Tag: website

7 Reasons Your Business Should Use Energy Comparison Websites

With energy prices set to soar yet again, more and more businesses are starting to take the decisions they make about their energy supplier far more seriously. Long gone are the days when you’d just sign on the dotted line and agree to any rate as long as you had power to the PCs. These days businesses really are looking for the best deals. Using energy comparison websites such as uSwitch for Business can help you do just that. Here’s why:

1. Apathy. Be honest, the thought of choosing an energy supplier doesn’t exactly get you hyperventilating with excitement does it? When it comes to running a business it’s very much a chore. A chore you’ll probably get one of your colleagues to deal with. The problem is – and we hate to be the ones to break it to you – your colleague is far more interested in playing with the new app on their smartphone than talking with energy suppliers. As a result you’ll get a knock on the office door at 4.59pm and the message, “I can’t find any better deals than the one we’ve got.” Of course they couldn’t. They didn’t even look. It would have taken minutes on uSwitch for Business.

2. Logic. If your company was going to buy a new car, printer, water cooler or bottle of milk, you’d look around for the best price. Well, maybe not for the milk – you’d probably break the petty cash piggy bank for that – but for the more outlandish investments definitely. Unfortunately, energy prices now fall into that outlandish category. As a result, it’s time to treat them as you would that new vehicle. It’s common sense really. And all good businesses are built on a foundation of common sense aren’t they?

3. Impartiality. Let’s spoil a myth. If you phone up energy supplier A it’s highly unlikely they’re going to tell you to give B a call. Similarly, B aren’t going to suggest you contact C. Sad as it may seem, A, B and C all want your money and will do their best to convince you that they are the best. To discover which two are being economical with the truth, use a comparison website like uSwitch for Business. They aren’t interested in which supplier you go with, they are interested in making sure you get the best deal. (Incidentally, there aren’t energy suppliers called A, B and C, so don’t bother searching for them. We were just being impartial).

4. Jargonbusting. With so may tariffs and rates and rules and regulations, working out which supplier you should go with is a bit of a nightmare. Just understanding half the spiel is complicated enough. Who knows, perhaps they write things in such a way that you’re meant to get confused and bored before the end of the second paragraph. Perhaps that’s their best chance of getting you to sign. It’s good to know then that you’ve got someone like uSwitch for Business who will cut through all that nonsense and tell you, simply – in English, not gibberish – who will give you the best deal.

5. Cost. This is probably what you’re most interested in isn’t it? The good news is there is money to be saved here. So before you automatically renew your contract, take a look around. Use uSwitch for Business and see how much they can save you. It could be as much as 70%. That’s a massive saving on a packet of doughnuts, let alone on your energy bills.

6. Time. It’s an old saying and it’s probably become something of a cliché now, but that’s not to say it isn’t true. Time is money. If you have the time to speak to dozens of different energy suppliers, find out what they have to offer and then do your own comparison, then either your company is leading the way out of the economic gloom or you’re doing it wrong. The chances are your company doesn’t have the time to sit down for a day and analyse who you should go with and why. You’re far too busy doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Or planning the Christmas party. That’s why comparing gas and electricity for business on comparison websites is an absolute time saver. And time is money.

7. Gimmick Free Zone. Which bank would you choose – the bank that can get you the best rates or the bank that has the radio station or the water-slide? One would hope, for your sake, that it’s the former. Deciding which energy supplier to go with is exactly the same. No one is interested in the fact that supplier A can get you 20% off at the local spa, nor are they interested that B can get you 10% off your mobile contracts if you switch from that network to that one within 30 days of signing a contract. All businesses want to know is who is the best energy supplier for their needs. And that’s exactly what energy comparison websites such as uSwitch will tell you.

October 29, 2011
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
In Conversation With Marc Fearns

In something of an oddity, we’re both on the sofa this Sunday. Usually it’s just Marc and his spam fetish, but this week we thought we’d bring Jon into the equation to give things a little more substance. 7 Reasons has been going on twenty months now. Given our success we would have thought we’d at least have been interviewed on Yorkshire based radio station Whippet FM by now. Sadly, we haven’t. And that’s really disappointing. But, being innovators of great stature, we have decided to do what Whippet FM hasn’t. We are going to interview ourselves. In this two part special we are going to be sitting on the sofa talking to each other. Via the medium of email. This week, it’s Jon interviewing Marc. Here we go.

