: Fast T’internet Are Go!: Bowdfern Towers now has a shiny 1mb ADSL connection running into the house. Wahoo!
19 September 2004: The Joy of Email: Whilst it’s great to have emails coming in via the email forms again, it’s reminded me just how much crap I get through…
18 September 2004: CSS and Email Forms fixed, and some PHP: Broken (and fixed) CSS, broken (and fixed) email forms and some PHP thrown in to boot! Yay!
15 September 2004: Spam! To The EXTREME!: It’s been almost a year since I switched on SpamAssassin for the first time. I was rather cautious - setting it up so all spam would go into one folder that I could review and then delete. Just in case anything slipped through.
17 August 2004: The F-Word v3.0: At long last, version 3.0 of The F-Word has gone live. Given I first started work on redesigning Catherine’s site back in December 2002, you might understand that its launch is somewhat of a relief to me.
16 August 2004: Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and CSS problems: If you’re using Mozilla Firefox 0.9.x - and if you are, you’ll probably know it - you might be looking at a very plain webpage without any proper colours or styles on it.
19 July 2004: Never reveal. It’s safer.: Woe betide you ever have an opinion that happens to be similar to any management decision….
16 June 2004: Seek and ye shall find?: I’ve talked before about the weird things people search this site for but today I some odd ones in the Planet Bods search logs…
11 June 2004: More hits, RSS and Email Validation: I was surprised to see the site hits go up 7000 last month, a large number of people hitting my post about my recent RSS changes, and a 1000 referals from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Mark site.
1 June 2004: Londoners! Have Your Say!: A rather good booklet dropped through my door today - explaining all about the forthcoming elections in London and for the European Parliament.
31 May 2004: Bods ‘uses’ mycokemusic.com: Well you can’t beat a sequel sometimes, so to follow up ‘Bods Tries To Use mycokemusic.com’, here is Bods ‘uses’ mycokemusic.com! And what an ‘experience’ it was…
18 May 2004: Sasser and Comet: How depressing. I connect the Windows XP laptop to the internet for the first time in 6 months and bamm. Sasser virus.
17 May 2004: Corrections and Clarifications: Given the PR disastor that surrounded the launch of Movable Type 3, it’s perhaps not surprising that there have been some ‘clarifications’ (or backtracking, depending on whose opinion you read) about the new licensing.
13 May 2004: Built Using Movable Type v2.661: Following on from my Movable Type essay/rant [delete as appropiate], I’ve made an ever so slight change to the template of this site.
13 May 2004: I Want My MT3…: Well the announcement of version 3 of popular blogging software Movable Type has been greeted with a flurry of posts in the blogs across the land. Unfortunatly they’re rarely about the flurry of new features, but instead concentrating on one thing and one thing alone. The price.
10 May 2004: Before you hit the send button, think first.: Do you ever wonder if people actually use email to communicate in a way that they never would with any other form of communication? To say things that they probably shouldn’t? And that they wouldn’t by phone, or by text, by letter or in person?
6 May 2004: bbc.co.uk rebrand: So today the BBCi website became bbc.co.uk. An amazing transformation which I’m sure a few people haven’t even noticed.
6 May 2004: Are you?: Had an email via my website email form today. Rather odd one cos someone had obviously been searching through websites and spamming them through website contact forms.
15 April 2004: People who use this site, also like…: Launches of new search engines seem to be ten to a penny these days. Yet the launch of one from Amazon is surely a bit more interesting to the world?
11 April 2004: Search Results Extra.: Incidently, if details of what people searched for isn’t enough for you, you might be interested in what search term in search engines like Google, MSN and so on, people used to find this site.
11 April 2004: Anatomy of Search Results 4: One search on BodsCentral from last week had me puzzled. "Hillgate Place". And I had to wonder. Where is Hillgate Place? Maybe my other search results from last week will shed some light…
3 April 2004: New Atom Full Post Feed: There’s a new full-stories feed for your pleasure. If you use an aggregator to view the site, feel free to give it a try.
30 March 2004: Rant ‘n’ Rave Subcategories: I’ve been looking at the hierarchy for categories in this the site for some time and have been less than impressed with what I see.
24 March 2004: Keywords Metadata: It’s taken me a long time to realise, but I finally have. The meta keywords tag in HTML is now very pointless.
