Snoskred Explains

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Blog Wrap Ups Made Simple And Easy..

8 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

For a while, every Sunday on the blog I did a “weekly wrap up” post. It became a firm favorite with my readers and people often emailed or left comments letting me know how much they enjoyed it. So, would you like to make a regular wrap up a part of your blog too? Here’s how to go about it. Note, this may get a little basic at times in order to help out the less technical of us. ;)

1. Decide what categories you want.

It’s a good idea to have a weekly wrap up follow a kind of “set format” or order. It makes it easier for the readers – they know what to expect each week. You can choose any kinds of categories you want – be creative. You could choose to wrap up what has been going on in your life, perhaps little things which didn’t rate a blog post of their own. You can break down some of the categories into smaller chunks, for example my Must Reads section has extra categories within it. My weekly wrap up includes –

Funny Search Terms This Week –
Must Reads – Post of the week – Funnies –
Great Stumbles this week –
Here On The Blog –
Blogs Added To The Sidebar –
Coming Up –

2. Never be afraid to add to your categories –

This week I am going to be adding a new section where I highlight an old blog post of mine each week. I’ve written some great blog posts in the past and newer readers to the blog may never have read those. If you think of something new don’t be afraid to try it out – and if it doesn’t work out that’s ok too. Some categories you might want to only use from time to time when something fits in them instead of weekly.

3. Create a weekly wrap up text file – with formatting included.

This is the key secret to writing the weekly wrap ups – the formatting part is a secret I only recently discovered. How do you do it? I do mine in blogger but what I’m about to say can be done with almost any blogging platform.

– create a new post
– put in your category titles
– format each category title as you want them to appear (larger text, bold, color etc) note you have to do each title separately because you’re going to add text in between the titles later.
– copy the HTML (in blogger just click edit html and copy that – wordpress users, how do you do this in wordpress?)
– paste the HTML into a text file

So now, you’ll have a text file which will look very strange to you because it has odd code in it, eg – (span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;”)

Save this text file as the BASE file. Then save it a second time as blogwrap(date) and use blogwrap(date) as the file you put your links in as the week goes by – this way once you’ve done a wrap up you can open the base file and then save it as blogwrap(next week’s date) and start putting links etc aside again without having to delete last week’s work. This saves you time and effort!

If you looked at the file, you’ll note I have html in there for the links to posts etc. That’s important when you get to number 4.

4. Have your weekly wrap up text file open when you’re online.

I’ve mentioned Editpad Lite here on the blog before as one of the best free things available on the net – a great little program that allows you to have text files in tabs so you can flick between them.

I always have Editpad running on my computer and I now always have blogwrap(date) open so when I find a great blog post or an article or anything I want to mention in the wrap up, I can add it – this is where the HTML comes in – (a href=”link”)text(/a)

– copy the link and paste that where it says link
– copy the title of the post as written by the author to where it says text.

Once you’ve done that, you have a link ready for posting in a weekly wrap up. Don’t forget to click save whenever you add in a new link – I lost a bunch of links one time when the power went out.

5. Write your thoughts as you go.

When you copy a link, make sure to put a little bit of text next to it on the spot, so you don’t have to spend time re-visiting the links when you’re writing the blogwrap post. An example from tomorrow’s upcoming blogwrap – with the html brackets changed to ( ) so you can see how it looks in the file –

(a href=”http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html”)Hubble Heritage Gallery Of Images(/a) Sites like this are why I love Stumbleupon.

6. Comment before you leave the link.

I usually like to let bloggers know I’m going to be linking to their post in my next weekly wrap up, sort of as a heads up. This is a polite, considerate and friendly thing to do and a very good habit to get into. Sometimes I forget due to lack of talent, organization or skill. Apologies in advance, I never claimed to be a perfect blogger! ;)

7. Communicate updates to your blog.

The weekly wrap up is a great time to mention new widgets and gadgets you’ve added to the sidebar, as well as any changes you’ve made to the “face” of your blog and any new blogs you’ve added to your sidebar links. When you make a change, note it in your wrap up text file on the spot, so you don’t forget about it.

