Tag: web

7 Reasons Not To Have A Contact Form On Your Website

Okay, up above these words in the menu bar, there’s a page called Contact Us, and we’re beginning to believe that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. In fact, we’re beginning to think we should get rid of it altogether, and we’re coming round to the view that everyone else should too. Now we’re not self-appointed web experts or internet gurus; we’re humourists. If you have a website yourself, we can only advise you to free yourself from the tyranny of the contact form based on our own experience. And, from our experience of having one of the damned things, here are seven reasons to get rid of it.

1. You’ll Have A More Manageable Penis. One of the most frequent things that people use the contact form for is to attempt to sell us penis enlargement pills. And by frequent, I mean we get a lot of penis enlargement offers. In fact, if we don’t visit our inbox for a while it ends up chock-full of enlarged penises. We aren’t really interested in any of these offers (I have a child now, so I probably won’t even need mine for the next eighteen years or so), but it’s a lot of stuff to wade through and ignore. Well, I say ignore, I’m assuming that my writing partner Jon’s ignoring them too. Perhaps he isn’t, though. Perhaps Jon’s buying penis enlargement pills from everyone that’s offering them. It could be that since we’ve been running 7 Reasons, Jon has purchased so many of these pills that his penis has become a major Kent landmark. Maybe ruddy-faced locals in smocks are staring at his chemically-enhanced appendage right now and pointing up at it with awe. Perhaps it’s on Google Earth. Who knows? One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a major hazard to air travellers as the other thing we get offered almost every day is Viagra.

2. You’ll Get To Read Less Gibberish. When the contact form isn’t trying to enlarge our penises, it sends other stuff too. It sends gibberish. Most things containing the subject heading “7 Reasons Contact Form” look like someone just pressed many keys at once. Frequently, we get the message that “sdkjfkl;sdfjsjsdk;” wrote “sjklsdhfkjsdhfjksdfhsjdfhjlksfsdhthurthw”. This is not helpful. In fact, it’s quite scary that “mgklksfdlgjkhg” writes “mxvnbcxn,bvcxb,mvxc” and “hytfhtyhtfyh” writes “vbnmbmnmbnm” on such a regular basis. Our contact page is fairly dull, but it’s not soporific enough to make this many people doze off on their keyboards while they’re reading it. So perhaps this is just the law of averages. Perhaps one person a day actually falls down dead while looking at our contact form. They’re probably dying when they’re reading other posts too, it’s just that we won’t get to know about that. 7 Reasons could be killing them in their droves: We might be the greatest practitioners of genocide since Pol Pot*. Either that, or – I don’t know – but we only get stuff like this from the contact form, not via email or our comments section.

3. Your Life Will Contain Less Mystery. This morning, via the contact form, we received this question: “When does it start airing?” That’s it. That’s the entire message. But what does it even mean? When does what start airing? Is this an enquiry about my laundry? Is this an enquiry about Jon’s penis? 7 Reasons: The Panel Show? Who knows? Certainly not me, and I don’t want to wake up to a mystery of a morning; I’m not Quincy. I just want to wake up to find that it isn’t raining and that there are coffee beans in the house. I would be able to do that if it weren’t for the contact form.

4. Your Messages Will Go To The Right Person. Above our contact form we clearly direct people that wish to write for us to a different page containing a dedicated email address for guest post submissions. This is a (vain) attempt to try to limit the number of identical submissions we receive about car insurance (purportedly all from different people) and to get them sent directly to Jon – who’s in charge of guest post submissions – rather than to me. He’s more patient than I am. He’s calmer than I am. On receiving his ninth identical offer of a car insurance post in a day, Jon’s veins bulge, he turns red, he emits a sound that is part scream, part bellow and part mating call of a rhinoceros and begins to punch the nearest table or wall. I, on the other hand, don’t take receiving them nearly as well. So there’s no likelihood of these things getting used and we just end up getting rather worked up when we receive them. Well, I do.

5. You’ll Feel Better About Yourself. This is from the contact form:

***** wrote:

Hi

My name is *****.

I would like to ask you if its possible to buy the picture of the lemons in a

high resolution (300ppi 160mm x 200 mm).

And if you have it form a other place can you tell me where?

Greetings *****

This refers to a picture of lemons that – in the same way that approximately 99.99999999% of websites source their pictures – we got from Google Images. There’s no way of replying to this person (that amazingly managed to give us their own name three times during the course of a tiny message) without sounding sarcastic. “Dear *****, we did get it from another place. It is available here. Yours sincerely, the 7 Reasons team” would make us look rather mean.

