Yup that’s right. To hell with search engine optimisation. No links allowed! Maybe Google themselves even received an email that said “Hey, if we find our site in your results, heads will roll!”.

NBR pointed this out earlier today with an article about Auckland Council’s new website.

Ironically, NBR linked to the page that says that links are not allowed without explicit link permission from the people that give you permission to link.

Very shortly after this was mentioned on Twitter and picked up by influential tweeters such as myself (cough), the entire website collapsed.

Did the powers-that-be take the site down? Or perhaps there was a REASON no one was allowed to link to the site? Maybe linking to the site caused the server to melt-down? Are there desperate website technicians somewhere that are drowning in the emotional ocean that is the loss of their new website, sorry, Website? Is it all NBR’s fault?

Not too long after that, the website was reinstated but, alas, without the humourous “linking’s a no-no” condition. What a shame. Expecting this, the geniuses at NBR plus the genius at NZRAW (that’ll be me then) took snapshots of the message before it was removed. NBR added it to their post and you can see it here too:

Funny that other websites all suck so much that they need to be spelt with a lower-case wuh yet the Auckland Council Website is epic enough to be spelt with a capital wuh. Could this interesting style of proof-reading also explain why they have a news article on their homepage which announces the launch of the new website today, Thursday 1st July. Despite it being Wednesday, the 30th June?

So yes, while short-lived, this special condition brought joy and mirth to the hearts of many in the wuh wuh wuh. Thanks Auckland Council. To show our appreciation, here’s a free link.

Link.

Update: One of the Google ads that may come up on the right there is for the Yellow Pages councils category that features links to the city councils.

No, Yellow Pages! No linking! Bad Yellow Pages.

Mark Inglis has a firm place in New Zealand’s mountaineering heritage having been the first double amputee to stand on the summit of Everest.  Since then, Mark and Anne Inglis created Limbs4All – a sustainable New Zealand based Charitable Trust committed to helping some of the 400 million disabled people in the world to express potential.

Inglis contacted me to invite me on a trekking expedition that he is hosting in Nepal. Arranged by World Expeditions, this trip takes you to the Gokyo Lakes region at the head of the Dudh Kosi Valley. The trek takes you higher than Everest base camp to Gokyo Ri and to see what Inglis tells me is the real Nepal.

The beauty of having Inglis there with you is that you see the area, and views of Everest, from his own perspective. Inglis can take you around the mountaineering haunts of Kathmandu and introduce you to his Sherpa friends.

Trip Highlights

The highlight of the trek is an ascent of Gokyo Ri. From the summit you’ll see impressive views of Everest as well as the 8,000m peaks of Lhotse, Makalu and Cho Oyu. To put this in perspective,  Mount Cook – New Zealand’s highest peak and the place where Mark lost his legs in 1982 – stands at 3,754 metres. The highest peak in Brtiain is Ben Nevis at a comparatively minuscule 1,344 metres.

Personally, the highlight for me would be walking alongside Mark Inglis himself and discussing the stories and personalities that I’ve read so much about and knocking pint glasses with a guy who features in a large number of the more recent books himself.

Alas, I’m unable to head of on this remarkable adventure this year but Mark has allowed me to put the offer out there to others. Looking over the trip information, this really is an incredible trip at fantastic value – less than the price of a 20 year old Hilux (yes, I compare all prices to my truck to help me put them in perspective) . Plus $500 goes towards Mark’s charity, Limbs4All.

For a full guide to the trip itself, head to the Gokyo Lakes page on the World Expeditions website and download the trip notes. If you have any questions or want to get in touch with Mark about the trip, feel free to post a comment here or contact World Expeditions through their site.

If you end up going, take some photos for me and give me a run down of your experiences and I’ll post them on this blog.

The incredible pictures of Mount Everest on this page are by my Christchurch photographer friend, Heather Ellis.

This morning, my wife called me to ask me if I’ve moved her car. Questions like this spark immediate concern!

Yes, my wife’s car was stolen last night from right outside our house. Ok it was only a 1992 Nissan Bluebird, registration plate TZ9717, but the thing about a 1992 Nissan Bluebird is that if you own a 1992 Nissan Bluebird it’s generally because you can’t afford anything flasher than a 1992 Nissan Bluebird. So in some ways, losing our Nissan has caused us as much grief as if we’d lost a BMW M3.

Secretly I was also upset as, despite the fact that I have a Hilux 4WD, my wife’s car is the only one with a tow bar and we were planning on using it extensively to help us move into our first home in a couple of weeks.

Anyway. Worse than having a car stolen from you is the underlying feeling that it was stolen from you by someone in the immediate neighbourhood.