3 March 2004: Thou Shalt Not View This Website.: More ridiculous conditions websites like to ‘enforce’ agreement to.
13 February 2004: Timing of the Tables: A scouring of the Apache server logs reveals why people keep looking for train timetables…
11 February 2004: Death of the Homepage?: A lot of people seem to have been wittering on about the death of the personal homepage. Having just compared stats for Planet Bods and this site, I’m glad to say that Planet Bods still beats this place on the hits stakes - it’s not dead yet!
6 February 2004: Idiot Web Users: For some time I’ve been cursing web users. Specifically those web users who want to contact Tyne Tees Television. For instead of going to the Tyne Tees website, they come to the totally unofficial Tyne Tees Logo Page as run by me.
2 February 2004: Words of Wisdom from Catherine.: Inspirational stuff from my other half.
2 February 2004: Anatomy of Search Results 3: It’s been 6 weeks or so since the last Anatomy of Search Results but they keep pouring in and confusing me. Except for the one from the very beginning of January which was just shag. That just scared me.
26 January 2004: Bods tries to use myCokeMusic.com: I’ve read a lot about myCokeMusic.com - yet another bandwagon jumping music download site - so I thought I’d try it out. And this being my blog, I’d better tell you how it went…
20 January 2004: CSS Hacked Off.: CSS hacks are on two levels - documented ‘features’ and undocumented browser bugs. And using the latter could be storing up a whole lodda trouble for the future.
20 January 2004: Universal Mysteries, number 1.: Why oh why oh why is it that when you are bored and want a diversion, there are never any emails, blog posts or new message board posts to read?
12 January 2004: Banking Fun.: Twice I’ve tried to apply for a current account with Intelligent Finance online. And twice it has failed for no apparent reason.
11 January 2004: The Conclusion of Freeserve?: Sometimes it’s what people don’t say and what they don’t do which proves to be far more revealing that what they do say and what they do do.
19 December 2003: More Anatomy of Search Results: The searches are getting wierder and wierder. What is a Bods to do, apart from shove them on a webpage!
13 December 2003: Anatomy of Search Results: Every week I get a sample of the searches made via the Bods Central search engine, sent to me in an email.
10 December 2003: Freeserve Letter Thoughts: Some thoughts about my letter to Freeserve.
10 December 2003: A Letter To Freeserve: A copy of a letter sent to Freeserve today.
4 December 2003: The Swirling Mists of Time: It was roundabout this time in 1996 that I started work on my first website.
3 December 2003: Guardian Limited.: The Guardian are doing a beta test for their new ‘digital editions’ If you’ve never heard of them, they’re taking print paridigms and trying to apply them to the web (shudder).
6 November 2003: ISP Woe.: So… Does anyone know of an ISP who have a prepay package with no call charges that isn’t permantly engaged and inaccessible between 8 and 10pm?
31 October 2003: Pace Your Linking.: People are linking to Pace. I hope they asked permission.
28 October 2003: Page Not Found: One of my last tasks as a Client Side Developer at the BBC has now snook online.
17 October 2003: Sick of Spam?: The one spam email subject I love recieving however is about… well spam.
15 October 2003: Thou Shalt Not Link Without Permission: Some people seem to think hyperlinking can be stopped by asking people not to link to you… Some people need to get their heads out of the clouds…
9 October 2003: The Measure of Success: Paul Hammond recently blogged about the accurate measure of the quality of a site. Apparently links to content and traffic have nothing in relation to each other. So how do you measure success?
9 October 2003: More Theme Switcher Fun: The theme switcher now works properly. Honest. Believe me. Please?
4 October 2003: Theme Chooser (and Konqueror’s handling of alternate stylesheets): A new, and rather pointless theme chooser has been added to the site. Enjoy!
2 October 2003: The Death of the Technical: Today I struggled with some HTML. Does this set a worrying path to technical oblivion?
2 October 2003: Can I moan about Freeserve any more?: My subscription to Freeserve Anytime account was paid up until 7th October. I cancelled and got written confirmation that my account Anytime account would be deactivated on the 7th October. Today my account was deactivited. Today is the 2nd October.
