Today's task is from the August 30th entry. I have to EXPLORE A SOCIAL MEDIA SITE.

I choose Facebook. I have a Facebook profile, you know. I have no idea what it's for. Maybe I can work it out.

Um, not really. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to post. I've updated my profile, but why should anyone care, in the absence of any actual work to judge me on? Let's have a look in the Networks section.

Well, there's a list of places in America. I suppose I could hunt for Bristol UK, but I decide to go to Workplaces instead.

And there's a category called Alien Technology. Now I understand. The whole thing is a front. A pointless facade designed to distract the foolish, and lurking within it the Area 51 of the Internet. I bet most people can't even see it, but the Men in Black recognised my IP address and thought this was their long-desired opportunity to recruit me. Not you, me. For my outstanding special qualities.

Sorry, more people must join this network before a page can be created for it. You don't seriously think that would deter me. I click on Join this network.

They demand my email address. A reasonable precaution. I add it. There was an error joining the netwok. Please enter a valid email for the network. I try all my email adresses, and each one is deemed unworthy.

The bastards. I was ready. Ready to represent humanity at the highest level. Damned elitists. I click the Back button, my mouse hand heavy with gravity's inevitable tug. I briefly consider joining All American Asphalt, but the prospect of earthly glory has turned to ashes in my mouth.

I log out. And now I'm back here, with all of you, and I begin to see. ProBlogger understands the creative process, and knows how one has to suffer to achieve one's best work. By reminding me so painfully of my inadequacies, he inspires me to transcend them.

I'm grateful, really I am. Have you ever heard the old saw about gratitude? Apparently the Japanese have nine words for it, each expressing a different degree of resentment.

Today's task is from the August 29th entry. I have to EMAIL A BLOGGER THAT LINKED TO ME TO SAY THANKS. So it's off to good old Technorati to see who's been writing about me.

You haven't been writing about me, have you? Loads of you have put me in your blogroll, though, so thanks for that. From the list of people who have linked to me, I chose The Bad Idea Blog. He doesn't show his email address, which means I don't have to send him an email. Result!

I'll add a comment, though. He writes interestingly about the meaning of meaning. One of the things which consistently annoys me about the religious is the way they think they've somehow cornered the market on the meaning of life. Even the ostensibly 'moderate' ones (presumably the ones who think only the nice voices in their head are real) still do this.

Bad simply points out that the whole idea of meaning is empty when considered in the abstract, and that you can't say that anything means something without having someone that it means something to. Straightforward enough one might have thought, but if you want to fight for secularism you can't stand on ceremony, you have to roll up your sleeves and restate the bleeding obvious over and over again until all the confounders of the bleeding obvious just fuck off.

Amazingly, this hasn't happened yet, but me, Bad and the others like us still live in hope. Just to make it clear, the correct answer to the question what is the meaning of life? is shut up you tart.

Today's task is from the August 28th entry. I have to come up with a MISSION STATEMENT for my blog.

Barman, two foaming pints of your finest bile. I have to tip them all over the whole idea of a mission statement. Bullshit management speak, spreading through the land like mould through a peach. How long before the Internet Management Committee starts demanding Record of Achievement Sheets from me? And don't you laugh, you'll all have to do evaluation forms.

Apparently, though, all I have to do is analyse why I blog. That's easy.

I blog because in here, the jagged edges and static electricity which comprise the atomic building blocks of the actual world reduce to regular polyhedrons, and everything is calm and clear. I like to show off. I like to explain things. I like to string phrases together. I like to say the things I think are funny. In here (in my mind, this is a place), I can do all of those things without having to negotiate them, and without having to worry what you all think.

What do you all think?

The Institute for Amphibian Biology in Japan have come up with a genetically engineered transparent frog!

Apparently this helps research in the same way that see-through oven doors help cooking. Judging by the picture, it looks like frogs are made of skin and peppercorns.

The Institute that came up with this mutated freak is based in Hiroshima. I wonder where they get their ideas from?

Today's task is from the August 27th entry. I have to FIND A SPONSOR FOR MY BLOG.

Frankly, it's a little hard to imagine why any company might want to sponsor me. It's not like I'm going to write nicely about their products. Oh, I'd start with the best intentions. I'd praise their doughnuts to the skies, and the first backhanded compliment that came to mind might seem safe enough, like the court jester who's allowed to make jokes about the king. Unfortunately, backhanded compliments lead to sly digs, and sly digs are the gateway to altogether harder material. Before you knew it it would be all fuck these doughnuts in the arse, and that would be the end of my glittering commercial career.