We’ve also received this:

Do you stock a Thermos type water jug to use on invalids bedside, I can’t find one in cataloues.

That’s just heart-breaking. Could we, in all conscience, send a reply saying “sorry, as a humour website we carry no stock of thermal water jugs, could we tempt you with a mildly Francophobic t-shirt?” No. Of course not. So we either have to spend our time researching random queries from confused people or feel really bad about ourselves.

6. You’ll Hear Less About The Colour Of Hats. The other thing we frequently receive via the cursed contact form are offers of help. Technical help. Traffic driving help. Messages that variously offer to help us “engage strategic initiatives”, “harness value-added solutions”, “integrate visionary partnerships” and “orchestrate bricks-and-clicks infomediaries”. A recent message discoursed for so long about white hat SEO, black hat SEO and grey hat SEO that I almost lost the will to live and – had I been viewing the contact form – I would have been in danger of sending myself a gibberish message with my face. As it was, I began to think about purchasing a hat. What I wasn’t thinking about was taking anyone up on their kind offer to improve our website with their baffling and incomprehensible gobbledygook.

7. You’ll Receive A Better Standard Of Correspondence. Groucho Marx brilliantly and wittily advocated exclusivity when he famously said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, and this can be applied to the Contact Form too. Because the contact form makes us too accessible. It’s too easy to get in touch with us. If it were more difficult to get hold of us, then we’d get a better class of correspondence, because the act of having to do a tiny bit of research to find our contact details and paste them into an email program could well cut out the spammers and raise standards. Perhaps the extra time and effort that this will take will cause people to reflect on whether they really need to contact us at all.

It boils down to this: If you have a contact form, it’s a magnet for spam in all its forms: penis-related-spam; gibberish-spam; spam that consists of bizarre utterances from the mad; spam that shouldn’t even be going to you; spam that is just flabbergasting or heartrending in its naivety; spam about hats. The one thing we rarely receive from the contact us form is any sort of meaningful correspondence. That all comes via email or Twitter. We’re going to be brave; we’re going to be bold: We’ve looked at the correspondence we receive via our contact form, and we’re going to disable it. And if you have a website that has one, we recommend you go back through your inbox and have a look at how much worthwhile correspondence you’ve received through it. We’re guessing it’s not as much as you think.

*The level of interest in our latest competition bears this out.

July 18, 2011
7 Reasons to Shop With 7 Reasons

You’ve laughed with us, you’ve cried with us, you’ve watched us, you’ve read us, you’ve heard us, you’ve written for us, you’ve tweeted with us, you’ve got engaged with us, you’ve had a baby with us and probably other stuff too. And now, in a new and exciting development, you can shop with 7 Reasons. And here are seven reasons that you should.

1. Be Unique. Everyone wants to feel distinctive, unique and a bit special. And, if you purchase a 7 Reasons t-shirt, the chances are very high that it will actually be unique. After all, how many people are you likely to bump into in your local pub wearing the same Haystack Poking Patrol t-shirt as you? And even in the unlikely event that you did meet someone else in a pub wearing that same t-shirt, you could just say, “Hello Marc” and I’d probably buy you a beer. You’ll be unique or you’ll get beer. That sounds like a good deal.

2. To Marvel At The Emporium. The 7 Reasons team have (amongst other things) expertise in web design and the retail sector. You might think that this would make putting together an online shop easy. But you’d be wrong. Because in typical 7 Reasons style, the one with the retail background did the web design and the one with the web design background is in charge of the retail side of things (and did everything else). So if it does crash or start randomly giving away free merchandise you’ll be there to witness/benefit.

3. Because Our Wares Are Really Jolly Good. I didn’t have anything to do with the design of the lemon t-shirt (God or Darwin, depending on your viewpoint, designed the lemon and Jonathan Lee did the rest), so I can say this. It’s bloody brilliant. Look at it! Just look at it! It’s really a beautiful piece of design. It’s a pop-art pie-chart in lemon. Who wouldn’t want to wear that, other than the abjectly wrong and gits? No one.

