Random is Good, Random is Life

In all my time of reading blogs, writing posts (ok, not so much of that) have I ever been inspired so quickly to write a post that I am truly impassioned by.

I have read on a couple of blogs today about a new plugin that will no doubt take over the world! I am talking about the new Buy me a beer WordPress plugin by Ankesh Kothari. An idea so simple, yet so awesome that I am kicking myself that I didn’t come up with it.

Bloggers everywhere are looking for income sources to keep them afloat, and maybe even enough to quit their jobs. Steve Pavlina has quoted a few times that his secondary income to Google Adsense is his donations from readers. He has a link at the end of every post to donate to his Paypal account.

This plugin, once installed on your blog places a beer icon on your sidebar and/or at the end of each post, asking your readers to donate to your beer fund…. Awesome! If beer is not your thing you can change it to a coffee cup. It may not be enough to become a ProBlogger, but hey if you can keep up your spirits, then maybe your job won’t seem so bad

Rather than begging for a donation for your insightful, intelligent or even drunk writings, you can simply ask for a donation to your beer fund! I sent Ankesh a couple of beers for coming up with this ingenious plugin!

Cheers!

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Met with Sam in London, who has embarked on a marathon four month travelblaze through Europe, Canada and the US… Nice.

Sam and her Mum, Liz, invited me to join them at Madame Tussauds, even though I’ve been living in London for over a year I’ve never made it to the famous wax museum. It was fun and the likeness is truly freaky!

Here’s a few choice pics of the day.

Yeah Indie… I’m Runnin!

Sam & Jessica Simpson

Well Oprah, the trouble started when Cybill kept staring at the audience….

One.Happy.Man

By the way, those things of hers actually move… I got quite a surprise!

Sam trying to steal the microphone from Oprah… Good luck Sam!

Your clothes, give dem to me.

’nuff said.

Hey Johnnie, I can see right through!

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Now that I have pretty well settled into life in London, I’ve decided to actually do something with my blog. My travels through Europe were experiences that I’ll never forget. However, as you may have read updating my blog on a regular basis whilst on Contiki was difficult bordering on impossible. The very hectic, but incredibly enjoyable schedule, expenses of using web cafe’s and not having a laptop made it hard to think about all the weird and wonderful experiences, let alone write about them! I still have my handwritten diary so I’ll be blogging entries as time allows.

The first thing I wanted to do was change the theme to something a little more different than the default WordPress Kubrik theme. After browsing JohnChow dot com via a Digg article I noticed his theme, Misty Look 101. Mistylook is quite a nice clean theme and also supports sidebar widgets which adds drag & drop functionality of your blog such as positioning of your sidebar:- categories, archives etc. Installed and modified it a little, blue background and orange text, I quite like it, let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

WordPress Plugins

Adsense Deluxe
This is an awesome plugin which allows you to put code snippets into your WordPress loop, and even in your posts to display adsense ads. The plugin is easily usable with in WordPress itself, allowing different tags etc to be used.

Digg This Button
Displays the very familiar Digg This button on your post when it has been Dugg. Upon testing the plugin, I found that it works quite quickly, I unashamedly dugg a a post myself and the button appeared within a few minutes. Not bad. A few diggers were even nice enough to vote on it…

Social Bookmarks
Simply displays the most popular social bookmarking sites in little buttons at the bottom of each post, the usual suspects are present such as Delicious, Digg, furl, Yahoo!, StumbleUpon and Google Bookmarks.

Google Sitemaps
Awesome plugin to generate your sitemap for Google, updates the sitemap.xml file which Google will download from your site, check out Google Webmaster tools for more information.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is yet another service from our beloved search engine Kings that monitors every movement of your website viewers such as their location (provides a very cool world map indicating the Country and City of your visitors), length of visit, depth of visit, browser versions, screen resolution and much more to help you understand your visitors and optimise your site. This plugin adds Google Analytics code without manually editing your website code.