So instead of doing that, I'm going to ask your advice about adverts on my new project. I've finally solved the mindbending technical problem that is Google Ads, but I'm thinking of ways to make more than 3.7 pence a month, and I thought local advertising might be the way to go.

I'm going to be doing more Bristol material, and I thought I might get some joy from advertising local services - restaurants, etc, and combining this with reviews of them. I thought that it would be interesting to try and develop a different charging system, where instead of charging per click, I charged per customer generated. So, if I bring in a 5 person booking for your restaurant, you pay me 50p per customer, which makes £2.50. If I never bring you a single customer, you never pay me any money, so there is no element of risk for the business.

The problem is that I have to identify customers who come to the restaurant (or whatever) through my site, in a way that both I and the advertiser can accept as honest. I need to come up with a mechanism which makes this work, so I'm turning to you, my loyal public. Any ideas?

You may have seen the BBC website claiming that Needles are best for back pain. They were writing about some German research suggesting that acupuncture can help back pain sufferers who are unresponsive to normal treatment. This is Bad Science on the subject, and this is the press release.

They've edited the BBC article since they first published it, but if you'd gone by the original you'd have had to read halfway down before you found out that the research also showed that patients subjected to 'fake' acupuncture, in which all the rituals of acupuncture are followed but the needles are stuck in all the wrong places (ouch!), did nearly as well. In fact, 47.6% reported an improvement after 'real' acupuncture, 44.2 per cent after the fake treatment and 27.4 per cent after conventional treatment only.

In a total sample of 1162, that isn't enough to establish a statistically significant result. This is especially true when you remember that by definition the people applying the needles knew which treatment they were administering, so it wasn't a proper double blind test.

This is just one piece of research, but it does suggest that acupuncture has an effect, but that that effect is either a placebo or simply the result of sticking needles in people randomly, and nothing to do with meridians. In further breaking news, a survey of one respondent revealed that ley lines were horse shit, fit only for dumbfuck hippies with nothing better to do. Honestly guys, if you must have intangible networks there is such a thing as the Internet.

Incidentally, the Placebo used to be the vespers sung for the dead. In Latin, placebo means I will please. Vespers for the dead began Placebo Domino in regione vivorum, meaning I will please the Lord in the land of the living, and were referred to as the Placebo, in the same way as you might speak of the Te Deum or the Ave Maria. Other English words from the same root are placid, placate, placable and ultimately please.

From this context, a placebo also came to mean someone who went to funerals of people they didn't know but pretended to, so they could get a free meal. Turns out there is such a thing as being too interested in food.

Today's task is from the August 26th entry. I have to LINK UP TO A COMPETITOR.

I remember the first time I had a blog, my friend Jeff gave me the best blogging advice I ever had. He said that to make waves on the Internet you have to whore yourself about. Go to other people's sites, comment, debate, scatter your URL through the cybersphere. So I don't really need to be told to do this now, and I'm not sure it's that different from day seven (comment on a blog you've never commented on before), or any of the other days where I'm supposed to interact.

Still, I'm hardly going to falter now, with just a few days left. So here's my link. It's to Bug Girl.

Bug girl is an entomologist, as you might expect, and you may remember the spiders that ate Texas, which I wrote about as Spiders can be friends too. Did you notice how I didn't just say here? I'm learning.

She also has the Minuscule movie series. And a category called Ranting - general. You can't knock a blog which sorts by the level of rantiness.

So go there and comment. Let her bathe in the light of the love that you give me. Not all of it. I still want most of it. Enough to arouse, but not enough to satiate. What am I talking about? As if the need for blog love could ever be satiated.

Today's task is from the August 25th entry. I have to GO SHOPPING AND IMPROVE MY BLOG.

I feared it might be asking me to buy blog-related products online, but no, he really wants me to go to the mall. Yes, the physical mall, in physical space. Is cyberspace curved, by the way?

Once there, I'm supposed to wander round for thirty minutes, noting down things like what people are buying and why, how retailers are attracting them, what colours are in fashion, and so on. Then I need to go get a coffee (he's constantly forcing coffee down my throat), read through my notes and work out ways to apply it all to my blogging.

Well, I've been to the mall before, so I think I might explore the behaviour of shoppers through the power of memory. Hmm, let's see. Oh yes, it's all coming back to me now.