4. Innovation. Because the product range will grow as we think of more things to add. We’re already looking into producing 7 Reasons Inspirational Beer-Mats, calendars and fridge-magnets, so you’ll never know what you might find there: A 7 Reasons horse; a 7 Reasons handbag; a 7 Reasons his and his voodoo doll set; a replica 7 Reasons sofa. Anything. Or if you don’t find what you want, you might eventually, because…

5. We’re interactive. We can’t think of everything. We’ve tried and have gotten distracted by girls and tiramisu and things. But we love great ideas and, if you’ve thought of something you’d like to see in the 7 Reasons shop that isn’t there, you can email us and, if we think it’s a good idea, we’ll look into making it. And we’ll probably put your name on it too, unless it’s something really small – or embarrassing – in which case we won’t. Or if you have a really long name like Bartholomew Constantine Washington Penderghast the third, we might not. But if you’re called Jennifer Aniston we definitely will, and that’s a promise.

6. Incentive. Has any other website ever encouraged you to invade a country? Yes, probably, but only evil ones. We’re nice chaps though, and we’d like to encourage a more benign, civilised, conquest: So the first five readers that are photographed standing atop the Eiffel Tower waving a Union Flag and wearing one of our France Invasion t-shirts will get the money they spent on the t-shirt refunded.*

7. Because We’re Very Excited. So excited, in fact, that we spent a couple of hours putting this post together about our shop and forgot to include a link to it. So here it is (this is the link). Now go and shop till you drop! Or at least until your arms are very full and you feel a little faint.**

*We can sometimes tell the difference between the Blackpool and Eiffel towers and we’re also quite good at spotting things that have been photoshopped so no tomfoolery, please.

**I – Marc – would like to thank my colleague Jonathan Lee for all of the effort that he put into the shop and the merchandise (and for fielding slightly ranty emails about World War Two font styles and spacing without ever losing his cool). Never let it be said that he doesn’t work very, very hard indeed.

April 8, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: It’s Cake!
Hello 7 Reasons readers! It’s Marc here and today, dear readers, we would like you to make a cake. This cake.

It’s Oxfam’s Easy Lime and Ginger Cheesecake, the recipe for which comes from my local Oxfam Bookshop’s brilliant blog . The recipe calls for the use of Fairtrade Stem Ginger Cookies and, when you go to your nearest Oxfam shop to buy them, you’ll be giving money to a worthwhile cause. That’s right readers, by making and eating an ethically sourced cheesecake (unless you buy mascarpone sourced from warmongering cheesemongers) you’ll be helping a good cause in an ethical way. In fact, if we can all make and eat enough cheesecake, we can probably save the world, and I’ll be trying very hard. Here’s the achingly simple recipe as published by Oxfam Books, Petergate York:

Easy Lime and Ginger Cheesecake
- Serves 4
- Prep time: 15 min
- Chilling time: 30 min
- Basically, in 45 minutes you’re in business.
Ingredients
- 200g pack of Fairtrade stem ginger cookies, crushed
- 50g butter, melted
- 500g mascarpone cheese (they usually come in 250g tubs, so get two of these)
- 40g icing sugar, sifted
- Finely grated zest and juice of two limes
Method

1. Mix together the crushed biscuits and melted butter (I also like to add a bit of sugar to my cheesecake bases to make them a bit jazzier) and press into the bottom of an 18cm (7inch) spring-sided or loose-bottomed cake tin.

2. Place the mascarpone cheese, icing sugar, lime zest and juice in a bowl and beat together. Spread this mixture over the biscuit base.

3. Put it in the fridge and chill for 30 min! That’s really it.

That’s the entire recipe. It’s basically spreading cheese on biscuits and it’s so simple that absolutelyanyone should be able to make it. And now we’re going to demonstrate that even people with no food preparation skills, knowledge or aptitude can follow this recipe. I’m going to hand you over to my writing partner: A man whose culinary education began and ended with learning how to boil water for tea: A man who – before he moved to Kent – was known as The Fulham Poisoner: A man whose litany of culinary disasters includes failing at defrosting a chicken and the hospitalisation of a flatmate*. He’s going to make a cheesecake himself and feed it to his fiancé Claire – a renowned and accomplished maker of cakes – who will judge it on appearance, texture and taste (should she survive). Here’s Jon.