JL: Hello Marc. Nice baby/glasses. Why did you feel it necessary to involve me in 7 Reasons?

MF: Hello Jon. Nice fiancé/biscuits. It seemed logical. I realised that with someone else on board, I would only have to come up with three and a half reasons per day and – I’ve been told – that doing things on your own is less fun. The first seven reasons piece that I wrote (which was on my own blog, before the provisional concept of the site came to me in the bath) was also partially your idea, so it seemed like the thing to do. It does have its drawbacks: Not being the best writer on my own website occasionally irritates me and I’ve learned more about Whitstable than I ever wanted to but, those minor matters aside, time has proved that it was the right decision. It’s a bit like a variant on infinite monkey theory: If there are two thoroughly daft people in the world with roughly compatible interests and skill-sets, eventually they’ll end up running a website together. Or annoying a woman. Or both. I’m also a big fan of the writing of Jonathan Lee. This way I can see it more often (and get to remove the rogue apostrophes).

JL: It’s nice to hear you’re such a fan, but let’s talk about you more. Almost two years ago you quit the wine industry to start 7 Reasons and redesign the whole of your house. Which do you feel has been more successful?

MF: Well, I do now have a library, a loft, a working roof and a big muddy hole in the front garden but parts of the house are still pink. 7 Reasons, on the other hand, isn’t pink at all. It is also visible from Rio de Janeiro. Definitely 7 Reasons.

JL: We’re approaching our 500th post Birthday. That’s a lot, especially when you consider we use the same formula every single day. Have you ever been tempted to call it a day and go back to fearns.blogspot.com?

Oh, most days. Usually when I’m stuck on five reasons. But other than that, no, not really. I test myself occasionally just to ensure that I retain the ability to write without counting to seven, but 7 Reasons is much more fun and some days it just seems to write itself. Saturdays, mostly.

JL: Obviously an ability to write and count up to seven are essential requirements for a 7 Reasons writer – and may I just say on one of those counts you succeed admirably – but are there any other skills that you feel lend themselves favourably to being part of the 7 Reasons team?

MF: Yes. Anyone can write seven reasons for something, but to make it entertaining requires some sort of minor unhinged-ness, eccentricity, neurosis, and perhaps a soupçon of Francophobia. Most people, for example, on hearing the captivating tones of the woman next door singing lullabies to her children would think no more of it and carry on. A member of the 7 Reasons team would have a different thought process:

That’s the woman next door singing a lullaby. Wow, she’s got lovely pitch and an impressive range. I wish my child’s mother could sing this well to him. Perhaps I could convince the woman next-door to sing to him occasionally, he’d like that… Wait! What am I doing? I’m coveting my neighbour’s wife! I’m not supposed to be doing that, the Bible says not to (possibly). And I’m not even coveting her out of lust! I’m coveting her for her parenting skills, which is probably an even worse betrayal of my child’s mother than coveting a woman for more conventional reasons. Or is it? Does this mean I’m going to hell? Can I get a 7 Reasons post out of it?

That’s the sort of mindset that the 7 Reasons team bring to the plate every day.

JL: What about the need to have a thick skin? You recently wrote a piece about the M&S Dine In For £10 deal. On reading the article, Mark Spencer (probably not his real name) suggested that you were a complete idiot and proffered that you were someone who moans about anything and everything. He then called you an idot. An improvement on idiot though one suspects not overly complimentary. How do you deal with the personal insults?

MF: Before he(she?) called me an “idot”, which as a fan of irony, I heartily approve of, he(she?) also complained (semi-literately) that I wrote a full article on the subject. Presumably he(she?) inhabits a world where people that disagree with him(her?) can only do it in that arcane and obscure form, the partial-article. Either that or Mark Spencer (or, more accurately, Anonymous-From-The-Internet) is a bit unhinged and should really be ignored by right-thinking people. After all, if you have to resort to abuse where there is room for debate and opinion, you’ve really already marked yourself out as not worthy of anyones’ consideration or attention. Generally, I’m happy that I write fair-mindedly, and if people choose not to read things in that manner, that’s really up to them. And most people do, which is heartening.

