First of all, we at 3nglish.co.uk want to apologize to the users of the website and the admins and staff involved in the investigation to find the error which caused the server to die for a day.

It appears the site might have been DDoSsed by someone with a fetish for alien body tattoos. We’re still investigating though, so this may be an erroneous conclusion. We’ll keep you up to date.

We would personally like to thank Greg the super server admin who interrupted his holidays in Scotland to come online and help us out. Enjoy the rest of your holidays, Greg. We hope you have a good time eating Haggis and bagpiping your way around the place.

Hi folks,

Just a quick update regarding the recent downtime of 3nglish.co.uk. The server we host the site on has been experiencing some problems recently. Our apologies for the inconvenience of not being able to access the site every now and then.

We have contacted the admin (who is a good friend of 3nglish.co.uk) and we’re investigating, trying to find the problem with the server.

Bear with us while the fire engines are called out.

– bouzo

Hi folks!

Just made a quick change to the site and all looks good so I thought I’d announce it with a big BANG!

Here it is:

I’ve made it so anyone who signs up to the website now automatically becomes a contributor and can write articles.

If you are already a subscriber you can now submit your articles too.

A few notes to this are:

1) You can start writing your articles by clicking on the ‘Write’ button in your Dashbar (the blue bar that appears at the top once you’ve logged in).

2) Your articles have to be approved by an author, editor or administrator of course, but don’t let that stop you. We have plenty of good wholesome and fiber-rich authors zooming around to get your draft approved.

3) If your article is rejected we will notify you on why this happens. How is still a mystery, but be assured you will be surprised.

4) If your articles contain subjects or pictures which are against the law in the U.K. we will demote you back to subscriber or ban you outright

5) Any further questions can be either submitted in the actual body of the article (e.g. NOTE TO ADMIN or something) or below in the comments. We will get back to you asap.

Enjoy your new-found freedoms.

Many kind regards,

Bouzo.

I’m off to my native haunt in the south of Holland for a few days. Imagine a village out past the edge of nowhere. Now imagine a dark and forested neighbourhood. That’s where I am.

In the mean time I challenge you to find me the most nightmarish landscapes on google.

We have a new admin for the 3nglish.co.uk website. His name is dille and he lives on teh internets.

All hail Dille and his amazing powers of wordpress.

I’ve managed to fix the image uploading from Ubuntu Firefox in Wordpress 2.5 by installing the new flash player 9 for linux.

Expect more articles from me again now that I can post images.

A new version of wordpress , the software our blog runs on, is online today.

Expect a short downtime and (if all goes well) we will be back asap.

Quagmire thanks you for your patience.

Update: Site’s been updated and a new header image added. Tell us what you think of the new header, and report any problems to us in the comments.

After walking our lovely blog through a few validation sequences it came to my attention that most widget scripters don’t know their arse from their elbows when it comes to valid XHTML. I came up with 182 errors.

Below you will find a load of nerd-speak pertaining to what I’ve been doing to our little blog:

• Edited the custom smiley plugin to make it include the alt tags. In a few weeks the new smileys will have slowly edged out the old ones and they will be valid XHTML.
• Removed the MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup which showed you all our Zombie Vidar warning. It was so full of errors and bad coding it made me bust a nut.
• Edited the video plugin to get liveleak param tags to close (bad bad liveleak coders to blame). Unfortunately I haven’t managed to re-code the embedding of The Onion’s code.. apparently they’ve never heard of flash validation.
• Changed a load of stuff in the VoteItUp Karma widget. There might be a new version out there, but imo the validation wasn’t good this time around, so why trust the wankstains to do it right the 2nd time.
• Edited the template I built the interface on and made it my own. The designer didn’t know his HTML arse from his HTML elbow either.

So that’s it. I present you with a cleaner, more valid page now (at least, code wise; all you non-nerds won’t know what the problem is or that there ever was one). I know I could’ve gotten around to it earlier, but seeing as it was such a mountain of work I kept postponing it.

The only drawback: No more Zombie Vidar to warn you about the content. Sorry Vidar. People will have to find out who you are the hard way now.

Changes are coming to 3nglish.co.uk. After quite a good month with over 200 unique visitors a day (on most days; Sundays are always a bit slow) I’ve decided to tweak the website somewhat to improve some things people complain about. Next to that other changes are planned. Here’s a bit of a list for you…

• I had the impression the Karma widget wasn’t being used very much. I’ve now made the icons extra big and made the font a bit more readable. They’ll grab your attention and not let go now.
• We’re working on splitting up the website, making a portal page and moving the IRC related sections to a different part to make the 3nglish site a bit easier to navigate and to be able to find things like the IRC Quotes and the rules again.
• I’m looking for new smilies to introduce into posts. We’ve got quite a few, but it’s never enough!
• The F.A.Q. is almost finished. That and the new Dashboard for Wordpress will be introduced sometime this month.
• We’re currently in discussion with some advertisers to see if we can get some money back for the investment of the time and effort we’ve put into keeping everything running properly. If all goes well, expect unobtrusive yet (as is our tradition) rude adverts to start appearing soon.
• We’re looking for some good authors at the moment. We want to transform the weblog into something a bit more literary than just the bog-standard video posts. If you’re interested in writing for us, we will provide you with the means to do so. We won’t give you money. We’re not rich. You’ll just gain fame and/or notoriety. Give us a holler in the comments below if you’re interested!

That’s about it for now.. I’m going for a coffee.

Our esteemed owner and server admin Laagje has upgraded the server our page runs on and has added some RAM too.

All hail Laagje!