“It was only when I was standing in the queue that I realised I had been well and truly duped. The idea of making a cheesecake and then eating it had originally sounded like a good idea, which is why I had agreed. Marc had, after all, said all it required was a spare half hour. In my book, that’s a fair exchange for cake. But as I stood there I realised it had already been twenty-five since I had left home and I hadn’t even purchased the ingredients. There was no way I could make a cheesecake in five minutes. Not there. And then I got to the till. Which is when I realised this idea was also going to cost me money. Just short of £5 in fact. That’s a lot to spend just to have something to write about. I couldn’t help but think if I had managed the past year and a half writing without having to pay for the privilege, why did this have to change? I trudged home.

Having spread the ingredients in front of me and read the recipe, I realised this was the exact same cheesecake that Claire makes. And she makes it very well. Brilliant. So I’ve had to walk all the way the shops, spend the best part of a fiver on ingredients and now I am challenging my future wife by making one of her specialities. Perturbed, I carried on. Twenty minutes later I was left staring at the following creation:

Making it was something of a doddle. What was not a doddle was the washing up. I don’t know how often you zest a lime, but cleaning the zesting part of the grater is quite possibly a harder job than watching England play cricket. Still, an hour later I was done. I also had lime poisoning from licking the bowl.

The next part of this project – and that is very much what it had become – was to get Claire to profer her opinion. These are the results of the Claire survey.

On Appearance: “That looks nice.”

On Texture: “It’s nice.”

On Taste: “That was very nice”.

So there we have it. I make nice cheesecakes. I am sure your Sunday just got a whole lot better with that news.”

*Which he denies.**

**Falsely.

***As Oxfam Books, Petergate York would (and actually did) tell you themselves, remember the whole point of this recipe is that it is a Fairtrade recipe. So help the global community during this Fairtrade Fortnight (and after) by buying Fairtrade goods as much as you can.
March 6, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: The Images

Hello! Happy Sunday! (or Friday, if you’re one of the 7 Reasons team editing this post before scheduling it for Sunday)

Images are very important to us here at 7 Reasons and we always try to put them together in-house because, though what we post usually isn’t about an image, there’s always at least one picture attached to what we’ve written. We wanted to communicate the significance that we place on arresting and original visuals to you, so we decided that today we would chose three each of our favourite images from previous posts (plus one we’d used from Google Images by way of contrast) and hold an earnest and thoughtful contemplation of the importance of imagery in our posts and the technical and aesthetic merits of the selected illustrations as pieces of artwork. Obviously we failed, so here’s Marc Fearns and Jonathan Lee bickering about pictures instead.

Hitler’s Hand

Originally used in 7 Reasons That Size is Important.

MF. This is probably my favourite of the images I’ve put together for 7 Reasons. It’s not technically brilliant (in fact, it’s quite flawed), but boring stuff aside, it ticks all of my boxes: It’s black and white; It has Hitler in it; it has some sort of Photoshop-induced oddity (the big hand), and it has a random, bizarre element to it (the triangle apparently embedded in Himmler’s head). If it weren’t for Jon’s civilising influence, 7 Reasons would probably look a lot more like World War II than it does already.

JL. I have a serious problem with this image. It seems to suggest the Nazis were very handy. The Nazis were not very handy. They weren’t even quite handy. The Nazis were rather irritating and quite frankly caused more harm than good. I also have a problem with Himmler. Unlike Marc I am not struck by the triangle in his head, but his the binoculars. Why did Himmler need binoculars? Was he a part time ornithologist? Was he a pervert? Why are they pointing at his trousers? This picture provides more questions than answers. And that I find rather frustrating.

Lamb & Jon Photoshoot

Originally used in 7 Reasons Playing With A Cuddly Toy 2010 Was Not A Let Down.

JL. I like this picture because I look like an idiot. And in this life there just aren’t enough people prepared to be idiots. Sure, there are idiotic people, but that’s by accident. It takes a very special kind of person to deliberately make themselves look like an idiot and I am very proud to say I am very special. It also reminds me of that great day last September with Lamb. Oh, what fun was had. Rock on.

MF. I’m less keen on this picture than Jon. While it does feature a pair of Aviators, which is always a good thing, it’s lacking something quite fundamental. Hitler. Or the war generally. Also, outside of the framing, there barely a straight line in it. And what’s with the archway? What sort of oddball has an archway in their house? And he’s wearing a hat indoors which, as any grandparent would be very keen to point out, is a #manfail. The only thing that makes this image good is the albino monkey.