JL: 7 Reasons is very much concept driven, in a marketplace full of content driven websites do you think the 7 Reasons approach has helped or hindered its growth?

MF: No. Or yes. Or, more accurately, I don’t know. I think it adds a nice hook to the titles of pieces and gives the potential reader some sort of inkling of what to expect. If you imagine the titles of our pieces without the prefix 7 Reasons, what you might expect to see when clicking on that link would be far less clear. I think people realise that they’re not going to get some dull, sprawling, ranty tract that will take all day to read when they see that there are a fixed number of reasons. Plus it gives people that have failed to observe the name on the link or the website’s header the chance to say of any given post, “What, only seven?” and wear their own ignorance as a badge. They seem to like doing that.

On balance, I think the concept helps to attract an audience, but it isn’t the key to retaining them. That’s the role of the content. And all I need to do now is add the phrases “evolve viral experiences”, “synergize leading-edge web-readiness” and “drive front-end bandwidth” to this paragraph and then I can draw a cock on my own back and beat myself to death with an iPad. Great question, Jon. Thanks.

JL: They don’t call me the young Michael Parkinson…actually, that sentence stops there. They don’t call me the young Michale Parkinson. In what will hopefully be a more enjoyable question to answer, which three posts, from the 500 plus that have been published, stand out in your mind?

MF: 7 Reasons Not to Write on a Train stands out. I really enjoyed writing that one, though it really sticks in my mind as a result of the epic battle I had to upload it from Essex the next day. The friends that we were staying with had a broken internet connection that I could have fixed but they couldn’t remember their password. Then it turns out that no establishment in Essex (apart from one place) had working WiFi. Then the working WiFi in the place with the working WiFi stopped working just as I started using it, and many of the places that advertised WiFi weren’t there any more. After six hours of trying to upload the piece from Essex I had to abandon my wife and friends to go to London to use the internet. And to have a beer.

7 Reasons We Love Propaganda Posters also stands out. Just because there are websites out there that have accepted our posters and explanations as historical fact and there’s a part of me that finds that very funny.

7 Reasons Sports Personality 2009 Was A Joke also stands out, mostly for the debate about sport in the 1990s that ensued in the comments section. I don’t think you’ve ever researched anything as thoroughly as you did the sporting year of 1994 during that debate. And then someone else we knew turned up and commented thinking that our website was The Guardian. Fun all round.

JL: And finally, what hopes do you have for 7 Reasons in the future?

MF: Untold riches, tiramisu, world domination and minions; it’d be great to have some of them. Oh, and a book deal.

JL: Well best of luck with that Marc Fearns. Thank you for talking to us.

MF: We’re welcome.

Next week: In Conversation With Jonathan Lee!

May 15, 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
7 Reasons We’re Delighted By This 7 Reasons Analysis

This morning I was completely devoid of inspiration. Initially I was going to attack a 10 year-old girl. Not literally obviously. I wasn’t bored. And it would be wrong. I mean literately. I was going to question why the girl – whose design has been chosen as the emblem for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee – couldn’t be bothered to use a ruler. Or indeed colour between lines. But as I was writing, I felt a deep sense of shame. It is not in my nature to pick on 10 year-old girls, so I stopped. Instead I googled ‘7 Reasons’ and, lo, what did I find? This beautiful analysis of all that is good about 7 Reasons. I was delighted. Here’s why:

1. Backed By FIRA. It’s news to us, but we are delighted to be backed by the capital city of Santorini. And, having looked it up on wikipedia, we are pleased to say that we reciprocate. Go to FIRA. You’ll love it. Especially the Santorini Archeological Museum.

2. Exceptional Performance. It is highly unlikely that this refers to our web hosts so we can only assume it is a compliment aimed at the robotic manner in which both of us knock out 7 Reasons posts day after day after day. We are just short of 500 posts now, or 3,500 reasons if you prefer. Quite an achievement given that one of us thought we’d struggle to get past 14. (Reasons).