8. What’s on the horizon?

The weekly wrap up is a good time to let your readers know what may come their way over the next week – however be careful. Blogging happens all on its own sometimes, and sometimes I’ve said things were coming up but those things still have not arrived. I’d generally advise not to say too much, just a brief overview of potential possibilities and topics. However do make sure to let them know if you’re going to be participating in things like the Hump Day Hmmm or various other weekly type things.

Blog wrap ups are good for many reasons but the most important could be helping you to build relationships with other bloggers by showing them you like their work enough to link to it – and generally you will find the link love comes back to you over time.

We all find ourselves amazed, happy, excited, possibly a little scared when we start blogging and get our first comment, and we begin to connect with people. It’s a great feeling. It is a great way of showing your blog readers blogs that you enjoy – and a great way of showing bloggers you love their work which is something bloggers enjoy and like.

10. Click on the links.

Once you have published your weekly update, my advice is to click on all the links in your post. This gets the words out to bloggers that they have been linked to because all bloggers tend to check where incoming links are coming from, and generally they will drop over to your blog and check it out, sometimes leaving a comment, sometimes adding *your* blog to their list of blogs to read.

Pick a day! Let people know.

You should choose a day of the week that you’re comfortable with. I chose Sunday because it was a slow day here at the blog – it’s not anymore. ;) People drop by just to read the wrap up. It’s also made Mondays busier, too.

So there you have it –

How to create the blog wrap up and make it easy. Are you inspired? If you’re going to add one to your blog, make sure to comment and let me know, and send me a link when you write your first one, I’ll drop over to check it out.

Work Smarter –

Until recently my weekly blog wrap up was taking up a fair bit of time at the end of the week to put it together. While I was putting links and search terms aside during the week, it was more of a mish mash of stuff I’d put aside rather than anything organised. I would leave it till Sunday to format the post and lay out the links in some kind of order and in general it would take over an hour to finish writing it.

Now that I’ve decided to work smarter instead of harder, the blog wrap post comes together over the course of a week, and is ready to post on Sunday with only five minutes of checking and editing.

In Conclusion –

How many of us take the time to encourage other bloggers on a regular basis, and let people know we enjoy their blogs and enjoy their work? A weekly wrap up gives you the chance to do that – if you don’t want to do it weekly, you might consider once every two weeks, or even once a month.

blogging tips, how to guides, internet, weekly wrap up, writing tips

Plane Safety – a must read for all.

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Have you ever wondered why they bother to have a safety demonstration on the plane at all? A lot of people think ok, if the plane is going to crash what is the point of knowing any of these things. They’d rather skip the safety demonstration all together – for two reasons, one being the “It will never happen to me” attitude and one being that they find it annoying, repetitive and intrusive.

If you knew what I knew, you’d know watching that safety demonstration very closely might actually save your life. Not every incident on a plane is fatal. Incidents on a plane can *become* fatal if people haven’t been paying attention to the safety demo. Here’s a few things I think you should know. They may not be things you *want* to know, they may scare you a little. However being scared might make you a survivor instead of a statistic.

First of all, you need to know about hypoxia. At sea level there’s plenty of oxygen in the air. As you go up into the atmosphere, two things happen – it becomes a LOT colder, and there is less oxygen. Where commercial planes generally fly is between 30,000-40,000 feet and they do this for a lot of technical reasons which I won’t bore you with here. They are able to do this because the cabin you are travelling in is pressurized.

The moment the plane doors shut, air is pumped into the cabin to increase the air pressure within the plane. That means you can safely breathe, and the air is kept warm, and the plane can safely fly at high altitude without killing you. You may notice you have to swallow in order to make your ears pop.

However in air travel, things can and do go wrong. If they did happen to go wrong, you need to know this – at 30,000 feet, you have approximately 45-75 seconds to get on oxygen before you lose consciousness and will be unable to put your mask on. At 40,000 feet, you have between 10-30 seconds to put your mask on.

The safety demonstrations try oh so gently to not scare you, but in effect what they do is take away any urgency you should feel. There have been times when the masks have fallen from the ceilings in commercial jets and the passengers just sat there looking at them. Nobody made an effort to put their mask on. Lucky them, because in those cases there wasn’t anything wrong with the plane, but they *could* have died if there had been. So, that makes safety lesson number one –

IF YOU SEE OXYGEN MASKS DROP DOWN IN THE CABIN, PUT ON THE MASK FIRST AND ASK QUESTIONS LATER.

