For those of you that don’t know what i’m on about, see the below video of the incident.

When i logged in i found around 800 spam comments, out of date plugins, out of date WordPress and unanswered questions people left in the comments. I had to go through all of the 800 spam comments to see if any were actually legit comments. This took some time that i didn’t have time to upgrade all of my wordpress plugins and the platform itself.

Talk Playstation on the other hand is ran by a number of people now, it has a number of authors so they can take care of things when i’m not around. I need to update a few things on there such as the about page.

I’m going to try and take care of things this weekend because i’m going away again on Tuesday to Penrith with my girlfriend.

So yes, here’s the disadvantages of leaving a blog alone for a long period of time.

• Spam comments mount up (some spam comments are sometime legit).
• A lot of emails/comments from readers unanswered.
• Out of date plugins.
• Out of date platform.
• Takes time to put back right.
• Readers lose trust in you.
• Less visitors because of less content

Thats all i can think of for now. If you know of anymore let me know.

Hopefully this may improove rankings in the Google search engines as its recommended by Google to keep an eye on your Google Webmaster account.

If your not signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, i highly recommend signing up, you could be surpised at what you find. You can also set a sitemap in their which is also good for seach engines.

I checked the page ranks this morning and daparky.com is still a page rank 3. I was surprised daparky.com even got a page rank in the last update a good few months ago.

I’m happy to say that talk playstation has a page rank of 4! This is probably due to the amount of incoming links it has (around 12k). Not bad for a blog thats only 4/5 months old.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

I plan on setting more goals for next month and i’ll mention that later on in the week.

Set Your Goals

Set yourself a goal and see if you can achieve it, try and get so many visitors or feed subscribers, it might do you good at the end of the day.

If you don’t set your goals, your not pushing yourself and you won’t achieve what you most want.

My next goal in life is to become a PHP expert

I’m still using Firefox 2 and i’ll be upgrading to Firefox 3. I will probably test it out at work first since i’m a web developer. Looks like i’ll have to have around 7 browsers open while developing at work (IE5, IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 and Safari).

Anyway so what’s new in Firefox 3?

Well first of all it has 15,000 improvements and no i’m not going to list them all!

New Features

Firefox 3 sets the innovation bar very high with exciting new features, including one-click bookmarking, the smart location bar and lightning fast performance.

Security

Keeping you and your personal information safe is our top priority. Firefox 3 includes phishing and malware protection, plus our new instant site ID info.

Productivity

With features like built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom, Firefox 3 makes it possible to work faster and more efficiently on the Web.

Customization

Your taste and needs set you apart from the rest. With Firefox 3 you can choose from over 5,000 add-ons that help you customize your browsing experience.

Help Firefox set a Guiness World Record by downloading it, it will get a ‘most downloaded file in 24 hours’ award.

If your having trouble download it off the official Firefox site, try this site instead.

So the goals are:-

• To reach 150 RSS Subscribers (currently around the 80 mark)
• 20 of which must be subscribed via e-mail
• Last month the blog received 61,053 Visits. July 1 will see 70k

So there we are. How am i going to reach them targets? I will use social media sites and promote the blog using social media.

If i don’t reach my goals… well what can i say but try again the month after, it is afterall quite a hard task because the blog did so well last month and hasn’t performed as well this month and if i don’t set targets they won’t be met again.

Other than working hard at my job, i haven’t been up to much apart from playing Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Playstation 3 and watching the European Cup.

There has been a huge inactivity on this blog and thats due to time constraints. I said i would sit back and have a look at where all this time is going and re-adjust it so i can spend a bit of time on this blog.

Now onto the subject of England not being in it. Well yes it sucks because i obviously only watch it when my own country is playing. I think i’ll only be watching Euro when the big matches are on like when the knockout stages start otherwise it doesn’t interest me.

I think that one of the 4 teams will win…

1. Spain
2. Holland
3. Portugal
4. France

Thats my bet that. I really hope Holland win it actually, they played so well last night and deserve it.

So comon Northerners!

Although i would like United to win but i think Chelsea will win 2-1 simply because they have never been there before. This is the 50th anniversary of the munich air accident and i hope this doesn’t effect the Man United players.

I will make a more meaningful blog post later tonight if i get chance regarding where i’ve been and what happening.

I mentioned earlier that my hosting company upgraded my server to a new, faster one. It works like a real treat! So far this month talkplaystation has had 26147 unique visitors and my server suffered no downtime what so ever.

I’ve also spoken to some of my friends about this and they think i should start putting adverts on such as adsense but i turned around and said something like i’m trying to build a readership and get a constant flow of visitors. I won’t be looking at adverts for a very long time yet.

I contacted some big name blogs such as Problogger and John Chow with their opinions and they replied with some useful advice, i will let you know about that shortly.

So far so good!

I also made a mistake because i thought the games were yesterday and not today! Sorry about that, i should have checked the fixtures.

Hooray to all the Manchester United fans out there!

p.s. check out the Ronaldo freekick entry i posted a few weeks ago.

My prediction is that Manchester United will beat Wigan and Chelsea will beat Bolton which means they will be on level points, however Manchester United have a far superior goal difference! United have +56 while Chelsea have +39.

Anyway, anything can happen in Football, United might win and Chelsea might loose… or it could be the other way round. Ultimately i want Man Utd to retain the Premiership.

My vote is that Manchester United will win the final, i think the score will be 2-1. Liverpool were very unlucky not to be seen in the final because of Risse’s own goal effort in the first leg of the semi final.

I havent been blogging much lately because i’ve been busy playing Grand Theft Auto IV. I have a 3 day weekend coming because its bank holiday on Monday the 5th of May so i will kick some ass on this blog without a shadow of a doubt.

Anyway, after watching the news and reading some online articles it seems that the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland has shut down due to workers going strike. So what does this mean for the UK? A lot because Grangemouth oil refinery provides petrol for a 3rd of the UK and when the news was broken everyone went crazy and filled up which caused mayhem at the pumps. Why couldn’t everyone just calm down and buy their normal amount?

Here is the article on the BBC website.

Dear David Parkinson,

Grand Theft Auto IV is nearly here!

Thank you for your order ********** for Grand Theft Auto IV. The highly anticipated GTA IV game is due to be with you on Tuesday 29th April. To make sure that we get this title to everyone who ordered it for release day we have had to start our picking and packing process earlier than we would for our normal pre-orders. As a result, we may look to authorise and charge your credit/debit card from tomorrow.
Kind Regards

Customer Service Team
Gameplay.co.uk

Well well, that means i’ve secure my copy because GTA IV is almost guaranteed to sell out day 1. GTA IV is expected to make around $400 million in it’s first week! thats crazy money!

Take a look at some screenshots HERE and HERE.