People are buying stupid and pointless things. Their motivation is that they are too stupid to use the Internet, and retailers prey on them like Venus fly traps, luring them in with the promise of sticky treats before dissolving their flesh and turning the resulting stringy goo into cellulose and chlorophyll. The most popular colours are aquamarine and pus.

I can apply this to my blog by stealing your souls and selling them back to you at 20% pa. From now on, each post will contain up to 5000 words, of which one in ten will be emoticons, and every word will be delivered to your home at no extra cost.

Right, that's enough better blogging. We wouldn't want to attain perfection six days too soon, would we? Time to feast on grilled bread, garnished with my own bile.

Today's task is from the August 24th entry. I have to DO A SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION AUDIT ON MY BLOG. In other words, I have to edit my blog so Google loves me.

And ProBlogger says some interesting and useful things. Apparently, instead of just using the word here for a link, like I normally do, you should select text which reflects the meaning of it. For instance, rather than And before you take me to task for my awful ways, theres an grandiloquent defence of them here, I should be saying And before ... here is my take on blogiquette. The same thing applies to head tags - tags which attach to text which is formatted in heading style - and image tags.

And you should always be sneaking in links to your own stuff. Just like I did there. Did you notice?

If you have control over your title tags (the text that appears on the title bar at the top), do bear in mind that it's the title tags that people see in hit lists. For instance, a Wikipedia title tag says [Topic] - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, so every link is like a little vision statement in itself.

Not that I've got that kind of control over this blog. Still, it's a blessing just to be back in again.

Today's task is from the August 23rd entry. I have to GO ON A DEAD LINK HUNT.

Done. Boring.

Today's task is from the August 22nd entry. I have to CATCH NEW READERS UP ON THE BASICS OF MY BLOG.

When I first started seven months ago, it was nearly all about religion. I'm against it, you see, and I wanted to tell the world. Of the first twenty posts, most of them are polemical. In the early days, if my blog was a body part, it would have been a spleen.

After that first great blasphemous splurge, I remembered there were other subjects in the world. Having started at the Richard Dawkins website, that naturally led me into other science sites, in particular the Science Blogs, so I started writing about the wonderful things in there. Being on the Internet a lot, I naturally found myself thinking about it, and you'll find several sparkling posts on that subject. I'm also keen on sports, especially soccer, and I was soon baffling my American readers with phrases like promotion chase and without playing the national anthem.

A big hug for all my readers in the US, by the way. You may be aware that whenever you meet a Canadian in Europe, the first thing they do is mention they're Canadian, before you have time to register their accent and assume they're American. Irish people, of course, are equally quick to establish that they're not British, so from one citizen of a pariah nation to another, welcome. Whilst of course understanding the Canadian and Irish position, we don't hold with such tawdry bigotries at the Backlash. In here, you are judged solely on the pungency of your scabrous wit.

I say we, for many great minds are wont to pay us a visit. If commenters give you a URL, it's very often worth a click.

You'll be getting the hang of it by now. Never use five words when twenty are available, and every word labelled archaic in the dictionary is worth three normal ones. If you know Latin you'll find I sometimes plant little treats for you, which might unfortunately get lost when they're borne across. Horribly elitist of me, but then I don't write this to be nice.

I don't write it to be nasty either, you understand, but you need to know that I'm not here for the social responsibility. I get enough of that in my actual life. This isn't me, this is me-on-the-Internet.

Welcome, and enjoy. If you scroll down to the Tags, you will observe that the main categories appear at the top, and begin with a #.

I'm back in!

I've been locked out, for technical reasons too boring to explain. Yes, there are things so boring even I won't explain them.

And from looking at my stats, you've all kept coming by anyway. Like Lassie, you just couldn't accept I was gone. I'm touched, really. Really.

And I've been scribbing away, here at my end of the bargain. I've got four more entries on the better blog challenge for you. Yes I know you've been desperate to know what's coming up. They'll be turning up in order over the next few hours.

God, it's a relief to be back. I was almost reduced to talking to the neighbours.

Today's task is from the August 21st entry. I have to MAKE A READER FAMOUS.

Do you want to be famous? asks ProBlogger. Do you want to be noticed? Do you want people to know who you are? Do you want to have more influence?

Oh yes. Not recognisable in the street, you understand. But famous on the Internet. Famous like Belle de Jour. Well, not quite. Actually, that would be great, a voluptuous, sleazy fame, the kind that calls for no less a figure than Billie Piper to get involved, but age, girth and gender rule it out for me in our narrow, image-obsessed world.