It’s better to look a little silly than to be very dead, would we all agree?

So why would the masks drop down, I hear you ask? What’s going to be wrong with the plane? Best case scenario is that something is wrong with the planes cabin pressurization system. Worst case scenario is that there has been an explosive decompression of some kind. That could be anything from a small hole in the plane to the plane missing an entire section.

If there has been an explosive decompression, there will be a fine mist in the air for a short time, things will be flying around in the cabin. You may experience intense pain in your ears especially if you have a bad cold or flu the pain caused by this cannot be described, it will make it impossible to think. Anything or anyone not tied down is going to fly around and might even get pushed out through the hole. So that makes safety lesson number two –

KEEP YOUR SEATBELT FASTENED ALL THE TIME YOU ARE SEATED.

It’s just good sense to do that and not just because of the possibility of explosive decompression, there could be turbulence, anything can happen. I’ve seen people thrown out of their seats during *taxi* from the runway to the terminal because the plane had to brake suddenly. That could end in tears – or even a broken neck. Have you been on a plane and heard all that seatbelt un-doing right after the plane lands? So that makes safety lesson number three –

DO NOT UNDO YOUR SEATBELT UNTIL THE PLANE HAS STOPPED AND THE PILOT HAS TURNED OFF THE SEATBELT SIGN (unless you are being ordered to evacuate the aircraft by the flight attendants).

You’re not going anywhere until the plane stops anyway, having your seatbelt undone won’t make you get off the plane any faster, so why take the risk?

If something did happen, the amount of time you’d be in shock because you were in “it won’t happen to me mode” could be the amount of time it takes to kill you. Many passengers die because they sat in stunned silence while the plane filled with smoke. It’s almost like they gave up – they thought well, the plane is crashing, that’s it, I’m dead, there’s no way I can survive this. People can and do survive. Safety rule number four is important and simple.

BE PREPARED FOR ANYTHING. READ. EDUCATE YOURSELF ON PLANE SAFETY. KNOW WHAT CAN SAVE YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.

There are a lot of good aviation safety books out there. However there is one book which I believe should be on your bookshelf. It is called “Black Box” by Nicholas Faith. There are many excellent lessons to be learned from this book, even by non-aviation fans.

I know a fair bit about flying. I have absolutely no fear of it. What I fear is that the people around me aren’t going to have paid attention to the safety demonstrations, and they’re going to slow me down to the point I can’t get off the aircraft. Passengers have been known to try and collect their hand luggage in the event of an evacuation.

You know something? If you’re in front of me, and you’re trying to get your hand luggage out of the overhead locker, and we’ve been told to evacuate, I’m going to punch you, push you or KICK you, hard. I’m going to get you the F*CK out of my way, and I don’t care who you are or how important your stuff seems to you. You may be more interested in your laptop than saving your life, but I want to live, so get out of my way, get out of everyone else’s way, have some respect for the lives of others. Safety rule five therefore is –

IF TOLD TO EVACUATE, DO NOT DAWDLE. DO NOT BRING ANYTHING TO THE EXIT BUT YOURSELF. THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT WILL NEVER LET YOU TAKE IT OFF THE PLANE ANYWAY AND PASSENGERS MIGHT KILL YOU IF YOU GET IN THEIR WAY.

And PS – even if you don’t have travel insurance that covers everything you have on the plane, if your stuff is destroyed the airline will usually compensate you. And if you’re dead, you can’t use your stuff, so leave it where it is and get out of the aircraft. NOW.

I will leave you with this final thought and a few videos. On August the 22nd, 1985, a British Airtours Boeing 737-200 lined up for take off at Manchester airport. 130 passengers were on board. As the plane gained speed, there was a loud thump heard. The pilot thought a tyre had burst, so he aborted the take off, slowed the aircraft, and turned off the runway. He did not know the plane was actually on fire because parts of the engine had disintegrated and been thrown through the wing fuel tank. The evacuation was more difficult because most of the exits on the side of the plane that was on fire could not be used. 55 people died.

