Quiet This Week I know…

A quiet week this week for blog posting, I have been working on several much larger posts that have taken up the time slots I set for writing here. I’m still here honest! But the new content is not at a stage that its not publicly viewable yet.

I’d thought I would share couple of things I have been up to this week:

#1 Book: Who Move My Cheese?

Brillant little book, here is my short review:

I received a “well loved” version, but intent on following the personal recommendation of that book I had been given, decided to read it while escaping the office.

Wow, these four little characters are so true to real life, Haw who finally adapts with time, Hem in denial, Scurry, the action’eer & finally Sniff who spots change early.

Definitely worth a read, its not even 100 pages long and there is plenty of writing on the wall to help you find your way :)

#2 Updated Pages

After following my own advice, well, the explanation of how I play in ‘Be a Player not a Bystander. Get in. Get Mucky‘ I’ve updated a couple of pages on the site to a new layout style and also altered the writing style to the 3rd party, narrator style, which I felt worked well.

Take a read and let me know what you think:

• Contact Matthew
• About Matthew Ogborne
• Project Matthew Ogborne

There are several others that so desperately need to be worked on, but that’s OK, at least they’re there and can be expanded upon.

#3  First Proper Poem

I even amazed myself and quite a few friends, made the partner cry, even myself cry. It was an epic journey writing it. The contents are a little personal and are dedicated to my son Alex whom we lost a  few hours after birth. He would be four this year and only now am I feeling OK to talk about it openly.

I think I did OK, here goes:

I Miss You Alex

Sometimes when no one is around I cry
Sometimes when I am around people I hide the tears
Sometimes it hurts soo much
Sometimes I feel so lonely without you
Sometimes I feel really bad because I do not hurt enough for missing you
Sometimes I forget and that makes me feel sad when I remember you
Sometimes I lay in bed, thinking of you
Sometimes…

I wish I could hold you again
I wish I could change time
I wish you were here, but you are only in my mind or in photos
I wish I could tell the person right next to me
I wish we came to see you more often
I wish you could meet your sisters, they are truly crazy
I wish these tears would not smudge the screen so much
I wish…

I just miss you Alex. I know mummy does too.

Always thinking of you,
Daddy xxx

Reading that again, I surprised myself. I do not think this will be the start of any new writing benders, I have always been challenged when it comes to the creation of ‘creative writing’ and sadly feel that it will be a short moment of clarity and will fade away faster than the drug enticed world of the patients in the film Awakenings.

#4 Reading

I’ve managed to get quite a bit of reading done this week, the first book “who moved my cheese” I mentioned above, but I have also been updating the Book & Kindle library I started a few weeks back. The plug-in used for it needed some work on the templates and I have been fixing & updating as I go.

A few books worth mentioning:

• Tribes by Seth Godin
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• Start & run a profitable Consulting Business by Douglas Gray
• Who Moved My Cheese by Dr Spencer Johnson
• What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism by Philip Delves Broughton
• Instant MBA: Think, Perform and Earn Like a Top Business School Graduate (52 Brilliant Ideas) by Nicholas Bate

#5 Google Images Spam

These media bots are a nightmare, they’re spoiling and for the past few weeks have been distorting the figures, it does not help I use a CDN subdomain for the delivery of images and finally found this .htaccess redirect to tackle the way that WordPress deals with uncreated sites:

# robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cdn.lastdropofink.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ "http\:\/\/lastdropofink\.co\.uk\/robots\.txt" [R=301,L]

This needs to be added at the very top of the .htaccess file just below “RewriteEngine On” and “RewriteBase /” settings.

Google has just got the hint and the number of incoming views for just images are going down while Bing has started upping the pace. Its my own fault I add too descriptive descriptions to images, alt tags and title tags to links and I feel it only brings in leecher’s not readers so do not mind the loss in traffic.

#6 Email InBox

Oh and I cleared my email inbox, completely. Set up rules to filter everything and I’m looking at just 10 that came in this morning that need my attention.

Happy Friday!

Those that know me well, know I get quite excited about Fridays. I’m not sure why. I just love Fridays. So on that note… Happy Friday!

Image thanks to: Arenamontanus