But the kind of famous where I post a comment somewhere and thousands of people think 'oh yes, I like his stuff'. That would be nice. What do I mean, nice? I dunno about arms, but I'd give a finger or two. The little finger on my right hand, you can have that one. How often do you need to type a semi-colon? Not the left one, or I wouldn't be able to say I was compiling an aardvark quiz, but the right one is Satan's whenever he wants it. So just the one finger then. And a thumb. Justonethumb,oritwouldallbelikethis. You get the idea. As if to emphasise my point, Wondermark has just dropped into my RSS with this.

So ProBlogger knows my soul, and lays bare my secret need. Then he suggests I fulfil it - for somebody else. Is this some kind of Zen training or what?

Still, he's right. Just this once, I must rise above my sordid cravings and do the noble thing, with no thought of reward, just because I can. Marcus Aurelius would be proud.

So who to pick? I pick sallyontour. She clearly misses Bristol, and ought to think about moving back if you ask me. She describes herself as having moved to 'a new city', and elsewhere as being in the 'West Midlands'. I deduce that she lives in Coventry or Birmingham. I grew up near Coventry, and for the first time in my life, Sally, I'd like to say that I hope you live in Birmingham. And that's not something you'd normally wish on any human being.

As many of you know it's just been International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and she writes very interestingly on the subject of piracy in Bristol. The Llandoger Trow, a Bristol pub, is often said to be the source of the Black Dog in Treasure Island. Apparently Llandoger is a Welsh town just over the Severn bridge, and a trow is a ferry. You learn something every day. She comes down in favour of the Hole in the Wall as a more likely source though.

So, there you go. Yes, there you go. I want to make her famous, and I'm depending on you. It's a modest kind of fame I offer, frankly, but it's the best I can do. Give her the old VCS. Visit, comment, subscribe.

And me. VCS me harder, do it until your batteries are flat. And mine are full.

Today's task is from the August 20th entry. I have to RUN A READER SURVEY ON MY BLOG.

I'm mainly interested in your opinion on the content. I know many of you will want to say there aren't enough pictures or video, but I'm addressing this in my imminent new project.

In particular, I want to know which posts worked and which didn't. Which bits did you think were funny, what do you think about the serious bits, when was I trying to be funny but sucked? Be blunt.

Also, tell me how you got here. Did you come through a comment I left on another blog? Did you Google something I'd tagged? Was it a post somewhere else?

So, let's see if we can make this the longest comments stream in the history of this blog. Yes that's right, I'm looking for eight of you to say something.

Honey bees have many natural enemies, but probably the worst are hornets, who invade their nests, kill them and haul their bodies home to feed their young. You might think this was a high risk strategy for the hornet, but fortunately for them their skin (chitin) is so thick bee stings bounce off them like British shells off a Tiger tank. Once a hornet exits a bee's nest, it tags it with a pheromone which attracts the attention of its friends. Packs of vicious gangland hornets turn up, and make repeated round trips to slaughter bees and lug the fresh corpses back home for butchery, dismemberment and dinner. It's kind of like if Dennis Nilsen ran Parcelforce.

So you'd expect bees to have evolved some kind of defence, and damn their little hairy knees if they haven't come up with something brilliant. They mob hornets, packing them in tightly with their bodies, and vibrate. The resulting friction generates so much heat the hornets are frottaged to death. I never knew a bit of rubbing could be so dangerous, and I can think of a few people who need to watch their step on club night.

The method works fine in the temperate zone, but your equatorial hornet is too tolerant of heat for this to work. In these areas, bees use a similar strategy, but focus on the hornet's abdomen. Although insects breathe through their skin, and have no lungs, hornets need to be able to move their abdomens to do this, and by smothering their tummies the bees are able to suffocate and kill them.

Thanks to the Neurophilosophy blog for this story, which is here. There's also a short video, for those of you who like a little bee on hornet action.

Today's task is from the August 19th entry. I have to RESPOND TO COMMENTS ON MY BLOG.

I almost didn’t publish this because it’s so basic, says ProBlogger, and I can only agree. I often do respond anyway, just to get a conversation going. It's a way to echo the words of the great Apu - "Thank you, come again".

Those of you who have your own site - blogging, Flickr, whatever - will know that when you post a comment you can add your URL in the relevant box, and then when people read your comment on my site they can come through to yours just by clicking on your name.

