dgmagic - UK magic blog by magician Dan Gifford

I am now the webmaster for the Leicester Magic Circle website.

I’ve used Wordpress (the same blogging software I use for this site) to power the LMC site as it makes managing multiple users and adding content really easy. Wordpress is very flexible and easy to modify once you get to know it.

The basic information is up at the moment and our Secretary is adding announcements. Hopefully, other magicians in the circle will get involved and we’ll add further information such as links pages and a members only area.

I get quite a bit of spam submitted to the guestbook on my website (people hopeing entries are automatically published so they get a link to their dodgy site from yours), but this one is a classic.

Hallo! I’m Bob Stuart programmer.I know that all spam it’s biggest trouble of WWW. My site.: ****SPAM BLOCKER*****

(URL removed, obviously)

Spam offering a spam blocker! Usually it’s boring old drugs.

Maybe it’s actually a very clever ploy, because people are more likely to accept it in their guestbooks? Anyway, it works. I did a search for the email address supplied and found several guestbooks which have published this entry.

Why don’t people just monitor their guestbooks?

A fellow magician at the Leicester Magic Circle mentioned a marked card scandal involving Protea Playing Cards in South Africa. It happened a few years ago, but the good old BBC still has the story on their site.

In a nutshell, someone managed to mark the cards used at casinos in South Africa and was selling the secret to gamblers.

The casinos could have lost millions… what a shame.

My site has gone up to PR 4!

Ah, I have a warm fuzzy feeling inside - Google likes me. Of course, it’s meaningless really. Doesn’t help your rankings in the search engines.

And Google doesn’t like a couple of pages I’ve changed recently, corporate magician and wedding magician pages. I changed the filenames of these pages and now they have PR 0.

I’ve started using Google Reader for keeping track of RSS feeds. (RSS is a way of keeping track of updates and changes on websites without visiting them - new content on a site is sent to you. It’s the new Black.)

This is one of many Google services that I use: (more…)