The Wardman Wire

You are browsing the archives of 2008 June.

These are some links you can use to keep up to date:

• Sokwanele - Enough is Enough - Civic Action Support Group
• This is Zimbabwe - Sokwanele blog.
• The Bearded Man Blog / Podcast - Ex Zimbwbwe policeman based in UK
• Zimbabwe Democracy Now - Democracy campaign site

Back in February I wrote about the saga of the SPCK bookshop chain in a post about the need to maintain dialogue between critcial different religions and philosophies:

About a year ago the venerable SPCK chain of Christian Bookshops (one arm of the literature work of SPCK - the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, who also do things such as funding libraries in theological colleges) were transferred to a charity called St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust.

and noted the pressures on staff:

Since the transfer took place, a large number of staff (for example 70% of the bookshop managers) have left, and there have been some major management changes - including an attempt to make major changes (which were perceived as detrimental) to the staff contract.

Doug Caplin, who writes at MetaCatholic reports that this has turned to tragedy in Worcester with the apparent suicide of Steve Jeynes, the ex-SPCK branch manager, two weeks after he was made redundant.

We don’t need you to annoy single people by telling them that we’re hard working. Some of us aren’t, but that’s not a problem is it? Is it?

One by-election was just a month ago. Another held its vote yesterday. And the candidate list for one more has just closed.
They think it’s all over - but it isn’t yet:
A Labour MP is set to resign forcing another potentially embarrassing by-election for Gordon Brown in the wake of his fifth place humiliation in Henley.
The [...]

As promised last week I’ve ditched the classification into left & right and decided to break things down slightly differently into three sections - I’ll highlight any formal reports and publications issued, articles / briefings or blogposts from their own sites or in the MSM and finally public events or debates that might be of [...]

This week I have started using a Wordpress plugin called “Crawl rate Tracker”.

The plugin draws a graph of how often your website has been visited by the indexing spiders from Google, Live Search (Microsoft), Yahoo and Technorati. This is important since this is an indicator of how much trust particular pages attract from a search engine.

The graph below is from the Wardman Wire for the few days since I installed the plugin. As you can see, the blog has had up to 1000+ search engine spider visits each day - which makes clear why it is important to filter “robots” out of your traffic statistics. Also, the front page is being indexed up to 13 times a day by Google.