John Walker's Electronic House

Part of rebuilding the site has involved playing around with new WordPress plugins and other such hideously geeky frippery. The most exciting part has been trying to find a statistics pack that will indulge the ego in every desired manner.

A doffed hat of respect to WP-ShortStat, for being extra-double-fun, and showing nearly everything one could ever want to know, all in one window. This has led to Jim’s, Kieron’s and my discovering that we’re actually far more popular than the evil lying liars at rubbish-don’t-ever-use-it Extreme Tracking had ever let us believe. We’re great. About three times as great as previously believed.

But I am greatest of us all, despite possessing only a fraction of their fame and popularity, because I hacked the php of the plugin to tell us even more fascinating information about how damned loved and handsome we really are. I’m enormously proud of this achievement, knowing absolutely nothing of php, nor indeed any programming language beyond how to make the border flash while stringing swearwords down the screen in Spectrum BASIC. Perhaps the so-called gifts of the Holy Spirit have finally caught up with the times, and rather than causing pointless, self-indulgent, incoherent babbling at the front of cold buildings, ‘tongues’ has allowed me to understand words of any programming language. Like a modern day Peter, I shall gather the crowds of oddly smelling programmers around me, and speak unto them words of truth in mySQL, PERL, C++, PHP and XML, and they will take my message to the massives. However it occurred, whether by divine intervention, or my own inherent awesomeness, I managed to get the thing to report unique hits in the weekly box, rather than non-unique. Yes, to your knees, mortals.

However, my own brilliance could not have been quite as utterly brilliant as it currently is, were it not for the help of some slightly less brilliant people. Richard Cobbett was his usual astonishingly patient and heroic self as I whinged and complained at him while he was working, calmly fixing things that I don’t begin or end to understand. And Martin Coxall was a statue of marvellousness, leaping in to rescue me from server-level damage, and rewriting the rest of the internet until it was compatible with my site.

To these men I raise a glass of orange squash, and toast their genius.