The Anglo-French Flag

Originally used in 7 Reasons The Anglo-Franco Defence Agreement is a Good Idea

MF. This Anglo-French flag is something that I’m rather proud of. I constructed it from a picture of a British flag, a picture of a French flag and a picture of a silk sheet (which is how I got the creased fluttering effect). It wasn’t even in the post itself, it was the featured image, which means that it appears next to the post on menus as a thumbnail and it was in the Latest Posts window at the top of our home page for five days. You might wonder why I’d go to such an effort to create an image that would be barely seen but, to me anyway, that sort of detail is important, and I like to think that 7 Reasons is all the better for having high standards. That the image of the intertwined British and French flags brought Jon to near-apoplexy is purely coincidence.

JL. As Marc indicates, this picture absolutely disgusts me. I don’t mind the United Kingdom and France joining forces if we are beating up some bad guys, but to merge the Union Jack with the Drapeau Tricolore is nothing less than treason. I have had to ask myself many searching questions since Marc posted this. Should I turn him in? Can I continue to work with him? How the hell did he get that creased fluttering effect? In the end I have allowed Marc to remain living his life in York. The prospect of writing 7 Reasons on a daily basis was just too much to deal with. Rest-assured though, he’s had a warning. A severe one. And, as he’s posted it again, I shall be poking him on facebook too.

Beauty & The Beast

Originally used in 7 Reasons You Should Never Get Cary Grant & Carrie Grant Mixed Up.

JL. Let me clarify one thing, I don’t have a ‘Cary Grant dressed as a woman’ fantasy. I think it’s important to remind you of this now as I can see why you may be thinking such a thing. It’s a disturbing sight. I don’t think there is any getting away from that. So why do I love it? Well that comes down to the photoshopping. Do you know how difficult it is finding a picture of Cary Grant and a picture of Carrie Grant that will go together seemlessly? No, of course you don’t. The consequences of your actions rarely lead you to such an investigation. The consequences of starting 7 Reasons very much do. So, yes, I was delighted that I found two pictures that would work together. It’s not perfect. If I had my time again I would do a bit of work on their skin tones, but for the purpose of the post it did the job. And in 7 Reasons circles that means victory.

MF. For once, I agree with absolutely everything that Jon said about this image. In his third sentence. I do, however, have some observations of my own. Firstly, bloody Twilight: When you’re a vampire and you’re not even the scariest person in the background of a picture, you’re doing it wrong and you should just bloody stop. Secondly, there’s a terrifying bald man wearing an ill-fitting white suit and eyeliner with someone’s severed arm tucked under his own arm. I haven’t slept properly since I saw this. Thirdly, I find Jon’s Cary/Carrie Grant hybrid creature more attractive than the actual Carrie Grant. Or Cary Grant. This is troubling. And Jon never responds to my emails begging him to photoshop more of them.

Lungs, Heart, Asparagus.

Originally used in 7 Reasons That We Should Grow Vegetables in our Lungs.

MF. I put this one together to complement the title of the piece. It’s an original x-ray with the heart and lungs highlighted which I found online and added asparagus to. I’ve chosen this image not just because I’m pleased with the way it turned out, though I am rather. I’ve chosen it because of the almost boundless amusement it gives me every time someone discovers it searching Google Images for x-rays of lungs. I just like knowing that at any given moment someone, somewhere in the world is looking at it thinking, “Blimey! (or perhaps a colloquial equivalent) That looks nasty. I’m going to treat asparagus with more respect now”. I feel certain that one day, this picture will turn up in a medical journal, or on a GP’s surgery wall.

JL. Who eats asparagus whole? Is that even possible? This is just one of the 7 Reasons images that has inspired readers all over the road. A bit like that man in Norwich who – having been so inspired by a post last June – tried to break the world record for number of Jaffa Cakes eaten in one minute and was subsequently sick all over the biscuit aisle. Now, I am not for a minute encouraging you to see how much whole asparagus you can eat at once – that would be highly irresponsible of us – but if you manage more than five I would love to know.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Originally used in 7 Reasons You Should Always Kiss Properly.

JL. I know what you are thinking, ‘Typical Jon. Two of his three image choices feature him.” Yep, I can’t argue with maths. But let’s look at this photo. At least for as long a you feel comfortable doing so. It is an animated GIF! How bloody exciting! But more than that it is a reminder. A reminder of how far my kissing technique has advanced since last March and – if you’ve been using the above as some kind of guide – how far backwards yours has gone. Lovely stuff.