Not so long ago, we noticed that someone had been stealing petrol from it. So we put a lockable petrol cap on it. Not long after that, we noticed that someone was stealing mail from our mailbox. So we put a padlock on the mailbox. Not long after that, we noticed that someone was using our wheelie bin for their own refuse disposal. If we had a big enough chain, I swear I’d put a padlock on that too.

I feel like these three absolutely heinous crimes are in someway related. I’d love to think it’s not the older guy two doors from me who quite happily says hello when he sees us in the street … but I did startle him once while he was walking up to our mailbox one day. The way he suddenly realised I was watching him and then did a sharp 180 and hurridly walked off in the opposite direction really made me wonder. He also seems to sit at home all day smoking drugs with random people that turn up at the house so he’s not exactly a first-rate citizen EVEN THOUGH he leant me his hose once.

But hey. At least we have insurance right? And I’m talking the full blown “all the options” insurance from a reputable company like AMI. Although … wait a sec. I was very careful to select “Agreed Value” when we got our car insurance as I’d been stung with “Market Value” before.

Market Value is where you pay a premium each month and when your car gets stolen or someone ploughs into it with his Subaru (thanks Jeremy by the way) the insurance company gets one of their guys to look at your car and say “Yeah .. it’s worth about this much” and they pay you that much minus your excess.

HOWEVER. Here’s the part that sucks. We check our insurance documents and find that AMI have lowered the AGREED value of our car by $200 dollars. What’s that all about AMI? Well it’s because it’s depreciated in value. OK so what’s Market Value all about then?? Well … that’s when we value your car based on how much it’s depreciated in value. OK so what’s AGREED value then??? Well … ok yeah we’re just trying to screw you. Suckers! So you lowered the value of our car. Did you lower the amount we pay each month? No. We put it up. Yeah. We feel bad now … NOT!

So in summary, by the time we’ve paid our excess and received our payment from our insurance company, we’ll have about $100 and no car. What can we get for $100? Well … we can get two thirds of a battery powered kid’s quad bike. That should do us. I hear that Christchurch will be fitted with NZ’s first charge-point network for recharging electric cars so we’ll be set.

UPDATE!

It’s about an hour since I wrote this post. After publishing it, I went to pick my wife up from the mall where she was having training for her new job (had to pick her up as she had no car … are you following the story?). On the way home, I was casually keeping an eye out for any Bluebirds parked in dodgy alleys.

We’re travelling down Brougham Street towards the Lyttelton tunnel and through the trees I spot a Bluebird parked in a dead-end street. The Bluebird had a small white rectangular sticker in the back window. Hmm … that looks familiar. So I take a few random turnings down side-roads while my wife looks at my with a confused expression. Then we round the final corner and ….

… bam! There’s our car. It was on Vincent Place, Woolston. If you have a car that’s still not been recovered, maybe it’s down there too?

Whoever stole it:

a) was a girl or had a girl with them (there was girl’s deoderant and yeah I thought it was some sniffing drug abuser but then we found some girl’s lip balm as well)

b) used half a tank of petrol and didn’t exactly do the tyres and brakes any favours

c) was probably going to come back for a second go

I assume they were going to come back because they’d actually re-locked the car! They’d forced the ignition but other than that there was no damage to the car at all. Plus they’d left the perfectly-stealable CD player stereo AND they’d even left their own CD in the player.

I’m almost tempted to park it up in the same spot and then do a Lethal Weapon style stake-out. But I really don’t have the patience for that.

So, we called the cops. I told them what brand of deoderant and lip balm was in the car and they instantly knew EXACTLY who the criminal was and said they’ll knock on their door any day now (I hope all car criminals are reading this and know how amazingly efficient the police are)*

The car itself is now parked right outside our front door, which happens to be directly below our bedroom window, plus I have carefully made a few minor adjustments to the vehicle which means that anyone driving away in it will very soon end up in the Avon river.

Now I get to call AMI back and tell them to change my policy.

P.S. My wife and I would like to say thank you to all the people on Twitter who re-tweeted my status update in order to help us find our car or offered words of advice.

@HatchiNZ @daz_bLazem @nzben @simonleslienz @phillipnewmannz @ditzy_m @I_enigma @MiramarMike … you guys rock our socks. Thank you.

*The part about the cops being efficient wasn’t true.

Now ok, it is being recycled rather than thrown away … but too many people think that they’re doing the world a favour by simply recycling. We had a temp here who would buy a large plastic bottle of Evian spring water every day. She thought she was a proper eco-saint because she was recycling. At the end of each week, the recycling bag was fit to burst with these bloody huge plastic bottles.

