Seems like Burt's kicked off a a new chain of finding out more about people and their past lives. Boo's passed this on to me so a quick quote off Burt's post

In an attempt to find out a bit more about each other, I decided a good way would be to ask “where were you?” 1 year, 5 years and 10 years ago…

1 year ago
I was renting a room from a friend in the centre of Cardiff. Self employed with my own business, surviving month to month thanks to the 2 day a week contract job I had. I would have just returned from my last visit to Austria to clear my name after my ex-employers decided to spread lies about me. At the same time I was preparing to take a client to court over non payment of an invoice, as well as being with a guy who was just stringing me along.

5 years ago
I was preparing to leave my first and only full time permanent job in Chiswick, London. Living with a friend in Osterley (just by Heathrow). I was also about to go away for a week of skiing alone to Austria, to discuss becoming a ski instructor with the ski school out there. A little bit of self employed work on the side.

10 years ago
Just finishing my first year at university in Pontypridd, Glamorgan. Studying Mathematics and Computers. I was with a guy who treated me badly and it took me another year or so to get rid of him. Parents were still living in Germany which was quite hard. Had my first web page online by then – what a terrible mess that was!

Despite how it sounds I have no regrets over the past 10 years. I've had any amazing 3 full ski seasons as an austrian ski instructor, I've been self employed for almost 5 years now, and am finally prepared to call my business a success. I don't regret what's happened because if it hadn't I would necessarily be where I am today.

I pass this on to Dave, Sam and Khalid.

I'm probably a bit slow on the uptake here but whilst checking on the BBC Weather site to check on how it would be tomorrow for a day in Liverpool, I noticed an accessibility link on their site. Now the BBC has often intrigued me as they continue to use table based layouts which as far as accessibility is concerned really isn't a great idea. They get around it by having their text only version.

However they do still make valid points on their site plus offer a couple of PDFs for download.

Standards and Guidelines
BBC Commissioning – that's got the PDFs on.

It's got a bit of a checklist to use and it makes the accessibility points sound more like english to those of you who don't speak "WAI" Language
A worthwhile download.

On a side note, just been to see "Lucky Number Slevin" at the cinema. Cinema was freezing, film was worth it though

Alexa is now showing a list of your sites where it can match you are the owner. For example if you try viewing some of your domains (I've found .com ones work the 'best') if Alexa knows of other sites that you own or believes you own you'll see the links down the lefthand side.

Threadwatch have a thread about it at Threadwatch.org where you can see a few site owners with slight concerns over their various sites being associated. Why? Well for example even though I link to my business from this web site, I wouldn't link to this web site from my business. Even though, besides the odd rant, I'm not particularly unprofessional on this site (well I don't think so!) it's still a personal site and I don't want visitors or clients that go to my business site to come here. I don't tend to link to client sites from here (in fact besides one occassion, never) as I believe that the two should stay separate. In turn I can also understand why some people have threatened Alexa with legal action for listing their web sites. Some people don't want to be associated with the sites they run, they ensure that they don't link to their sideline sites, yet here is a company deciding to just take it upon theirselves to list all of your sites in one place.

I've not found any connections on my sites just yet, it doesn't seem to be happening with UK domains and I have very few .coms anyhow, but I've already gotten annoyed by Alexa for posting my full name and telling me it would take 3 months to have it removed (yet took one second to post it up). Okay whilst you can do some searching around and find my details on WhoIs Searches that's besides the point. It's almost as much of a concern as the other various options available to the public to get people's details and addresses, and they wonder why there's a problem with identity theft and everything else. Heck if you can even search Google as an online telephone book for the whole of the US!!

Anyhow, any site owners out there who don't want to be associated with their other URLs I'd check a few at Alexa.com and if they're there contact them (nicely first, via a solicitor second ) and get them removed.

WordLinx is run by a guy off a forum that I frequent. He's recently relaunched it as a pay per click service where advertisers can just buy clicks, set their bid price and total amount and then the members of the site are paid that bid price to click on the advert and view the URL associated for about 20 seconds.nnFor the advertisers out there – this is a cheap way to have guaranteed traffic. With Google Adwords you can't even get away with paying out $0.01 per click let alone encourage any visitors! If you've got a good catchy web site, a noticeable front page then this could be a great way to pull in the visitors. At 1 cent per visitor I'm sure you can survive a lot of visitors and still get a return of investment (R.O.I). The minimum amount to spend is $1.00 plus a 10% fee to the owner. $1.10 is a small enough amount to get 100 visitors and give it a try. If it doesn't work, well it doesn't work, I doubt it's going to cause a dent in the pocket to find that out that's for sure!nnFor everyone else, well what's better than being able to log onto a site during the day and get paid to click on some adverts? Bearing in mind some advertisers pay high prices on clicks with Google Adwords except Google gets the money. On WordLinx you get the money not the web site. Payment threshold is low ($10) and payment is via Paypal.nnMembers of WordLinx are growing quickly and it's definitely something I'll be using in the future once I get my new sideline business up and running hopefully in the next month or two depending on the meetings I have in a fortnight's time.

A colleague of mine, Hannah brought this web site to my attention last week. It's probably been around for ages and I've just not seen it sooner! Silktide will read over your web site and then award points for various areas after analysing your web page code, links coming in, links going out, positioning in Google, Alexa Page Rank etc. It can help point out issues that you may not have noticed and gives an overall point score for your web site out of 10. It's geared up for the UK as it mentions the DDA (Disability Discriminiation Act) and will point out areas where your site fails (if there are any). If you register for the free account then you can get an even more technical report which can give a real insight into the web site.

Whilst you may know your own site quite well it can give you a deeper insight that you may not have seen before. Alternatively it's handy to analyse other web sites that you don't know so well, especially if a new client calls for example, it can give you a nice set of results to read off within a minute or so.

Before I started the changes on this site I had 7.7/10 score. I've got a few patches of code to fix but once I've done that I'll be running the analysis again to see if I've increased my score. If nothing else it's a bit of fun