What surprised most people about this incident was that the plane never crashed. It never got off the ground at all. It was at an airport with an excellent fire fighting team who trained constantly and who arrived at the aircraft within moments, literally, of the fire being reported. This incident was one of the major factors in changing many things in aviation, from the materials used in building planes becoming less flammable to aisles and exits being made wider.

What does an evacuation of a big plane look like? Chaos really. This video shows the new Airbus A380 being evacuated. 873 people in 77 seconds. Can you imagine how much slower it would be if people were trying to get their stuff?
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gqWeJGwV_U]
Chuck Yeager talking about another pilot experiencing hypoxia and how he helped save the pilot’s life.

Air Force Pilot undergoing hypoxia training

Further reading on plane crashes and how to prepare for them and potentially survive them – (all are PDF, so be patient while your browser loads them)
Am I Alive? One flight attendant’s heart breaking story of what happened when the plane crashed. I recommend you read it but beware, it pulls no punches and is disturbing in some ways. Tissues may come in handy, it sure brought tears to my eyes.
Training Saves LivesAnother flight attendant’s story.
United Flight 11 Explosive decompression and quite a lot of missing plane as well as 9 missing passengers.

United Flight 232 A long read but well worth it. Captain Al Haynes is one person I greatly admire, and you’ll see why if you read that.

You should also check out my previous post – what not to wear on a plane.

plane safety, planes

Internet Safety Part 4 – Use BCC

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

From yesterday’s post, Em had a question –

What is your opinion of spam filters. My gmail one seems to work quite well and the spam doesn’t bother me because I don’t see it…

I’ve got about 40 gmail accounts actually. ;) Being a scambaiter, you tend to have a lot of email addresses. The spam stuff, like viagra and cialis and people trying to sell you stuff, gmail does reasonably well with. However, they do NOT do as well with the *scam* emails, and also phishing gets through on a regular basis.

You might not be getting much in the way of spam as yet, but if you have an email address which is anywhere out there on the internet, it will be coming to you as a surprise some time in the future. WHich leads me to an important point – *always* protect your email address by writing it like this – emailme at email dot com – mine you can see in the sidebar and it looks like this –

snoskred {at} gmail {dot} com

Here’s a screenshot from one of my email accounts which is on a scam blog. The people emailing it do not know it is on a scam blog because they use an email extractor program to get the addresses.

scamspam

The emails you see there arrived over the space of less than an hour. That account regularly receives around 40 emails per hour. That’s 960 emails a day. Can you imagine how this would mess up your inbox? ;)

For most people, a single gmail account with a spam filter might work just fine – until someone gives out your email address somewhere. It’ll start out being 3-4 spam emails a day, and keep going upwards until you want to throw things at people you’re getting so much of it. If you have one email account which you use for everything, it’s a real nightmare when that happens. And you would be surprised at whom is doing what with your email address as we speak.

I’ve done a lot of email warnings to scam victims over the years, and many times some of these people have decided I am their friend and added me to their forwards list. They then send me any “joke” or “inspirational” email that they stumble across during their interweb travels. The trouble is, they add all the email addresses as “cc” – carbon copy, which means me and everyone else who got the mail can see who it was sent to! That means, if a scammer or spammer gets their hands on it, they have a bunch of new targets to email.

So there’s the lesson for today – use BCC when you want to email to more than one person. *Blind* carbon copy – it means nobody else can see who you sent that mail to.

The reason I am suggesting the email plan rather than just one gmail account is because if you break it down into groups it is much less of a hassle when that account is compromised. I say when because it is highly likely to happen. :( Spam and Scam is getting worse, and there really isn’t much that can be done to stop it, so it is much better to be prepared. ;)

I hope that answers the question. :)

email safety, internet, Internet Safety, scams, spam, www safety

What not to wear.

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’m sure many of you heard of todays plane crash in Indonesia.

plane

It’s an unpleasant fact of life that sometimes, planes do fall out of the sky. Which is why anytime I go to get on one, I am constantly amazed at how unprepared people are for the possibility of what might happen. They ignore the safety briefing, don’t even bother to look for the nearest exit, and *worst* of all, wear things which are not appropriate for the occasion.

