Have a bit of fun with your WordPress blog

Have you ever looked for a way to make your WordPress blog more interesting? We’ve all looked at different devices to attract and retain readers to our websites but today there’s a new tool in the webmaster’s arsenal. (who can resist a cute kitten right?)

Introducing the Showdown Plugin, a brand spanking new WordPress plugin that lets you create games on your blog and use your content in a new and interesting way. The plugin has two modes, a Battle mode that lets you present users with two bits of content and allows them to vote on the one they prefer, and a “Hot or Not” mode that lets users show just how much they like a piece of content. It works with pictures, videos, text and any other content type you might be hosting on your blog.

Want to see how the plugin works? Check out the Showdown demo video or check out my Joke Showdown or our Cute Kitten Showdown. Check out the demos and if you feel your site could benefit from a bit of fun, go ahead and download Showdown. It only costs a few dollars but can make a real difference to how engaging your site can be.

Third Thursday – January 2012

photo credit: su-lin

Looks like Third Thursday is upon us once again! For those who have never come across it, it’s an opportunity for people interested in Social Media to get together, have a bite to eat and share thoughts and ideas about established and emerging Social Networking websites, capabilities and services.

It’s usually a pretty varied group around the table and conversations range from benefits and risks of Social Media, all the way to designing efficient algorithms for minifying Javascript. Yes, there are geeks among us, but there are also those who just want to learn more about Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and how they can be used in their daily or professional lives.

So please come and join us. It’s an open invitation, anyone can come and if you’re a regular try and bring along a friend too. This month will be slightly different as Glen from YourWebVideo will be hunting around for people’s opinions on the use of video online and we’ll get a chance to watch him in action. It’s bound to be fun!

As usual, we’ll be down at Paparazzi in Douglas at 12:30. There’s all the Wifi you can eat and we’ll grab some food while we’re there too. See you on the 19th!

Evening Tweet-up in Douglas – Friday 13th January #fb

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Nathan’s organising a tweetup this Friday evening, which we’re hoping to make; and I wanted to post about it, just to get the word out in case some of you hadn’t heard. The plan for the evening is pretty simple:

This month we’re planning on having a bit of a bite at The Velvet Lobster on Friday 13th January. It’s their Jolly Time, which means cocktails are cheaper (and they are very good, made from fresh ingredients). After food, we’re hoping to grab a taxi down to the new Crescent Nightclub which has just re-opened for some frivolity, music and dancing.

Looks like it could be a great night out. If you interested in joining, check out the details (and who’s coming) down at his website.

How a few drinks got us into this financial crisis ..

Image via Wikipedia

I came across a great “Derivatives Primer” today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans). Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds really are debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Heidi’s 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi’s bar.

Now do you understand?

Ending the year with a joke

Here’s a good joke to end the year with:

Hans goes to Thailand on a business trip. When there he goes to a “gentleman’s” club seeking compliant female company.

The Mama sends a girl over. She drinks. He drinks. She sits on his lap. Hans whispers in her ear and makes a suggestion.
She screams. Slaps his face and runs off.

Mama sends another girl over. Once again after a while Hans makes a whispered suggestion. The girl screams. Jumps up horrified and runs off in tears.

The same with a third girl, a fourth girl. Whatever Hans is suggesting even her most seasoned girls balk at.

So Mama thinks that she’ll have a go with Hans. She has not done the bedroom work for some years but she is quite understanding of the demands men make.

What can Hans be suggesting that disgusts the girls so much they run screaming from the bar?

So the Mama sits on Hans’s lap. They drink. Hans gets bold and whispers in Mama’s ear the very same suggestion he has made to all the girls so far: “Can I pay in Euros?”

The great thing about bias …

.. is that you can make practically anything sound true! That was just a thought I had this morning when I came across a post that “Windows Phone bears Android and is top rated at Amazon” It’s always nice to see an underdog succeed and the title gave me the impression that all of a sudden Microsoft’s fledgling phone OS had soared to new heights. So I popped onto Amazon and looked for the most popular phones:

That was strange! Out of the top 24 results there wasn’t a single Windows phone. What was going on?

Well, looking closely at the article on the WpCentral, a website with a Windows Phone bias, I noticed that the title was misleading. The screenshot, captured by one of it’s users was showing cell phones with service plans. Well, any phone could come on top if bundled with a great service plan! And the screenshot doesn’t show what features and other options the list had been filtered with. It doesn’t even show out of how many results the Windows Phone was top ranked.

Just goes to show, with just a spot of ingenuity, you can make just about anything look real!

Third Thursday – December 2011 – Social Media Club

photo credit: Dano

Third Thursday has come nice and early this month, on the 15th of December; so this Thursday it’s time to come and meet your Social Media friends, to have a bite and discuss the latest and greatest. Come and tell us about your online exploits, the things you have learnt and even the mistakes you made. Social Media Club is a forum for anyone interested in Social Media to come and share ideas; we can all learn from one another and thee are tons of things we can learn from one another.

The venue is the same as usual, Paparazzi Restaurant at 12:30. It’s an open invitation, so please come and bring your friends. It doesn’t matter if you’re new on Facebook, or have been using Twitter for years; everyone is welcome.

See you there! Paparazzi Restaurant, this Thursday 15th December at 12:30.