New Host
Signed up with Powweb, but I gotta say, so far I’m not too impressed. I originally ended up with them as I needed a fair amount of space to host my travel pics via Gallery 2.0. Powweb have the ‘One Plan’ thing, it is $7.77USD with 20,000Gb space, 400MB bandwidth, fairly decent spam protection via Spam Assassin and a good suite of addons & default installs of the most popular web software. However the slowness and sometimes damn out-right outages (some lasting HOURS) are becoming quite boring. I have limited time to research a better host, so I’ll give them a chance to improve their service, if they fail to, I will be hunting for a new host real soon.

Update:16/11/2006 - PowWeb seem to have picked up their game, I have not noticed any outages and the site performance seems fine, so at least for the time being I don’t have to hunt for a new host!

From time to time I’ll be fiddling with the look and functionality of the site; love it or hate it, feel free to comment.

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Hey All…

Partied my bum off in Budapest 2 nights ago, got hammered on Absinth, man that stuff is AWESOME! It’s only like 80% alcohol. It is banned in most countries as it has hallucinagenic qualities. I did’nt notice anything myself… Just danced with a few sheep and kangaroos singing Kumbayah in a river minced meat with a backdrop of the back of the Sistine chapel depicting the last judgement under a sky of marshmellows… perfectly normal really. It was a good night and my first night out in 2 weeks. I have enjoyed slowing down a little.

In my ‘home’ town of Vienna now, just had a Sacher coffee & a Sacher Torte in the Sacher hotel.. very nice. The coffee is worth the €7! Austria Rocks… But I must admit though a couple of us headed to an Aussie Pub last night, had coopers and a very nice roo… Vienna is excellent, so much history, monuments etc. Have been learning alot about the Austrian & Hungarian relationship signified by the two headed eagles which can be seen all over Hungary & Austria.

Our campsite here is one of the best we have had… Very clean facilities and we can even flush the loo paper here… bloody luxury!

Today we have a free day to do what ever we like so I’m gonna check out Schbrunn Palace (I think that’s how it’s spelt) which is very impressive apparently. Tonight we are heading to Prater for some rides & and we have been tempted to try ’schturm’ which is wine 2 weeks before it becomes wine so it tastes like grape juice but is apparently potent as hell. Pete, the Tour Manager advised that us that we should only have 1/2 a bottle each… So the challenge has been set!

I’m finally getting over the Contiki bug, but unfortunately more people are getting sick. This thing has mutated on the bus, gonna need a preist to get rid of this thing I reckon! Hopefully people will be getting better really soon as we hit Prague in 2 days!!

Keep those emails coming guys!!

Aufweidersen

Paul

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Hey Guys,
Yep just another quick update. It is simply to f&*king hard to keep the site updated with piccies etc with the time and expenses involved, so I have decided to say “Bugger it, it was a good idea at the time”. Next time I will travel with a lappy which will make things much easier! I am keeping a brief handwritten diary and will update the site entirely with piccies when I get back… I will also be planning my next trip… I have been severely bitten on the bum by the travel bug. I have even been chatting with a few people on tour about travelling together… I have a room sorted out for a coupla weeks in London too…

Left Bulgaria today, very nice place, very different. My god the people there are very vain, not necessarily attractive but they are all fashion and gym junkies, was entertainting for a while!

Hit Romania today… can’t wait to see Dracula’s castle tomorrow!! Well whether it actually is or not is debatable.. but I don’t care!! Beer is cheap, everything is cheap… I am finally starting to get over the Contiki Tour bug. I am the worst affected… must have been all that drinking which kept my immune system a little sensitive eh??! I hav been crook as hell for about 8 days straight now, sleeping all the time I can, coughing my lungs up daily and I have even begun to snot out of my eyes (I’m NOT kidding). Slept heaps last night in Bulgaria, we are in hotels from last night and the next two nights which is grouse! So feeling like a good night in Romania tonight, never know I might even get a cheap wife eh?!

Apart from being quite ill, I am still enjoying the trip… Really looking forward to Prague etc… can’t believe we are over halfway on the trip, but still looking back at where we have been and all the fun we have had it’s like half a lifetime!

Don’t forget guys I am hardly lonely on tour, but I still like to hear from you too… so don’t be strangers now…

Love ya’s all

Paul

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