3. Experts That Live And Breathe Furniture. Okay, so the use of the word ‘experts’ my have been somewhat over the top, but we happily accept that the 7 Reasons sofa is a thing of beauty. And this is not by luck, but by design. We took great care when sawing the original sofas in half and even more care when we staple-gunned the two required halves together. The fact that it has lasted eighteen months is testament to our expertise. In fact the only thing we bemoan is the number of lemons that keep falling down the back of the cushions. Along with the cat.

4. Understanding & Insights. I am a little surprised this isn’t Reason One. After all, understanding the world around us and providing insight into a variety of topics is our bread and butter. Without this attitude you wouldn’t now be the proud owner of an orange door, you’d probably still be thinking about dating a polar bear and you’d own The American on DVD.

5. Leading Edge Infrastructure. This is very much Marc’s domain so he deserves the applause. From day one he has only been too happy to tinker with the back-end of stuff and he has done a marvelous job. The fact that none of you (or I) have ever noticed any improvements just goes to show how deep into the back-end Marc has gone. The result is a thing of beauty. When it works.

6. UK & Eire Coverage. We are glad this impresses people and it vindicates our original decision. Jon was very keen to prevent anyone outside of the British Isles having the ability to read the British humour website, but Marc muttered something about ‘impossible to do’, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘write about cricket and we’ll get loads of India-based readers’. That was enough. The website has always had Eire coverage. And the rest of the World too.

7. Partnership Approach. One of the seven reasons that 7 Reasons continues to astound the internet is because of this thing they call a partnership. When one of us can’t be bothered to write anything, we don’t. Instead we watch the football knowing the other will eventually crack around 5pm and rapidly write something about winning a country. It’s probably a flawed plan, but it works. For me.

February 21, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: Blimey! It’s The Future. Now.
Last week, 7 Reasons took a step backward. We went back in time to the antediluvian age of print when our words – if not our names – appeared in Esquire magazine. How can we top that, we wondered. The present will just seem humdrum now. So we decided to ignore the present and plan for the future.

In historical envisaging of the future, it’s all hoverboards, cars that fly and spangly jumpsuits. But it’s fast becoming clear that the true instrument of the future will be the Kindle. That’s how things will be read in years to come. We determined that the way forward for 7 Reasons was to embrace the Kindle and prepare for it. Well, Jon thought that we should wear spangly jumpsuits and LED watches, but fortunately he lost the coin-toss.

So we’ve got together with the people at Amazon and we’ve made it happen. From today, we have a new thing:

That’s right Kindlers, 7 Reasons is now available on your Kindles. So when you’re out there Kindling in your futuristic world of the future, you need never miss a single 7 Reasons post. They’ll just appear on your Kindle via the combined mediums of witchcraft, space-age jiggery-pokery and the wireless internet. You can subscribe to 7 Reasons : Kindle Edition here; you can even have a free 14 day trial. For the rest of us backward peasants there’ll still be the old-fashioned website but you, Kindlers, the beautiful people of the future, will be experiencing 7 Reasons in many amazing ways.

Things the beautiful-future-people will be able to do with their Kindles:
- Read 7 Reasons in direct sunlight.
- Read 7 Reasons for hours and hours without straining their eyes.
- Spot 7 Reasons spelling-mistakes with their built-in dictionary (but not as a drinking game, a post by Jon could prove fatal).
- Be better than the rest of us.
- Think of a witty and brilliant fifth thing.
Things that the rest of us will be able to do without Kindles:
- Stand in mud.
- Eat a raw turnip.
- Point at the beautiful-future-people.
- Lick a fetid dog.
- Wail with despair and cry until our souls hurt.
So, that’s the future: Available now. 7 Reasons will return tomorrow in many forms. Like the Devil.
January 16, 2011
7 Reasons To Join A Cult

The story of how 7 Reasons formed is not your traditional one. We won’t go into great detail other than to say we met because we were both in a cult. But don’t worry, this cult didn’t involve righteous killing or licking frozen chickens. Anything but. This cult was a friendly one. A cult where American architects sent dragons to newsreaders and people across the land turned the ferret gold. I am sure you are now seeing the light, but if you are still slightly unsure here are seven more reasons to join that cult.