I often try to add a pithy little paragraph somewhere else, entirely as a lure to trap the unwary in here. Anyone wanting to use my blog for similar purposes is heartily encouraged. Remember, all blogs come with microscopic punctures in them. They function hour by hour, but you have to keep inflating them or they go flat surprisingly quickly. It's all 'what have you done for me lately' on the Internet. it doesn't matter how many bastions your ancestors stormed in 1643, if you're not doing it today they might not come back tomorrow.

Another tip - write posts with the word fuck in the title. You'd be surprised at the spike in your stats.

Thanks for this go to Nick Hornby, writing in the Guardian here.

Who was the first person to use the word fuck on British TV? Many of you will know that it was Kenneth Tynan, well known theatrical impresario and bottom spanker, on November 13 1965. He used it in verbal quotation marks in a programme on censorship. His actual words were I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck' would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.

His optimism proved misplaced, and it was years before he was allowed back on the BBC again. These days, of course, their policy is a little subtler.

Mary Whitehouse wrote a letter of complaint to the Queen, suggesting that Tynan should have his bottom spanked. She wasn't at the time aware of his interest in such things, and intended it as a punishment rather than a reward, but it's still hard to see why it might be the Queen's job to organise it. Now that she's dead and can't blight the life of the nation any more, it's almost possible to feel nostalgic for such an innocent age. You could imagine casting her as a bit part in a re-enactment of scenes from British history, laid on at Warwick Castle for the tourists.

Almost nostalgic, but of course not quite. I still remember the blasphemy trial of 1976, and when I imagine her desiccated remains descending into the grave it could only ever be with pleasure. We get to bury all the old tryrants in the end - Thatcher must be soon now.

And the second TV fuck? Now you're struggling. It was Peregrine Worsthorne, in 1973. Yes, I was surprised. It's hard now to understand the fuss, but the owner of the Daily Telegraph was so offended, he decided not to make Worsthorne editor.

You'll all remember the third. Glenn Matlock on the Bill Grundy show in 1977, talking about what the Sex Pistols had done with their money - "We've fucking spent it, haven't we?" It was an important first - the first time anyone said fuck on British TV without having an Oxbridge degree. Turbulent times, of blessed memory in this sanitised age.

Today's task is from the August 18th entry. I have to CREATE A SNEEZE PAGE AND PROPEL READERS DEEP WITHIN MY BLOG.

A sneeze page (the graphic ProBlogger provides is frankly a little unnecessary) is a list of things you've written in the past that you're quite proud of.

Well, I'm always at my best when I'm offered a sitting target, and I did enjoy writing this when Conservapaedia first came out. From my longer anti-religious rants, I've picked this one. Oh yes, and this one. And I like to be unpleasant about the Pope. Although I'd have to go some to be as unpleasant as he is about the rest of us.

I'm keen on science, so keen it can actually make me come. Because I know so little about it, I'm normally reduced to stealing it from other people's sites. I'm also an enthusiast for the space program. And for sheer self-indulgent wallowing in meaningless numbers, there was my Dave Gorman moment.

I also like reporting polls, mainly as an opportunity to express the cruelty and smugness I'm forced to control in my actual life.

I liked the central conceit in this piece, although I'm not sure any of you did. There may be a reason why they call them conceits. Here is another one where my pleasure and your indifference balanced each other precisely. I liked it, and precisely one of you did.

This, on the other hand, was a slight piece which got more response than I'd expected. You never can tell.

If you want sport, this is the blog what I wrote for the soccer World Cup last year, and this is my favourite piece from it.

And before you take me to task for my awful ways, there's an grandiloquent defence of them here.

In two days time, I have to do a reader survey. I'll be wanting to know whether you liked the bits I liked, or definitely not.

Today's task is from the August 17th entry. I have to do something so entirely pointless I refuse to even contemplate working out what the hell it means.

Sorry to waste your time.

Today's task is from the August 16th entry. I have to CREATE A HEAT MAP OF WHERE READERS CLICK ON MY BLOG.

This requires that I embed a chunk of Java script in my blog. As I am unable to do this, he might just as usefully have asked me to rise up on my dorsal fins and clap my ventral ones until someone threw me a fish. Instead of today's task, then, this is how my tags work.

They're on the right hand side of my blog, under the bloglists. The number indicates how many times I've used each one. The tag dadaist disciplinary techniques, for instance, has been used once. If you click on it, you can see the piece, which has the title Freddie - a suggestion. To go back to the main blog, just click on the heading The Secular Backlash at the top.