What many people don’t realise is the amount of economic waste that is generated through the recycling process as recycling is not 100% efficient.

There’s one key ‘R’ that is far more effective than recycling and that is to RE-USE.

This brings us nicely to the subject of me. I’m no eco-warrior but I like to think that I’m better than most. But at the end of one month, I had quite a mountain of used takeaway coffee cups.

To be fair, I had started to get my coffee from the Coffee Laboratory in Shades Arcade. James at the Coffee Lab uses BioCups that are biodegradable. A definite step in the right direction but the lids were still naughty old plastic.

Then one of our graphic designers, Abbie, showed me the KeepCup. The KeepCup is a trendy product that’s really taking off in Austrraaylya.

Introducing the KeepCup

Developed in Melborne, Australia, it’s simply a re-usable coffee cup that comes in some funky colours. You simply gives this cup to the coffee-maker-people each time you get a take-away coffee. The baristas don’t mind it at all as it saves them money on coffee cups plus a lot of baristas are pretty switched on when it comes to the environment.

The manufacturer’s website itself is one of the best I’ve seen for showing off a product and understanding how it works. Using their calculator, I worked out that, for my 5 takeaway coffees a week, over the four year life time of the KeepCup I would help the environment by saving:

The KeepCup has also built up a bit of a cult fan base. Plus a mention from me on Twitter quickly brought five or six people into the conversation and produced a flurry of visits to the KeepCup website and at least one sale in just a few minutes.

Where can I buy a KeepCup in New Zealand?

A bit of research shows that the KeepCup can also be branded. Check out People’s Coffee in Newtown.  These guys sell a People’s Coffee branded KeepCup from their cafe and fill it with your first coffee for free.

Elsewhere in New Zealand, you can also buy the KeepCup online from CoffeeSupreme.com for $15 plus $3.50 for delivery, or in Wellington and Christchurch you can visit the Starfish stores to purchase one in person for $18 for the smaller model and $22 for the larger model. I’ve just bought one myself. A fetching charcoal grey with a red tab.

Although … you may be too cool to know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Now you know. You’re a little bit less cool. Ha.

Anyway, as well as an awesome amount of functionality for little-to-no cost, WordPress provides a heap of statistics along the lines of:

- How many people have visited your site
- What articles they read
- What search terms they used to find your site in the first place

Now if you’re thinking “OMG! I’m being watched!” then fear not, you’re absolutely right. But hey, we don’t get your personal details and if you’re thinking in acronyms and you actually use “OMG” in conversational language then to be honest we don’t want your details anyway.

What the stats DO show are, like I said, words people have put into popular search engines like Google (let’s face it, that’s the ONLY popular search engine) to find this here blog that you’re reading now.

All of this goes on behind the scenes but I’m actually going to give you a sneak peak at the stats behind this blog. Why? Because you should all be ashamed! Take a look:

Search Terms for all days ending 2009-11-11 (Summarized)

Search	Views
loser sign	31
scary washing machine	22
short skirts	20
blogspot vs wordpress	11
not for girls chocolate	7
christchurch	6
yorkie not for girls	6
garrett holborn	4
blackpool	4
very short skirts	4
shortest skirt ever	3
blackpool postcards	3
yorkie nestle	3
largest glitter ball	3
“scary washing machine”	3
giant glitter ball	3
flashing girls blackpool	3
boy racers	3
wife short skirt	3

The most common search term people have used to find this site is “loser sign” as mentioned in our post about Christchurch violence.

However, if we add up all the references to short skirts and flashing girls, you get a total of 33 hits from these terms. All this traffic because of a post about Blackpool tourism that included a photo of a girl with a ridiculously short skirt.

We also found that the most commonly clicked on image was that same short-skirt-girl photo. Try going to that post and clicking on the image now.

It’s great to know that we’re attracting quality readers to our incredibly influential blog on political current affairs and breaking news stories (Ed: what blog would that be then??).

Oh and yeah this blog post had a point didn’t it? Let me get onto that:

How to improve your SEO (that’s “search engine optimisation” for all our readers that don’t wear transparent plastic sandals and bicycle clips around their bell-bottom trousers) by using dodgy references in your text:

Next time you write a blog post or add a new page to your website, why not start the text with a dodgy reference of your choosing? Got a “Meet Our Team” page? Try starting it with:

Porn. We have a great team of quality professionals at our company.

Or do you want it to blend in with your blog post about your dog washing business? How about:

Soapy car-wash-girls are not employed by us as the dogs don’t know the difference.

Do that and watch your stats soar. You won’t get the type of readers you really want but hey you’ll feel all warm and fuzzy with all this new attention.

Flickr image for featured post title from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gillat/3924931083/