malcolm coles

I needed an ISA. I didn’t care which. So I got a Legal & General one via Quidco.

If you don’t know it, Quidco is a marketing/affiliate site that shares commission from clickthroughs with you. If you go to a company by clicking its link on the Quidco site, Quidco gets paid if you buy something. It then gives some of the money to you.

In the case of taking out a Legal and General ISA, you get paid £120. Allegedly.

Quidco: Where’s my £120?

I’m not getting my £120, however. The tracking system uses cookies to identify who should get the lead - ie who should be credited when one site sends a customer to another site. A system that seems fundamentally flawed to me.

Legal and General advertises all sorts of places. So if I see its advert on lots of sites before I go to the Legal and General site, it decides which site should get the commission. If it’s Quidco, you get the cashback. If they award the lead to someone else, you don’t.

I got 31p …

When I bought 5 itunes songs via Quidco, I got my free 31p. Whoopee. So the system can work.

but that’s it

There was no sign of my £120, so I queried this. I’ve ben told Legal and General have awarded the lead to a competing site. I haven’t been told which one. And this is complete rubbish anyway - I only went to the Legal and General site from Quidco. Did I see an ad somewhere else? Possibly. But the only place I clicked a link to go there was Quidco (I’ve checked my history file).

So the Quidco cashback system seems fundamentally flawed to me - there’s no way to tell whether you’re actually going to get the cashback even if you appear to do everything you should. And the judge of this is not you or Quidco, but the company - Legal and General in this case. And as Quidco says, there’s no point contacting them about it. (Press 7 for queries about our internet marketing program …)

I won’t be bothering again.

If you look at your user profile at guardian.co.uk, it looks like this:

That all looks OK - even a nice URL to link back to my homepage. How very kind.

But if javascript is off …

Only if you look at the HTML, there’s not really a link there at all. Just some wierd javascript that goes off and gets the URL. But only, obviously, if javascript is turned on.

So what google sees is this:

Why? Some sort of SEO trick to avoid linking out to other sites, as per my previous post? 

I’m so lazy, I type my name in the google toolbar to log into wordpress. It’s a few keystrokes shorter than typing the URL. Anyway, I noticed this in the results today - why does it say [TRANSLATED], when it obviously isn’t translated? I can’t get google to do it for anything else.

So I’ve been using the google keyword tool. It used to show you relative weightings of search terms - you could see that people searched for ‘tyres’ twice as much as they did for ‘car tyres’, that sort of thing. 

Recently, Google added exact numbers - showing exactly how many people searched for each term (3,350,000 a month for tyres, 1,500,000 a month for car tyres as you ask.)

How exact is ‘exact’?

Anyway, I downloaded some of the data. And I pretty soon noticed that the approximate search volumes are always certain fixed numbers, no doubt carefully chosen to look random. For instance, the following always turn up: 49500, 33100, 22200, 18100, 14800, 12100, 9900, 8100, 6600.

Have you had any numbers near those ones that aren’t these ones? It’s no surprise that Google rounds the numbers up  to the nearest hundred or thousand. But why then try to hide that by rounding anything near 10,000 to 9,900? Or anything near 18,000 to 18,100?

The flat rate VAT scheme is brilliant. Multiply your VATable income by the flat-rate amount. And that’s it. You may even turn a small profit …

The instructions on filling out your online VAT return, however, are laughable, and don’t seem to apply to the flat rate VAT scheme. Yet they’re incredibly simple for most people.

How to fill out your online VAT return if you’re in the flat-rate scheme

It’s actually incredibly simple, as long as you ignore the instructions (and assuming you’re not trading with the rest of the EU or anything).

Take your VATable income INCLUDING VAT. Multiply it by the FRVS amount applicable to you (take off the 1% discount in the first year). That’s all the maths you need.

So if you had VATable income of £50,000 INCLUDING VAT, and your FRVS amount was 10% (11% minus a 1% discount), yu’re going to pay £5,000 in VAT.

To do this, enter the £5,000 in box 1. Then in box 6 enter the turnover to which you applied the flat rate scheme percentage, including VAT - so that’s £50,000 in this case.

It looks harder because the form is wrong …

The reason the form is confusing is it tells you to exclude VAT at box 6. That’s because the form is the same as for people paying normal VAT, and they haven’t bothered to change it. But if you’re in the flat rate vat scheme, and you don’t have a complicated business, you just enter two numbers:

• VATable income INCLUDING VAT in box 6
• The VAT you need to pay in box 1.

That’s it!

If you have slightly more complicated FRVS requirements (EG you trade with the EU), check here.

“What’s the first thing you look for in a baby’s highchair?”, asked one mother. “Oh, it has to be easy to clean,” everyone agreed. “Machine washable.”

“Yes”, we said, looking sheepish, and agreeing that this was the most important criterion, and that the one we had ordered was definitely easy to clean and baby-proof. Even though we had read that it wasn’t in various high chair reviews.

Who would order a high chair that wasn’t easy to clean? How stupid can you be? Ah.

Baby Eliza in her Bloom Fresco high chair

Bloom fresco review: Good points

The Bloom Fresco looks good. Not as good as you think (the base is a bit ugly) but still good. And when your baby is sitting in it, they look like some sort of James Bond villain. In a good way.

The Fresco has various different positions, and a clip-on tray, and you can buy changeable seats from Bloom in different colours (we’ve got red and orange. There’s a blue, too). But you’re buying it for its looks, aren’t you, so you don’t care about that stuff? And your baby looks good in it.

Bad points

Did I mention it wasn’t easy to clean? It’s got crevices for a start. It gets really dirty, really easily. And although you can remove the seat and straps, they’re not machine washable. Why? Why would Bloom do this? They’re wipe clean, like that’s going to work.