20 September 2003: Spam-free inbox (well almost).: A combination of Spam Assassin and Procmail means fewer virus generated emails and other unsolicited bulk mail hitting me. Ah, that feels better.
19 September 2003: Freeserve’s Amazing Deduction: The amazing deductive abilities of a crappy internet service provider.
19 September 2003: Airhead Computer Users: Fscking Swen viruses bombarding me with crappy useless emails… Grrr…
17 September 2003: Wot no head (tag)?: Apparantly in HTML documents, you don’t actually have to have HTML, HEAD or BODY tags. Well you learn something new every day…
9 September 2003: Cancelling Freeserve: Freeserve. So competent, they can’t even cancel an account…
6 September 2003: Ad-blocking by Sledgehammer: Trying to crack a nut with a sledgehammer doesn’t turn out too well normally. However people will try it and it will have repercussions. As web developers, perhaps we should be making sure there are some saftey precautions…
27 August 2003: Ogg Streaming: Ogg streaming came to Virgin, The Groove and Liquid in June which is fantastic news!
26 August 2003: Clueless Quote of the Day: The Conservative Party are wonderful at sprouting utterly stupid comments…
22 August 2003: Email Virus Havoc? Where?: So why am I not being inundated with virus emails? Does no one like me?
22 August 2003: Friendship by Blog: Wendy has a new MP3 player, and Paul and Andrew C can only communicate by the power of blog entries. And Mark Radcliffe has been to Ashton a few times. And does anyone actually read this rubbish?
21 August 2003: Dysfunctional Electricity Company Websites: Changing electricity supplier revealed some appalling bad corporate websites from the giants of the electric industry.
25 July 2003: Far Too Easy JavaScript: JavaScript that’s too easy? That’s a bit of a swizz isn’t it?
23 July 2003: Cynthia Says.: Cynthia Says is a web site accessibility validator, and this is some information on it.
20 July 2003: Planet Bods and JavaScript.: New look Planet Bods out now - take a look and let me know what you think.
11 July 2003: Jumping on the Bandwagon: It’s time for a new direction - a new bandwagon to jump on. Who would have thought that Google would provide so well…
9 June 2003: Hell hath no fury like a Today message board user annoyed: How a slight bug in a redesign affected one internet community.
4 June 2003: Oddest Email of the Year Award: You mean you expect emails that make sense to arrive from ISP support teams?
3 June 2003: Yes Freeserve. I will send my password to you. It’s such a sensible idea.: Send Freeserve my webmail password? No chance!
21 May 2003: Freeserve Webmail Woe: The latest instalment in the webmail battle.
12 May 2003: More tales of Freeserve’s dire webmail: Yet more on the now slightly infamous "Freeserve crap webmail" saga.
26 April 2003: Must Use Correct Markup….: How do you markup a script in HTML? Well where there is a will, there is a way.
8 April 2003: The Battle Of Who Could Webmail Less: The latest stage in the continuing Freeserve battle of wits and wills, just to get a working webmail.
29 March 2003: The battle of Freeserve Webmail: The continuing hate/hate triangle between Andrew Bowden, Freeserve’s webmail and Freeserve Webmail’s support team.
26 March 2003: The Sheer Delight of Using Freeserve’s Webmail: You’d think that using a webmail service would be relatively straightforward. Not with Freeserve it’s not.
18 March 2003: Bye Bye myBBC.: myBBC was my first big web building project. Sadly it was turned off the other day. But it holds a fair few memories…
6 March 2003: The Real Underground: Funnily enough, London isn’t as organised as the Tube map would have you believe. Far from it infact as one website will let you know.
22 February 2003: Building a Better BodsCentral: BodsCentral has had a minor redesign to make it more accessible. Find out some details of the changes.
4 February 2003: Email Filtering for Beginners: 100 emails in 3 days from a pesky virus means a trip to email filtering hell. Oh how I love computers…
30 January 2003: Browsers Bugs (or how to ruin an OK site design.): If you’re a Mac IE5 user, this site looks a bit rough. Sorry, but it’s not my fault! Honest!
26 September 2002: Web Standards and Accessibility: About the Bods Central accessibility and web standards policies.
30 July 2002: Not Best Viewed In…: The ‘best viewed in’ culture has taken to locking people with certain web browsers out of the site completely. Which is neither nice nor sensible.

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