MatBennett.com

Thanks, in part, to Squeak’s inability to sober up enough to drive a car the bank holiday weekend on the beach extended into Monday - giving us more time to enjoy the kayaks (and Squeak more time to perfect his bailing technique)

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Just a post to allow me to embarrass friends. This post contains a gallery of photographs of people I know acting like goons. Read more »

We finally managed to get the kayaks in the water again today after too many weeks of them being allowed to dry out. Only put them in over the road from home, but got a few hours out there is some reasonable waves.

Rick, Squeak and Carrie (who managed to avoid the camera!) came down with us - albeit a few hours later than planned. Mum and Jacob also joined us after a while.

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OK, I know that this is old hat, but the entry about the Matt Cutts Blog made me think of it again, and I thought it worth noting here.

Google-guy Says is simply a site that notes when a particular user posts on the Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums. Not all that interesting unless you bare in mind that Google-guy, as the name suggests works at Google.

I’m not a huge fan of either forum as the signal to noise ratio is generally way off, but there is good information on both if you care to dig. Some of the best of it comes from Google-guy, which obviously makes Google-guy says a useful tool.

There now appears to be at least 2 sites running under the same name, both of which appear useful. I’ve therefore linked to both below:

http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/
http://googleguy.zorgloob.com/

I’ve recently noticed a growing number of “mainstream” sites utilising trackbacks on their pages. Even CNN’s all powerful news.com now has a slightly messy trackback / pingback system in place.

Not sure of the history of trackback and pingback, but both systems are heavily utilised by bloggers as a way of providing related links to a topic. The basic principal of both systems is that that one information site links to another through an article and let’s the target site know that the link is in place. The target site’s automated system then recognises this link and provides a link back.

Considering how difficult it now is to get a good relevant link, utilising trackback / pingback methods could well now be the easiest way to get links in to an information based site. I’m not talking about spamming every trackback page you can find (although I am sure that a lot of people are doing this), but instead deliberately searching for relevant articles to provide as further information sources.

I’ve only really used either method as part of out of the box news/blogging systems, but can’t imagine it would be too difficult to put a standalone module together - which is exactly what I intend to do. I’ll probably experiment with it here on this site at some point then roll it out on to relevant work projects.

If you know me then you’re probably wondering how I came to end up running a website about caravans, as it’s not something that I have a particular interest in.

The c4caravans.com was started a few years back as a demonstration of a free advertising system for a customer interested in running such a site for a another market. By the time the project unfortunately got shelved I had developed a fair bit of code and it seemed a shame to just scrap it, so decided to put it up in some form. As it didn’t seem right to use the same market as the customer had intended I picked another at random and decided on Caravans.

Since those beginnings the site has steadily grown in popularity into a busy caravan sales portal. So much so, that I decided to re-write the entire site earlier this year to incorporate and ever growing list of improvements that I had in mind.

Today the site still operates as a free caravan sales portal and continues to occupy when I am off work. Popularity has continued to grow and small improvements continue to be made and the site seems to be going from strength to strength. So much so, in fact, that things are coming full circle and we are now looking at starting another site, along similar lines, as a commercial work project.

It seems that yet another version of this site is now underway - (yeah I know… so many designs, so little content). I seem to have an ever growing collection of digital junk without a permenant home so I thought it about time I put together a system to house it.

When complete, this new version of matbennett.com is part CMS, part blog, part file storage and part photo gallery. For now though it is just part done.

I’m not a huge fan of blogging, as the vast majority seem to have little new to say. Good ones though can be great.

I haven’t yet read enough of Matt Cutts’ blog to decide whether it will be one of the rare good ones or not yet, but at first glance it could be interesting. What immediately made Matt’s blog stand out for the crowd is the fact that he works for Google.

I’d love to know what his employers think of the blog and how much of it he has pass committee before it hit the pages. Certainly what I have read so far is not ground breaking, but does put an interesting human face on the inhabitants of the (in)famous Googleplex. I’m sure that SEO engineers around the world are adding it to their RSS readers at a huge pace, something that Matt himself must be very aware of as he decides what to include.

Anyway, it’s here to remind me to take an occassional look. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

I’ve loved Japanese food for a while, but never really get to enjoy it. The nearest japanese restaurant that I know of is about 60 miles from where I live and I’ve never tried making any myself.

When we were recently away in York we had a great meal at the Buzz Bar, a great informal restaurant offering equally informal Japanese food. This rekindles my interest in trying it at home.

We’ve now taken delivery of the Wagamama cookbook from Amazon (link below if you want it). Although maybe not the more authentic cuisine around, I thought Wagamama recipes would be a good starting point as their whole operation seems to be geared to preparing meals quickly and you can never have enough ideas for quick meals.

The only thing left to do now is to stock up on some the ingredients. Hayling, where I live, is not the most cosmopolitan place in the world so this will probably mean a few online purchases.

Wagamama cookbook at Amazon