You can find something similar on most blogs. My innovation, though, is to use a # on tags that I want to treat as a category. This means that the most common themes are all listed at the top, as # comes before A in the alphabet. This is very clever and not anally retentive in any way, so you can stop your snickering right now. Especially you at the back there, in Frome.

Meanwhile, Watford scored twice in the last ten minutes against Southampton, to steal top place in the Championship from its rightful owners. Apart from anything else, they're making the division less alphabetical. I'm sure Barnsley and Blackpool fans would want to join me in condemning this, although West Brom fans may not understand.

In fact, it would be interesting to run a simulation to see how long it took before the alphabetical principle put them in the Ryman League along with Wolves, while Arsenal beat Aston Villa to the last Champions League slot. The League champions? Accrington Stanley, every year. Bristol City would be roughly where they were, but every year we'd finish (just) above Rovers. I'm liking it more and more.

Have a look at this link here. Do it now, or before three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Can you see who's top? Can you? Is it a team with Rovers in their name? I don't believe it is.

No, it's the Championship's natural leaders, Bristol City. Coventry were top this morning, but then we dropped in, scored three and leapfrogged them. Ribbit. To quote Dylan Moran on the subject of crap teams, "[Coventry], [Coventry], you are shit, and your girlfriends are all miserable and unsatisfied". It doesn't scan, but it's true. He actually said it about Millwall, but it's true either way.

I'm sorry for my mate Martin, though, proud owner of a Coventry season ticket. I imagined him sat there watching it and thinking "Oh well, at least Jon will be happy". I know from personal experience how little that kind of thought helps.

And have a look at this. Who's second from bottom? Leeds United. Why's that cause for celebration for Leeds fans? Have a look at their stats column. That's right, six wins from six games, no draws, no losses, but only three points. They were deducted fifteen points at the beginning of the season for going bankrupt, but their first five wins cleared that. After seeing off Bristol's charity team last night, they're now into positive figures. They're just two points from getting out of the relegation zone, six points from the playoff places, and thirteen from the top of the table.

in the predictable division with the superstars, meanwhile, guess who the top four are? It's enough to drive Sean to his first post this month. Never mind, Ronald Koeman will be along soon.

Today's task is from the August 15th entry. I have to STICKIFY MY BLOG.

Unconnected with the trapping of insects, this task boils down to getting people to come back, by editing your most popular posts to include a reminder about RSS options.

Unfortunately I can't tell which posts are most read, so I'm just going to tell you all about RSS generally instead. Those of you who already use it can stop reading now. I'll do you something about football later to make up for it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a way of finding out when there's new stuff on the websites you go to regularly. I use Google Reader, which you can sign up for here.

Once you've filled in the form and registered, you can start adding sites to your list. Let's start with mine. Oh, yes. Have it, or some similar expression.

Scroll down until you can see the heading Syndicate this blog. Under RSS 2.0, click on Posts. When the next page comes up, click on Add to Google Reader.

You've come through to your new Google Reader page, where you can see that my last ten posts are listed. Great, aren't they? If you've read them already, click on Mark all as read. If not, just scroll down through them. To open several in a row on separate pages, just right-click and choose Open in new tab or Open in new window, depending on what browser you're using. Incidentally, if you're still using Internet Explorer you can download Firefox here, and it's loads better.

If you're using Firefox already, instead of rlght-clicking, just click with the wheel of the mouse. This opens the link in a new tab straight away. I didn't know that until recently (thanks Jeff), and it makes the whole thing much smoother. If you've got a few posts to read, you can just scroll down through them, wheel-clicking as you go.

The Feed settings button in the top right allows you to make folders for your feeds, which is useful when you've got a few. I'm on about fifty at the moment, but it goes up all the time. You can also rename feeds, and delete them if they get on your nerves.

If you want to follow everyone else's bons mots as well as mine, just go back to my website and repeat for comments, rather than posts. If you have your own blog, this is obviously rather useful.

As well as blogs, you can pick up regular feeds from other sites. Some of my friends have Flickr pages, so I've added their RSS, and it tells me when they've put new pictures up. I also get stuff from the BBC site, including the weather and the science new stories.

Now, bookmark your Google Reader page before you forget. I use mine as my home page, which works very well.

This was a public service broadcast, brought to you by the Department of Ulterior Motives. Apologies to the large number of you who learnt precisely nothing.

Today's task is from the August 2nd entry, and we're now back in order again. I have to RUN A FIRST TIME READER AUDIT