MF. “AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!” was my initial reaction to this image when I first saw it eleven months ago. And now that I am older, wiser and more mature, on reviewing this image I would say that my reaction is now AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”. Note that Jon has attempted to baffle us with maths to distract from the inherent narcissism of his selections, but let’s consider it carefully. This, as Jon points out, is an animated GIF, so it’s not one picture of him, it’s three pictures of him. This means that four out of Jon’s five image choices are of himself. That’s 80%. Anyway, that aside, I like this picture. On the first occasion I viewed it I remembered that I was supposed to unblock the kitchen sink, and the repeat viewing has caused me to agree with my wife that I spend too long on the internet and I’ve now closed my laptop, sellotaped it shut and placed it under a sofa. With an anvil on top.

Raw Sausages

Originally used in 7 Reasons That December 24th Should be Known as the Day of the Sausage.

MF. Aha! I remember this piece. Sadly, I also remember this picture. It makes me feel sick. It’s not just that the raw former-animal bits are shiny and greasy looking and some of them appear to be inside used condoms, it’s that I don’t even remember which of us added this to the (co-written) piece. I realise what must have been going through the mind of the person that uploaded it. “Sausages! Sausages! We’ve written a piece about sausages and now I need an image of sausages – any image of sausages – right now, to go with the piece about sausages!” And, in the grip of a deadline-panic, that person will have just grabbed the first image of sausages that they saw and attached it to the post. Truly horrible.

JL. This is a perfect example of what one calls, ‘shooting oneself in the foot’. Not that I shot myself, Marc shot me. And himself. And our argument. Using this image kind of reminds me of that day I sent my CV out to dozens of prospective employers and realised a week later that it didn’t contain my contact details. That section about my ‘outstanding attention to detail’ lost all credibility after that. Now, I’m not saying that the idea of the Day of the Sausage lost credibility with the inclusion of this image, just that – if such a day ever was created – Marc and I would not be part of the marketing team. And that’s sad.

January 30, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: Badges

A long, long time ago, way back in the mists of 7 Reasons(.org) history, Jon promised that there would be badges for guest posters, and Marc rolled his eyes and said, “SHH! You’ll bankrupt us before we’ve even started.” But now, many months – possibly even a whole year later – we have an announcement to make about badges for guest posters.

We’ve never forgotten the promised badges, and just recently we took another look into the 7 Reasons coffers (once we’d located them in a dusty ante-room) to see if badges were now feasible. As we expectantly lifted the heavy wooden lid of our treasure chest it creaked with reassuring portent and, with the light of our torches to guide us, we peered into the interior of the dark, gloomy box.

To say that we were amazed by what we found there would be an understatement. After we had emptied the contents of the chest into a pile on the floor and methodically totalled it up, we were staggered.

So now, we can announce that the 7 Reasons Badge Fund stands at…(drum-roll)…(go on, just bang on the desk, no one will think you’re mad)…half a dead spider, a creased Post-it® note, the crumbs from several ginger nut biscuits, twelve business cards, a mug with a broken handle and a lemon. Plus some blue stuff that neither of us wanted to touch.

But necessity is the mother of invention and we’re nothing if not creative here so we’ve made badges anyway. For free. In Photoshop. So if you write (or have written) for us, you can now have a 7 Reasons Guest Writer badge simply by sending us a photograph of yourself. And we’ll send it back with your badge on it.

Not only will this help us achieve our goal of not running 7 Reasons at a loss one day, it’s also far more environmentally friendly than an actual, physical badge, which benefits the whole world. So the virtual badge is something worthy, it’s a force for good. It’s actually saving penguins.

A guest poster has already taken us up on our virtual badge offer (in fact, it’s what convinced him to write for us in the first place). Here is Sir Andrew Straussy jubilantly wearing his:

And here’s an owl wearing his (because one day, we hope to convince an owl to write for us (and the virtual badge is less cruel than an actual one)).

We also sent (to the lady herself) a picture of Jennifer Aniston wearing a badge and we received this in return.

So this probably means that marriage is still out of the question.

Anyway, the point of all of these badge-related-shenanigans is to mention that we’re currently looking for more guest posts. So, if you’ve never written for us, or if you have; if you have an idea, or even half an idea (because that’s how we work most of the time), then please get in touch.

