• The saying goes that everything happens in threes, but it seems it isn’t so. I popped into Joe’s Store in Nottingham last week, to have a little look around. They say they are a store full of cool, and they do have a lot of cools stuff there. So cool I didn’t look where I was stepping and nearly trop on the lovely, chocolate-brown dalmatian called Mia that seemed to blend with the wooden floor. (Mia is going to have her own blog, so we might exchange links!)

    I took a photo with a mind to mentioning how lovely she was on this blog. But then I met another dalmatian! She was waiting to greet me at the door of Longlevens Infants School last friday. In fact she was the Head Teacher dressed up for their Book Day. I caught this wonderful picture of her attending to paperwork in her office. Either the paperwork or the wearing of the costume was above and beyond the call of duty!

    So I thought, everything happens in threes and waited for the next dalmatian occurrence so I could post them all together. I can’t wait, so here are the pictures for you. I bet a dalmatian comes trotting up my drive minutes after I’ve posted this.

  • A couple of weekends ago my website host upgraded. My site was off for a while, but came back solid and a bit faster.

    But my statistics had changed dramatically. I had a fourfold increase in visitors. Some of the referring sites were most unlikely – grass track racing enthusiasts, insurance companies and a load of WordPress blog sites which were referring from the back office and not from blog entries. I did a whois check on some of these sites and found they were all hosted by my ISP.

    I imagine there is some sort of leakage going on between our sites. My users are being sent to pages about motorbike spare parts and a bunch of hairy bikers are learning all about Viking Vik!

    What’s also interesting is the search strings that people use to find my site. Many times they search google and add www. and .com at the end of their enquiries. I feel these people haven’t quite got a grasp of how internet addresses or internet search works.

    What makes someone enter www.allaboutshoorayner.com into a search engine? It’s a very unlikely web address and would bet much better results with spaces between the words. I get many variations of www.shoo.com and www. rayaner, things that look like web addresses that should go in the browser box at the top not into a search engine.

    I’ve taught a few absolute beginners on the net and they all have a preconcieved idea that Google is the net. That they have to type into Google to be able to get anywhere. I guess this is what is going on in my stats. Interesting.

    Meanwhile – appologies if you were hoping to buy some spare parts for your grass track bike!

  • Please still keep voting for me in the .

    You can win lots of lovely books if you do.