Wiki Loves Monuments UK competition

Wikimedia UK is supporting the Wiki Loves Monuments competition, where across the globe (and in the UK for the first time this year) in September people take photos of the world's historic monuments and upload them to Wikimedia UK.  Wikimedia UK, if you're not aware, exists to help collect and distribute freely available knowledge, and is linked with Wikipedia.

The competition is really straightforward, on the website they give you a very short guide as to what to do and what monuments they accept photos of, and then you go off, get some decent photos, and upload them with a bit of a description!  Nice and simple.  If you do have a go do read the guide, common photo errors, and the rules, I fell foul of not reading the photo errors before I went out and a lot of the photos I took had a lovely big church sign in it, with lots of phone numbers and information on there which causes problems. Must try harder in future!

My first uploaded picture is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Andrews_Church,_Kirk_Ella.JPG - to get this picture it was a bit tricky, as St Andrews Church in Kirk Ella is surrounded by lovely trees, which are great but get in the way when taking photographs.  The only way I could get a shot was by laying on the path in front of the church, taking the photo there, and breathing in so that my belly didn't get in the way!  (Bit of a subtle hint for myself to get some exercise - which the Pedometer Challenge I'm doing shortly should help with!)

Anyhow, that's my first picture, but I hope to be getting a lot more up before the end of September!  If you're getting involved do let me know what photos you're getting!

I'm nearly ready!

For anyone that runs their own website, today I found a really cool tool for you.  Nibbler carries out an automated free test of your site, and tells you basically how good it is - it covers technical specs, if the website has been tweeted about, and basically gives you some guide as to what you should work on to make your site better.

If you want to see the report for my blog it's here.  One of the cool things about the checker is that it gives you "badges", like achievements in games, good and bad ones.  They even run competitions sometimes to get bizarre badges.

Which is why I'm about to say "Ni! This is a dead parrot! Brian!"

And deoxyribonucleic acid.

(I'm really pleased I wrote that right - my dad used to be an industrial chemist and I wouldn't want to have misspelt a chemical!)

Read their blog too, it's really cool. Almost as good as mine! :)

Anyway, so far I've got a score of 5.3 out of 10 for my blog, 885 points, and 12 badges, including W3C Rebel (basically my blog is so bad at complying with web code it's James Dean) and Ink Waster (I'm missing a print style sheet apparently - so don't print my blog or bad things will apparently happen).  It promises to be very addictive as I try to fiddle with stuff to increase my score.

So apart from that, I've nearly got my stuff together to do my Guild synopsis video on Saturday.  No details yet though, you'll have to wait until you see the video.

One thing though I'd really appreciate - when I do post the video, I'll tell you where it is and all that.  It'd be a big help to me if you just watched the video, and maybe Liked it if you've got a YouTube account (or a Google account, they're the same thing), I'd really appreciate it.

Bye for now!