Essentially, you have to live with the Fresco looking good but being covered in food, and then you have to dismantle it and give it a deep clean (as far as a deep clean is possible with wiping …).

Bloom fresco high chair: to sum up

To sum up this review, I’m glad we bought this high chair (I was tempted by the Mozzee originally - but who would buy a high chair with no crotch rod/strap? the sort of person who buys the Fresco i guess …). 

But it’s always covered in food.

We’re buying a nice wooden high chair that’s easy to clean for our second baby. But I bet they end up fighting over who sits in the Bloom Fresco … I wish I could.

When I see a new Malcolm, the question is - is he helping Malcolms, or hurting Malcolms?

Malcolm X - he helped us.

That bloke in the Vicks advert whose mum said ‘Course you can, Malcolm’ - he hurt us.

Ulrika Johnson is probably spelt Jonsson. Anyway, her new baby is Malcolm

Ulrika Johnson’s new baby (or is Jonsson’s?):

The news that Ulrika Johnson (Jonsson?) had called her baby Malcolm seems neutral.

A celebrity has called their baby ‘Malcolm’ - that helps us.

That celebrity is the woman who hosted a reality TV where a bachelor had to choose a wife from the contestants - but turned them all down to marry Ulrika. That hurts us.

Kerry Katona: shut up

But Kerry Katona has just weighed in: “Now I like old-fashioned names, but I have to say that Malcolm is not one of my favourites. It’s quite a nerdy name. Let’s hope the other kids aren’t mean to him when he goes to school.”

That’s Kerry Katona, who, according to Wikipedia, has:

• Drug problems
• Tabloid exposes
• Smoked while pregnant
• Was voted second worst celebrity mother
• Was voted most irritiating person in Britain
• Was voted fourth most hated person in Britain
• Was voted most hated woman according to other women.
• And who called her own children Maxwell, which is a type of coffee.

And she’s worried about other people’s kids being mean to their offspring?

LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

So, if you search for the Immigration Advisory Service on google, it comes with a warning saying ‘This site may harm your computer’. 

This is a warning that google puts in its results if the site in question has been hacked and contains ‘malware’ - software that damage your computer.

I’ve seen a few of these lately - but this one’s the first for a big site, rather than a blog.

Question is, how do you warn the IAS when you can’t go to their site to find out their contact details …

If it happens to you, read this.

This took some fiddling around. And the instructions in BT’s help are out of date. So here’s how to set up Mail (Apple’s email program) if you use BTconnect.

Start, by starting Mail. Obviously.

Add account stage

1. Full name: Your name
2. Email address: The address you want the account set up for (so if you’re registered somedomain.com with BT, it would be something like: your.name@somedomain.com).
3. Password: Your BTconnect password 

Incoming mail server

1. Account type: POP
2. Description: Something to help you remember it (eg my email account - something memorable if you hav more than one).
3. Incoming Mail server: pop3.btconnect.com
4. User name: Your username from your btconnect account (ie the bit before @btconnect.com when you first log on)
5. Password: Your BTconnect password

Mail will then check the connection.

Outgoing Mail Server

1. Description: Anything you like
2. Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.btconnect.com

Don’t click Use authentication. It will check the connection again at this point.

Outgoing Mail Security

Don’t tick use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

Click continue, then create.

When the problems start …

Whatever I try, it just won’t work until you then go round in a seemingly stupid circle.

So try to send an email - if it doesn’t work, click ‘Edit server list’. Then under Advanced, tick the Secure Sockets Layer button, change the dropdown to password authentication, and reenter your username and password. Close and save the ‘Accounts window’.

If it still won’t work, go to the preferences menu and make sure your outgoing mail server is still set. And if it still won’t work, go and do it all again and remove the  SSL setting.

Why do you have to do all this? Why can’t you add the SSL setting during the wizard? Why does adding it and removing it help? Why does it keep unselecting the outgoing mail server?

Who knows - but I’ve set an account up about 20 times now just to check, and I keep having to do all this …

Meta descriptions only: update

Here is the meta description PHP with both category and tag pages included (and updated again to make them more than one word and to include monthly archives):

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php if(is_home()) {echo (’Malcolm Coles: His blog for his reviews, so you can find him, and other stuff that takes his fancy.’);} else {if(is_category()) {echo category_description();} else {if(is_tag()) {echo ‘-tag archive page for this blog’ . single_tag_title();} else {if(is_month()) {echo ‘ archive page for this blog’ . the_time(’F, Y’);} else {echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “Metadescription”, true);}}}}?>”>

I’ve given up adding keywords these days!

Original post about meta descriptions and keywords

I know little about PHP. But after fiddling round with other people’s example code, I’ve finally managed to use custom fields to get a unique meta description and unique meta keywords on each post, and on the home page.

To get this to work, you need to add new custom fields called Metadescription and Metakeywords to each post. The ones for the home page you hard code. And I’m still working on the category pages …

Copy and paste the code below into the head section of the header bit of your wordpress template. It basically checks if it’s the home page. If it is, it uses the hard-coded meta description and meta keywords. If it’s not, it goes and looks up the custom fields and uses the values from there. So there we have it: a unique meta description and unique meta keywords in wordpress.

Unique meta descriptions in wordpress

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php if(is_home()) {echo (’PUT YOUR HOME PAGE DESCRIPTION HERE’);} else {echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “Metadescription”, true);}?>”>

Unique meta keywords in wordpress

<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php if(is_home()) {echo (’PUT YOUR HOME PAGE KEYWORDS HERE’);} else {echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “Metakeywords”, true);}?>”>