The reason I mention this is, I just saw footage of the crash scene with a woman clearly injured, trying to walk in heels and a mini-skirt. Not a good idea!

So, a few fashion don’ts for when you next fly..

nottowear1

This outfit will mean you have trouble getting to the exit door, which will mean those behind you might not make it to the door at all. Nice for street-walking (literally perhaps) but no good for flying. Heels will hinder your progress. Put them in the suitcase, don’t wear them in flight.

nottowear2

Pantihose! OH NO! Major plane fashion faux pas! The fibers will melt in a fire and stick to your skin, which is not a good look and certainly would cause a lot of pain. Just say no to pantyhose when flying.

nottowear3

Going on a beach holiday? Save the beach dressing for when you arrive. Wearing something like this on a plane will get you talked about, and more than likely a large percentage of burns to much of your body in the event of a crash. Not a wise choice.

Leave your flip flops in your luggage, because in the *very rare but occasionally it does happen* instance that you have to traverse broken metal and things on fire, your feet will appreciate that you chose to wear a real pair of shoes.

So what should you wear?

Covered, closed, comfortable shoes, preferably leather. I like Doc Martens myself.

Comfortable pants which are easy to move in.

No flammable fabrics – though all fabrics will become flammable in the kinds of fires you will see in planes, some fabrics are more likely to catch fire than others.

Denim jeans (not too tight, don’t restrict your movement) is the better choice.

A long sleeve shirt to protect your arms from burns. Wool is one of the least flammable materials. Cotton is a good choice too.

The idea is, to get out of the plane before you have to deal with the fire. If you are wearing sensible clothes which you can move in, its more likely you’ll be able to manage this task. Knowing where the nearest exits are will also help. But if you are injured and can’t move, wearing clothes that will protect you will be a good idea too.

Anyway, that’s just a few thoughts you might want to consider when next choosing what to wear when you fly.

Save the fashion for the catwalk, put it in your suitcase.

When you fly, dress to survive.

Even though 99.9% of flights make it safely to their destination, if your flight happens to be one where you do need to evacuate, you will appreciate dressing to survive instead of dressing for fashion.

Fashion, life lessons, plane safety, things to remember, what not to do

A little plane stuff.

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

The airliners.net picture of the day box which I recently added to the sidebar has this shot as today’s picture of the day. What a gorgeous picture. It might show some of the non-plane-enthusiast people reading this just what the attraction is. ;) The 747 is my favourite plane.

I’m re-reading Black Box at the moment and something that I always find interesting is a lot of plane crashes have between 1-10 people who survive when nobody else does. One such accident was the worst single plane accident ever – JAL 123 – which involved a special version of the Boeing 747 that was made specifically for Japan’s short haul flights between airports. It carried 524 people – a normal 747 usually carries less than 417 passengers. The plane struck Mount Fuji and impacted the mountain, destroying 3,000 trees, and yet 4 people survived it. One of them was an off duty JAL stewardess who was sitting right at the back of the plane.

Another amazing story of survival was – AA 965 – where four people and a dog in the cargo compartment survived after the plane impacted with a mountain near Cali in Columbia. The dog was re-named “Milagro” for miracle.

A very old story of survival was the Stinson crash in 1937. Three men survived but one died while walking to get help.

Now to change topic slightly and most of these links are to PDF files so don’t worry when your computer does that stop and think thing ;) – If you think flight attendants are brainless drink servers, you might want to read this but be warned it is a slightly graphic tale. You can also read this – training does save lives. And finally, before you travel anywhere again, this article tells you why you should NEVER EVER ignore the safety demonstration.

plane safety

If you have a little spare time

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

You might want to read this very interesting transcript of a speech given by Captain Al Haynes. The crash at Sioux City (more info here and here) seemed not survivable when you saw it happen however thanks to a lot of preparation and the skill of the crew and a DC-10 instructor pilot who happened to be a passenger on the flight, 184 passengers and 10 crew members survived.

I had the strangest dream last night – I had this lizard which was injured and I had found it and healed it’s injuries, and I was supposed to make it this soup of carrots, lettuce and other fruits and vegetables but I couldn’t find any fruit and veg at the supermarket. Very odd.

dreams, plane safety, planes