Conclusion drawn from advanced Mathmatics.

I’ve been working tirelessly on this and the answer to life, the universe and everything is 5138008. Type it into a calculator, turn it upside down, and see for yourself.

In other news, I’ve also concluded that, without the sufficient level of medication, I destroy every social situation I am presented with. How or why I do this is beyond me, I assume due to some sort of chemical imbalance in the frontal neo-cortex lobe doofer, or something. I just wish people understood why I’m acting strangely sometimes and understood it, but I don’t think that they do. So I don’t think I’m doing very well with anybody this week, infact it’s been a complete disaster, although I’m thinking it may be a disaster from my perspective and nothing at all will have happened from other people’s perspective, because I seem to get unbelievably paranoid too….

Why have I stopped taking my medication, well, good question. Primary reason is I ran out of them. Contributory reasons are that the only doctor I trust has disappeared somewhere, and I’ve just not booked an appointment with another one. I also felt fine at the time and assumed that this random brain melting of mine wouldn’t come back.

No idea why I’m writing any of this for the record. Just makes me feel better I guess.

Anyway, begin weekend.

If you’re going to steal things, be smart about it.

It’s a sound bit of advice for any budding upstarts out there looking to make an impact on the world wide interweb. I’ve noticed a trend recently of people attempting to steal my web designs and using them for their own websites. Unfortunately, they’re so fucking stupid they keep getting caught, so I thought I’d write a little bit of an idiots guide to stealing things on the internet.

One of the many amazing web designers out there.

If you’re going to steal it, at least re-upload the images.
There’s very little point in hotlinking to the images of the site you stole the page from. It leads to two problems, firstly you’re going to light yourself up all over the victim’s referrer stats like a Christmas tree, so you’re going to get caught quite easily. Secondly, you’ve left your content in the hands of someone else. If you’re going to do this, don’t be surprised if you wake up to find that I’ve relocated my images and plastered photos of giant penises all over your website.

And while you’re at it, change the url’s in the menus.
Much like the first problem, this one also makes you stick out like a sore thumb. It’s also redirecting traffic back to me, so, apart from making you look like a douche, it actually lets all your visitors know you’re a thief. And a douche.

Oh, and the JS files. You really don’t want to hotlink my javascript.
Because much like the images, I’ll just change the location and bombard your users with dialogue boxes informing them of how retarded you are.

CSS files, you might want to make your own.
Hotlinking my CSS files is also a bad idea. Believe it or not, quite a few people have done this and all of the above, and they’ve all ended up with bright pink pages full of cocks, and messages informing their users that the webmaster is a child molesting baby murderer.

But if you’re smart enough to avoid all that, at least change the text.
Because copying my text not only hurts your search engine rankings, it makes it incredibly easy to find you. A good resource for finding stolen content is http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/ – if you’re a thief, why not bash in your website’s URL with your retarded sausage fingers and see how obvious you are?

But most importantly, if you’re going to get caught, admit it. Don’t blame your Indian web designer.

“Dear Daniel King, Sorry for any harm caused by this as this was not our intention and had instructed the Indian web designers not to use any copyright material but appears to have still have occurred. We understand that the copyright issue rest with us and is our fault for not keeping on top of this.”

Making statements like this isn’t going to get you off the hook.  In fact, this statement is amazing on so many levels. Apart from being blatantly racist, it’s also incredibly transparent and absurd. Why would you, a man who lives in Pontefract, hire somebody from India to design your website for you, when there are plenty of low-cost web designers right here on your own doorstep?  Since you’ve rather foolishly decided to develop your website in a live environment, however, the only hits that are relevant to points 1-4 must be yours and your Indian web designer, who also lives in pontefract. In your house, as a matter of fact. I can see why you hired him! He’s cheap and close by. You might want to fire him though, apart from being a bit crap, he’s rubbish at following instructions.

For the love of god, if you’re going to do this, at least don’t fuck it up.
I’m sick and tired of seeing people take my website and then replace the logo with some shitty MS paint text and dumping a load of clipart in the main body. If you’ve not got the skills to at least make my work look good, then please, stay the fuck away from it.

Alternatively, just ask me.
If you like my work, how about a revolutionary idea? Rather than just stealing everything, why don’t you ask me to design your site for you. I promise to beat the price of your nearest Indian web designer, even if he does live in the next room, and I might even let you use some stuff for free. I’m not an utter douchebag (well, I am but I’m an accommodating douchebag) – so I really wouldn’t have a problem helping you out if you just asked. I may say no depending on the request, but it’s common courtesy, and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you’re not a complete and utter mongoloid.

Day 17 of the great PSN outage.

First of all I would just like to point out that, according to Google AdSense’s terms and conditions, I am not allowed to make any requests for clickthroughs on the above advertisements. As such, I will not make any such request, and won’t even mention the subject.

