The Chuckle Brothers are a very popular traffic source, with such keywords as:

“chuckle brothers father and son sex show”

and

“is barry chuckle really dead”

“directgov crap” gives us an insight into the impotent rage one person feels against government websites.

I get a noticeable amount of traffic for “mrs robinson jokes” which baffles me, because I can’t remember ever posting about Mrs. Robinson, or jokes.

People still have opinions on the student loan company…

“sudent loans company is shit”

“student loans company are useless”

“student loans company lost payments”

My favourite search term of the month has to be “zoe is a chuckle brother”. HOW DID THEY KNOW?!

Talking to friends who’ve bought premium themes however, it’s not always plain sailing. Like any pre-made system there are limitations to any theme. Say you buy a theme which does everything EXCEPT one thing, which you then have to code in/hack yourself. Or say the standard of coding is okay but not perfect – there’s no objective grading method so although premium themes from places like Themeforest are meant to be good, what you get really depends on the ability of whoever coded them. You buy on trust.

My partner in crime Frog has a new speciality – template themes specifically built for online portfolios. Say you’re a web designer wanting to show off your work – what better way than to have a Wordpress (or Joomla, or whatever) site and template it up? Okay, web designers may be able to design their own portfolios but turning them into templates is a different matter entirely. With a free or premium template you still get a good-looking site that lets you present your work – and your work is the important bit of your portfolio after all!

For other creatives like graphic designers, photographers, even script-writers or film-makers who want to upload videos, a portfolio theme is a really cool idea. So many people want to use a free CMS but can’t get their work to look pretty – well, a portfolio theme is designed to show off your work

FrogsThemes.com not only gives away free wordpress portfolio templates, there are premium options too, and in the coming weeks there’ll be tutorials on PSDs, plugin recommendations and everything you need to make an awesome portfolio in Wordpress, Joomla and any other CMS you can think of. There’s also a Newsletter so you can get the latest tips and tricks in your inbox for some geeky designer reading.

To celebrate the launch, FrogsThemes is giving away Foliogrid, a Wordpress theme for design portfolios that gives you a stupendously sexy blank canvas to display your work.

Hooray for free themes! Hooray for FrogsThemes!

Thanks to Geekologie.

Edit: Just noticed the Twitter handle at the bottom of the ad – someone’s going to get a lot of new followers!

I could….

– Write an opinion about each suggest. To fit in with the spirit of the site this should be really sarcastic, possibly offensive but always tongue-in-cheek. This may help to generate discussion, but unfortunately, as the comment thread on this post shows, some people don’t really get what the site is all about.

– Have some sort of voting plugin to encourage more interaction. The vast majority of visitors don’t leave comments, but clicking a “I like this” button takes a lot less effort.

– Have more obvious social buttons. There are social buttons at the moment but I doubt anyone uses them. Maybe a huge “Stumble This!” would work better.

– Have a Facebook group. This would take quite a bit more upkeep – I mean, you have to get people to join, get them to add content, etc etc. I barely even use Facebook any more so this would be difficult for me.

– Utilise Twitter more. There is a Suggestoftheday Twitter account but it’s following….erm…me and Frog. I do use Twitter but to be honest, I’m at work all day so maintaining another Twitter account would again be difficult. Unless I just made an effort to check it every few days…

– Make money off it. There are some poorly-targeted ads on the site at the moment…(how do you target adverts to such a random site anyway?) Unless I went for something like Firebox affiliate ads which, assuming all my visitors are the kind of people who use Firebox, may work better. Because the site is so random and, well, *pointless*, it’s hard to justify the extra effort to build it up. If I had a plan for monetising it, the effort would be justifed.

Those are my thoughts so far! The ones that just need a plugin installing will probably get done, but like I said, Suggest of the Day needs a goal. I just need to work out what that is :s

That weird feeling…of something creepy, something pseudo-familiar, something not-quite right, has a Name. It’s called the Uncanny Valley.

The term was coined by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist who apart from starting a robot-building competition in Japan, studied the relations of religion, psychology and metaphysics to the development of robots.

He was particularly interested in the relationship between humans and robots, and carried out a study into our emotional responses to ‘non-human entities’. His findings are shown in the graph above.

Mori found that humans are increasingly positive towards robots the more lifelike they become…that is, until they become TOO lifelike. Then robots elicit not empathy, but revulsion.

If you think that Tom Hanks in The Polar Express is pretty damn creepy, you’re in the Uncanny Valley.

Several theories have been put forward to explain this reaction, from our cognitive mate-selection ability repulsing us from robots, to our pathogen-avoidance defences kicking in when we see something that looks like it could be diseased. Whatever it is, it seems that thanks to the Uncanny Valley, robots won’t be infiltrating society any time soon.

Many thanks to unsupervised

In 2008, I did the four things that in my mind make you an adult:

1) Got a Job
2) Got a Car
3) Got a House
4) Got a Boyfriend

In 2009, I’ve done all sorts of things that were only possible because of these ‘Pillars of Adulthood’.

