Ladies and Gentlemen The Slashdot effect The Digg effect The lesser, spotted Kyte effect The incredibly secure Pete Finnigan effect Please welcome, the latest addition to the effect family, the Doug Burns effect, which has increased traffic to this blog to new, world record highs and, even as you are reading this, is relentlessly propelling this humble blog towards ‘Top WordPress.com blogs today’.

…to resist the lure of WordPress.com - an (experimental) import utility to ease your migration from Blogger. See you on the other side.

Joomla, Chumbawamba, Oompa Loompa I really like the presentation of Howard Rogers' site (and the integration of Forums, Blog and now an Oracle Wiki) and have followed, with interest, the evolution of the site in different formats, and enjoyed Howard’s thoughts on various content management technologies over recent months before he finally settled on Joomla. I am also very impressed by the new look of Niall Litchfield’s orawin.info site which also uses Joomla and is a marked contrast (and improvement) from its predecessor. In fact, I just find myself gazing at the desert landscape for minutes on end. ...

The Mayor of Liverpool announced that there would a extraordinary 5 minute silence held across the city tomorrow at 12 noon. A special religious service will be held at the Anglican Cathedral and the two remaining Beatles will reunite and record a special version of ‘(Please) Let It Be (disallowed)’. Robbie Fowler will indicate the start and end of the silence by holding up five fingers. This is the number of European Cups that Robbie Fowler has watched Liverpool win on TV. ...

Yesterday, I had a credit card transaction rejected which is always a little embarrassing. Thankfully, this was over the phone and not in a shop where embarrassed people would quickly avert their gaze, thinking ‘Poor man, he’s probably lost his job. Just look at his clothes’. Normally, such rejections happen because the card number or expiry date was incorrectly transcribed and are quickly resolved - ‘No I said 6079 at the end’. ...

Mark Burgess once introduced ‘Here Today’ with these words. I just read on The Chameleons message board that Mancunian musician, Bryan Glancy, died at the weekend. I didn’t know Bryan Glancy. I never met Bryan Glancy. I just happened to see him supporting The Chameleons in Camden back in November 2002. Just very sad for his friends and family to think of another young person gone before his time. Elsewhere, four young people are convicted of manslaughter (not murder) for kicking a man to death in a random attack on London’s South Bank. ...

Amazing news - whales have feelings and can understand humans. ‘How a wave of human compassion will have comforted the whale in his final hours’ ‘He’d have known we’re trying to help but it couldn’t save him’ But what was really amusing about the bottlenose whale stranded in the River Thames story was that a friend recently returned from a holiday in Canada where he went whale watching. He was unlucky and saw absolutely nothing apart in a whole day apart from the bobbing waves. He then returns home to London to find one sitting on his doorstep. ...

GreatNews, in fact. I just discovered this RSS reader which is a Windows desktop RSS reader but can synchronise with Bloglines for Web based access. GreatNews is fast, has a clean logical interface, with an integrated browser, highly configurable (2 or 3 pane display), supports newspaper style for reading groups, drag’n’drop for organising folders, auto feed discovery and perhaps most importantly, displays as much content as possible (no ads), enabling you to quickly focus on what is of interest. ...

Tonight’s Money Programme (' ‘The world according To Google’) on BBC2 was about the history, the success and the possible future diversification of the popular search engine, Google. Now I use Google a lot and to me it is an excellent, fast, free service. I can hardly ever recall clicking on an ad that was presented alongside a search (even if I am actually looking to buy something). I use Google Groups for searching for technical information as someone, somewhere at sometime has probably encountered the same problem as me and better, someone, somewhere at sometime has probably, kindly, provided the solution. ...

The BBC have a program called ‘Pay off your mortgage in 2 years’. Tonight’s episode featured a couple from Cornwall with a mortgage of 90,000 GBP. The program is moderately interesting for the various ideas people come up with to earn extra income (not for the scrimping, living off baked beans and giving up alcohol). However, the program is spoiled by some very basic flaws. Firstly, any extra income seems to be tax-free. If they did raise 45,000 GBP in one year, the Inland Revenue would demand a significant element. It’s a shame but it’s the law, you see. ...