We have always felt genuinely honoured and flattered that brilliant people, who write to such a high standard, have submitted pieces for us to use, and we hope that – one day – we will be able to reward their endeavours with something more tangible than our thanks, our admiration and our love (which, to be honest may put people off). Perhaps in the form of a badge, perhaps in the form of money, perhaps we will build a shrine, who knows? Anyway, however we decide to reward guest posters when we are dripping with the riches of Croseous, the fact remains that we aren’t right now, but we do feel genuinely humble – and honoured – that people read us regularly and that people allow us to use their work.

Anyway, if you fancy earning yourself some thanks, some publicity and a virtual badge then email [email protected]. We don’t promise to use everything that’s sent to us (because, well, we might not like it, and if we didn’t have standards, then we wouldn’t feel proud of our own website ). We will always consider it, however, and are happy to offer guidance or advice, where solicited.

Here’s a brief guide to writing a post for us. Thanks,

Marc and Jon.

December 5, 2010
We’ve Moved!

It’s Sunday, so no reasons today. Here’s something different. Last week we brought you a tale of horror and woe, and this week we bring you…a tale of horror and woe, because we have an announcement:

We’ve moved! You may not have noticed yet, but we have. We’ve moved from Gloucestershire to Kent. Strange, the website doesn’t look any different, you’re probably thinking; I can’t see any oast-houses or Dover Castle or France, but I promise you that we’ve moved. We’ve changed our web-hosts from Fasthosts to EZPZ hosting.

And we hope the new web-hosts that we’ve moved to will provide you, the reader and us, the men who have spent many, many, many of the hours that they should have spent writing in the last year trying to get answers from Fasthosts about why our website wasn’t being hosted effectively, with a more reliable experience. As our experience with Fasthosts has been appalling.

In fact, we started monitoring our site’s uptime over the past few weeks, and it turns out that with Fasthosts, our site was working less than 99% of the time. Imagine if you had a car that wasn’t there 1% of the time when you came to use it. Or your house wasn’t there for over three and a half days out of the year, but you didn’t know when that would be, or that the sun vanished intermittently.

And it’s not just that the site would disappear while we were trying to read it; it would also disappear while we were trying to write it, which resulted in an awful lot of lost work. In fact, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time that I should have spent creating stuff and writing for the website monitoring its performance and corresponding with the web hosts.

As a result of the many support tickets that we have raised and the many questions we have asked them in the past year, Fasthosts have properly investigated our downtime twice. And they’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a problem at their end and that it must be our fault, which is strange as, since we’ve moved the website, it has been working for 100% of the time. Which rather undermines their claims.

It’s not just technical incompetence. A couple of days ago – we disabled the auto-renew facility some time ago – they tried to take money from my credit card to pay for web hosting for the coming year (something they didn’t have permission to do). Fortunately, they have the details of an old card and it didn’t go through.

Anyway, we’ve moved and we wanted our experiences with Fasthosts to have a home on the internet so that anyone thinking of using them and perhaps googling “Should I switch to Fasthosts”, “Are Fasthosts any good” or, “naked web hosting” (people search for almost everything pre-fixed by the word naked) would find this piece and would be forewarned.

Hopefully now, the 7 Reasons team will have less correspondence like this:

Jon,

I fully intended to forward any response on why we’re down to you. But, other than the initial automated (and pointless) response to our first email from Shithosts, there has been none. Nor have they replied to us via Twitter. This is on their webshite:

Websites hosted on 88.208.252.193 will currently be unavailable. Our engineers are investigating.

Update: 8:35: Our engineers have found the cause of the issue. However, it is likely that a resolution will require a server rebuild. We will restore all data from a recent backup and will update this page when further information and a completion time become available. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

This issue is presently under investigation:

Our ip address is 88.208.252.3:21so whether this applies to us is a mystery to me, I’ll update you as soon as I hear anything/they bother to reply/I turn up at their offices in Gloucester brandishing a weapon,

Marc.

P.S. Makes me really glad I spent 8 hours working on today’s post now.

P.P.S. Do you have backups of all of the posts that you uploaded yesterday?

P.P.P.S. We were on course to have one of our best Mondays ever yesterday. Before our site disappeared.

And more correspondence like this:

Jon,

The website is working fine. It’s nice here in Kent. Look, I can see deer strolling through the meadow next to the tiramisu farm. Would you like some beer from the perpetual fountain?

Marc.

In conclusion: If you are looking for web hosting. Never, ever use Fasthosts. They’re no good at web hosting, their customer service is woeful, they can’t be trusted with your credit card details and they’re expensive (our new hosting is almost two and a half times cheaper).