Upgrading Hercules and Experiencing Debt

My car (see Pillar of Adulthood Number Two), although full of charm and character (like a leaky and perhaps haunted 17th century cottage) was actually monstrous to drive. Foot to the floor, it reached a dizzying 40mph after a good half minute, and when it got to motorway speed – normally helped by a downward slope – the deafening rattle made me question its structural integrity and cross my fingers that the doors would stay on.

My job (Pillar of Adulthood Number One) was putting money in my pocket almost faster than I could spend it – an illusion I later realised was caused by Living at Home – so naturally changing Hercules for something a little more drivable was on my mind. I’d always hankered after a sports car and so, after a terrifying test drive in which I discovered Hercules was no preparation for driving a real car, I purchased a ridiculously expensive two-seater beast…on credit.

I couldn’t sleep that night.

It’s funny, the dramatic shift from having money free each month, to being so far in your overdraft you don’t even look at your bank statements any more. For the first few weeks I went from manic glee at driving something I never thought I’d own, to dark worry at the financial hole I’d dug myself, to hollow self-assurance I could pay it off in no time.

I stopped buying clothes. I stopped eating out. I joined LoveFilm because the cinema was too expensive. I started saying things like “oh look this is on offer” and “it’s cheaper to make it yourself”. I even stopped going to town because the shops were filled with things I couldn’t have – it was too depressing.

Now, after a year of frugality and debt, I’m just about in a position where I can look at my bank statements again. I don’t even want to buy loads of stuff any more. I’ve made my ridiculous purchase, I’ve spent a year with the consequences, and I have a far greater appreciation for money than ever before.

Going on a Proper Holiday and Needing It

My boyfriend (Pillar of Adulthood Number Four) took us to the Maldives this summer. I’d never been outside Europe before or to a fancy resort, so this felt like my first proper holiday. We were probably the youngest couple on the island, but we made friends with other couples there – people who a few years ago I’d have dismissed as ‘a different generation’. The difference between 23 and 33 feels a lot smaller than that between 20 and 30.

What’s more, I needed that holiday. This year I’ve discovered that work can be hard, holidays few, and that week in the Maldives was the most relaxing experience of my entire life. I never understood why people go to a faraway land to stay in a posh resort away from all cultural experiences – now I do.

Working, Still

My first job at a web company was sort of a fluke, but in 2009 I landed an upgrade and what feels kind of like a career. I’ve been working in the SEO field for over two years now – not long enough to know everything, but long enough to be responsible for things, and to know ’stuff’ that makes me (I hope) a useful employee.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been working so long that being a student is a dim and distant memory. Maybe it’s because even at weekends I wake up at 7am and can’t go back to sleep. Having a job is so ingrained in my life now, it’s starting to feel a bit like a career. This year I’ve realised that work is now a Fact of Life, and having a good job – that’s enjoyable, at a good company, with people you like – is very important.

Doing a Scary Thing

I’m scared of spiders. The kind of scared that makes me jump around and make incoherent noises until someone fetches a glass and takes the big bad spider away while I cower in another room.

I’m also scared of public speaking. The kind of scared that makes me feel a bit sick, makes me crazy with worry, and even now I’m not sure why I agreed to speak at a conference earlier in the year. It’s so far outside my comfort zone I was actually hoping to be struck down by swine flu, or a car, right up until the day of the event. The best way to describe how I felt is probably ‘abject terror’.

Even so, when the time came I got up on stage in front of a room full of people and talked about some stuff. All by myself. And I survived. Afterwards, I felt like I’d been thrown into the sea and managed to swim to an island – I wasn’t happy or elated, I was just relieved it was over and sort of disbelieving that anyone had enjoyed my floundering.

The thing is, I know now that I can do it, and I know what I did good and what I did badly. Public speaking was one of my deepest darkest fears, but next time (next time!) I’ll do it better.

Moving Somewhere I Like

In 2008 I moved in with my boyfriend to a house (Pillar of Adulthood Number Three) in Harrogate – a house and an area I never liked. It should have been so nice and yet, it wasn’t. It never felt like home, and after saying this for a good few months we took notice of the fact we were only renting and could leave whenever we liked. In 2009 we moved to a flat in Boston Spa and it actually feels like home. Just like the whole career thing above, I don’t know why it feels that way – it just does. It’s smaller than the house, not as fancy inside, but it’s cosy and warm and I like it here.

What about 2010?

I don’t know what next year will bring. I have some nebulous plans about travel, and some more concrete plans about Projects, but whatever happens I feel pretty well equipped to deal with it. I know there are things I still can’t do, circumstances I’m as childish as ever…but in a lot of ways, I’m all grown up.

(Many thanks to sk8geek for the Think Vis photo)

Downsides? Well, so far each book only has a few reviews and they’re drawn from other sites. SFF Meta lacks user-generated content. I’m really hoping this accounts for such horrors as The Court of the Air being on the 2007 ‘low scoring’ list, and The Gathering Storm scoring 84/100, when tbh I would quite gladly throw The Wheel of Time series onto a bonfire.

Anyway, I’d like to see SFF Meta open up their site to user reviews instead of just drawing them from elsewhere. It’s a neat idea and even I of so little time and so much apathy would contribute. Like any good community it would moderate itself and the seriously good fiction would rise to the top.