Richard Bacon Was A Cultish Leader

1. New People. A cult is different from exclusive clubs such as The Masons because it is open to all. As a result you will meet a rich and diverse group of individuals from all walks of life. Plumbers, writers, lawyers, singers, doctors, engineers, buskers, perverts. You’ll meet the lot. And because you leave all your prejudices at the door when you enter the cult, you’ll form a bond with each and everyone of them. The most hardened Tory will find joy in conversing with the most radical Socialist. Millwall supporters will appear fluffy and cute. Formerly disgraced Blue Peter presenters will be forgiven. And that sort of thing only ever happens in a cult.

2. Opportunity. Unlike your place of work, there is no hierarchy in a cult. Or, if there is, you can very easily destroy it. You can be anyone you want to be in a cult. You can be a wallflower if you wish, or you can be a leader of men. And women. No one minds. If you are the type of man who has access to both foil and a cat (Marc) you may wish to see if one will walk over the other. But what if you don’t? What if you don’t have foil? Or a cat? What if you are a person in one of those moods and fancies taking the mick out of your leader (Jon)? Well you can do that too. And whats-more, whichever route you choose, whatever you decide to do, you will be celebrated. You will be held in high esteem. You may well start a website.

3. Reward. When you have gone out of your way to entertain those amongst your cult, it is nice to be rewarded. And nothing rewards quite like a cult. Apart from the adulation and admiration from those around you, you may also receive a badge. Or a small motorbike. But it’s usually a badge. And when I say a badge, I don’t just mean a badge, well, obviously I do, because it is a badge, but it’s also more than that. It’s more than a badge. It’s what the badge stands for. It doesn’t just say, ‘Hey, I’m in a cult’, it says, ‘Hey, I’m part of a cult’. And that’s, you know, pretty damn special.

4. Help. Whether you are at school trying to write your Personal Statement or in lying in bed ill, the cult is there to help you. Admittedly, you might not get it right all the time. All your advice may just confuse the lad and mean he misses out on that place at Cambridge University, but no one can accuse you of not trying. For all your failures, you will have hundreds of successes. Like I said earlier, the cult we were in helped turn the ferret gold. But while that was great, it is more the fact that people were there to help turn the ferret gold than the actual turning. And it was the ferret himself who first shared these sentiments. He was right.

5. Meaning. It is very easy to wander along in life, working nine to five and waiting for the weekend. There is nothing wrong with that, but joining a cult will give your life purpose. It’ll mean something to you and, more importantly, you’ll mean something to the cult. It’ll give you direction and hope and love. And let’s face it, there is very little direction, hope and love out there at the moment. Your work isn’t going to give it to you, so why not give the cult a chance?

6. Outside. When you join a cult, you join in trepidation. This is only natural. A cult, after all, has a reputation for being dark and evil and thus it is perfectly understandable if you are initially nervous. No one enters thinking they may leave with a new life. But many do. Many leave with new friends. Some leave with new girlfriends or boyfriends or both. Others leave with ideas. The rest just go to sleep. No one thought this would happen when they joined. No one expected their life to change. But it can. It does. Sure, not all friendships and relationships last, that’s life, but for a moment in time they were very real. And it was the cult that gave you that happiness. Without it, it would never have happened. Obviously, some relationships do last. Like 7 Reasons. A monster that will never be slayed.

7. Death. Eventually, sometimes for reasons outside of your control, your cult will die. You will attend the funeral (or listen to it on the radio) and be filled with deep sadness. But when you come to reflect, you realise the cult hasn’t really died. You just can’t listen to it on BBC Radio 5 Live anymore. It still lives though. In your heart. And on YouTube. You still have the memories of your leader being portrayed as Hitler. You can still listen to the music of the cult’s house band and indeed of the one you may well call T He Digger. You still have the vision of chair legs being broken by that woman who stood on a plinth for a couple of weeks. You still remember that moment when you were denied from asking Chris Evans whether his gingerness had been a help or hindrance. And these thoughts will stay with you forever. No one can take them away from you. And you’ll always be thankful that you could never get to sleep before 00:30.

So, if there is one thing you should spread this Christmas season, it is the joy of the cult.

Thankyou. Jonathan Lee, in the lounge, with his badge.

December 22, 2010
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
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