7 Reasons (.org) will return tomorrow; I can state with utter confidence.

November 7, 2010
Russian Roulette Sunday: How You Found Us: Part 2

Hello! It’s Sunday again and here’s part two in an occasional series that takes you behind the scenes of 7 Reasons. How You Found Us gives you, the reader, a glimpse into something usually only seen by us, the people who know the password, into the ways that this website has been discovered. This time, we’ve split them into categories. Seven categories (it felt weird experimenting with the number ten last week). Enjoy. And try not to have nightmares.

1. Phrases you used to find us that we found flattering:

funny website

VIRILE MEN

good humour

Epic Moustache

I lust you

Extra large penis

lotharios

2. Phrases you used to find us that we found less flattering:

scary man

FAIL

I dont care

funny faced people

KNOB END

you dirty mind

the scariest mask in the world

3. Phrases you used to find us that we’re sorry we couldn’t help with:

cooking frozen sausages

What time is Blue Peter on

where do women urinate from?

what to do with lemons

who is the most beautiful naked woman in the world?

are oranges gay?

how to wear socks

4. Phrases you used to find us that we don’t know anything about and nor do we want to:

horse sex tube

The Pope naked

PIRAHNA PORN

Margaret Thatcher mask

sex with house

Naked Pocahontas

pictures of socks

5. Phrases you used to find us that are just plain wrong:

Sarah Jessica Parker looks like a foot

reasons for Piers Morgan

the queen paints front door

The Daily Mail

6. Phrases you used to find us that there is no earthly explanation for and that we can’t help with:

pin the sperm on the egg

naked hunting

syphilis fruit

dead squirrels

mermaid found in Haiti

7. Phrases you used to find us that there is no earthly explanation for but that we were able to help with:

the network is down (easy one, our website is hosted by Fasthosts)

Ryan Giggs hiding cupboard (we don’t know why a friend of ours googled this but we do know who she is so we made her one).

7 Reasons will return tomorrow. With reasons and stuff.

October 17, 2010
7 Reasons That Google Shouldn’t Have Revived Pacman

Last week, to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of PacMan, Google put a version of the game on their main page. The game proved so popular that they’ve now made it permanently available. Here are 7 reasons that they shouldn’t have.

1. Age. Pacman is slow, old looking and not as much fun as it once was: This is typical of everything and everyone over thirty. Why not encourage contemporary game developers by putting a new game there?

2. 1980. By reviving Pacman, Google is taking us back to 1980. But there are far better years that Google could celebrate. Why look back to a year that gave us the Olympic boycott, the election of Robert Mugabe, the death of John Bonham and the interminable and tedious saga of who shot JR Ewing? Why not commemorate 2009? Computer games were better; clothes were better; hair was better; England won The Ashes. It’s a much better year.

3. Prominence. Why not use the widely viewed search engine to promote something good? Instead of putting Pacman there, why not celebrate the 65^th anniversary of the end of WWII with an appeal for world peace or commemorate 1986 with an appeal for the Duchess of York to shut up and go away? Who wouldn’t prefer that?

4. Time. According to people that could be bothered to work it out, 4.82 million (Pac)man-hours (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) were spent playing Pacman last Friday. That can’t all have been me, there must have been several other people playing it too. Perhaps you’re one of them. That’s a lot of time spent playing something so obsolete.

5. Ubiquity. Once you’ve been playing Pacman for nine hours or so, your mind begins to unravel a bit and you start to see him all over the place. I’ve produced a pie chart to illustrate this phenomena. Seriously, he’s everywhere.

6. Music. Michael Winner dressed in a purple shell-suit scraping his fingernails down Simon Cowell’s blackboard would be less irritating than the relentlessly jaunty music from Pacman. That it has been seldom heard in the last few years should be a cause for general rejoicing. Offices can already be hellish enough places to work; imagine being able to hear someone at the next desk playing Pacman. Actually, try not to imagine it. Take deep breaths and think cleansing thoughts. Close your eyes and say “Ommmm”.

7. Rubbish. The single worst thing about the revival of Pacman is that I’m bloody rubbish at it. Useless. Cataclysmically useless. Useless to an extent that in years to come, my name will probably be used to redefine humanity’s very concept of uselessness. Nothing in my childhood prepared me for being chased by monsters – not even all of the Scooby Doo viewing – I was too busy playing Space Inavders. Now that’s a real game.

May 27, 2010