It’s been 17 days since PlayStation 3 users across the globe were sent into the dark ages, and reports have been circulating that several of their users have now reverted into a pre-historic state. Run down estates such as Clifton and The Valley have decended into war, as those who can’t afford to pay for a proper service struggle to find anything to do except stab each other and burn cars.

Few lucky enough to afford £5.99 a month have upgraded to a proper gaming network. Unfortunately this price is beyond that which the average PS3 user can afford, and as such I’m launching a new charity, “Live for Live”, to help get those suffering onto Xbox Live.

Please donate just £1 a month to help a starving and frightened young poor person onto Xbox Live. Your donation will provide;

• Clean servers for a child for an entire year, free of hackers.
• A reliable and functional online experience.
• The comfort that their online service will always be waiting for them when they get home.
• An online store that won’t loose their credit card details.
• Sanctuary from pointless law-suits, illegal data mining and privacy breaches.
• Access to a network run by a company that isn’t entirely incompetent.
• A gift bag and monthly letters from your adopted gamer.

You can make so much difference to a person’s life just by donating toward’s the Live for Live donation campaign. Thank you.

War of the browsers: why Opera’s a superior underdog.

In recent times the web browser wars have started to really get interesting. Each of the “big five” browsers, Internet Explorer, Opera, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, have been making major releases and launching massive advertising campaigns to try and take the number 1 spot.

Now, my browser of choice is Opera. I find it functional, fast and stylish, and although I’m largely happy with the experience, the question remains, why does Opera have the lowest market share of the browsers mentioned above? Looking at the raw statistics right now, we see Firefox leading the way with 42.2% of users, followed by IE at 28.8%, Chrome at 20%, Safari at 4% and Opera trailing behind at just 2.5% of the market.

There are several possible reasons for Opera trailing behind. Certainly speed is not one of them, and it’s perfectly user-friendly, installing and updating is one of the easiest out there, and the interface is clean, simple and familiar. So let’s take a look at the possible issues holding Opera back;

Opera does not have the marketing budget to advertise on the scale of other browsers;

Well, certainly this is true. Opera haven’t got the resources to compete with Apple, Google or Microsoft, who have launched billboard and TV advertisement campaigns to promote their browsers. They also have distinct marketing advantages, Microsoft and Apple can offer their products pre-installed, while Google is perfectly placed to market Chrome as the alternative with google.com – but none of those companies are currently in the lead. Who is? Firefox. That’s proof that it’s perfectly possible to make a browser a success on a low to non-existent marketing budget.

Opera’s interface is too confusing;

One of the most common complaint’s I hear when introducing someone to Opera is that they simply don’t like it – and very rarely do I hear a specific reason, basically, they just don’t like the look or layout. Most people don’t like a change, especially in something they use routinely such as a browser. I’m not entirely sure this reason explains Opera’s lack of success though, as FireFox 4, the latest browser, as pretty much taken Opera’s interface and reproduced it like-for-like. FireFox 4′s popularity has yet to fully prove itself but overall, I don’t think this could be the true reason for Opera’s poor performance.

Opera isn’t compatible with XYZ

Opera did have a reputation in years gone past with struggling to cope with certain websites and plugins. The situation today is a lot better, I don’t find Opera to be incompatible with a whole lot. A lot of the problems come from major website developers intentionally ignoring Opera from their sites, a good example being Google’s “instant search” and “background” fuctionality, which is intentionally absent from Opera browsers. Of course, Opera can masquerade as FireFox or Internet Explorer to restore this fuctionality with a few mouse clicks, proving it’s the web developer and not the browser itself, but is this enough to hurt Opera’s reputation and prevent users from migrating? Possibly.

Opera was simply too little, too late.

FireFox didn’t burst onto the scene with instant success, it took many years for the word to spread and for FireFox to gain the market share it holds today. While that success was building, Opera was struggling in a few key areas; firstly, the interface, compatibility and performance was not as outstanding as it is today compared to it’s contemporaries, and secondly, Opera wasn’t free. That’s right, you had to pay for Opera or suffer a banner advert lodged into the interface of the browser itself. This for me is the main reason why Opera today hasn’t got the market share it rightly deserves;  while Firefox was going viral, nobody wanted to spread the word about Opera – why would you want adverts or to have to pay for something the competition offers equally as well for free? This, for me, is the major reason for Opera’s low performance. In the eyes of the general population, there’s simply no reason to go to the bother of switching from FireFox to Opera, and those who are content to stay on Internet Explorer are content to do so.

So why should people switch to Opera?

Well, this is a personal decision, but Opera is the fastest browser out there right now. Opera’s always led the way in browser technology, and you’ll find features in Opera that Firefox will no doubt acquire in the coming years, such as Opera Turbo. Compared to Firefox, Opera is a faster, safer browser that has all the functionality and compatibility of Firefox. On a more technical level, Opera’s rendering engine, apart from being a lot faster, is also a more standard’s compliant, you’ll find Opera leads the way on compliance tests and support for emerging standards such as HTML5 and CSS3.

So, if you’re willing to give it a try, head over here.