Slightly Askew

A good copywriting reminder dropped through my letterbox today.

It reminded me to use examples when writing about technical stuff. Because as clever as we all think we are, we don’t really understand a lot of the waffle that’s thrown at us.

But that’s not our fault; just a copywriter’s problem.

The item that arrived through my postbox was a leaflet about Virgin Media broadband. Apparently, it’s the mother of all broadband.

The sell is its speed. We all want faster broadband, whether it be for Second Life, BBC iPlayer, or grotty porn. Virgin Media supply it (the faster broadband that is, not the… oh, never mind).

But how fast is 20Mb?

(Your Dad will tell you that “it’s ten times faster than 2Mb”. That’s just the way Dads are.)

To most normal folk, 20Mb means diddly-squat. Sure, they know it means twenty megabytes. But that’s just a number and a unit. And, to be pedantic, it’s not even a unit of speed.

Virgin Media’s promotion uses the example of time it takes to download a music track. For 20Mb, the time is two seconds.

Two seconds to download a music track isn’t a feature of the broadband, it’s a joyous benefit. One that means something to the reader.

It’s one that the reader can easily pass on too. My mother isn’t going to tell someone that she’s just had 20Mb broadband installed and it’s fast because of those brilliant fibre optic cables. She might, however, tell someone that her Virgin Media broadband is so fast that she downloaded the whole Mamma Mia soundtrack in less than a minute.

Customers will talk about you, but only if you talk your customers’ language.

The ability to blockquote is only the touch of a button away in Wordpress, so it’s easy to add visual emphasis when I’m quoting someone.

It’s a town for losers, but I’m pulling outta here to win.

But when using my better-half’s laptop - that’s still making use of the wonderfully archaic Internet Explorer 6 (or IE6 if you’re up with web slang) - I noticed that text underneath a blockquote was shifting to the left slightly. And then after the next blockquote it would shift even further to the left. And so on. Not good.

Oddly, I’ve managed to solve the problem by adding a simple border to the offending blockquotes. I’ve no idea why this works, but it does.

Usually, I’d never take this approach. I need to the exact cause of the problem in order to understand why the solution works.

But I’m getting older. IE6 is getting older too. Hopefully it will be extinct before me.

The moral of this story: pick your battles.

Anybody who has used Wordpress and tried to embed a Youtube video will have suffered the frustration of code getting stripped whenever you edit a post.  Enter EasyTube -  a wonderful YouTube plugin for Wordpress.

Now, without any hassle whatsoever, I can post YouTube videos into Wordpress.

Here’s a video by Theresa Andersson.  The song makes you feel ill halfway through the second listen, but it’s a clever live performance.  Quite why she set up all her equipment in her kitchen baffles me.  It’s probably because that’s where her muse was or something (she does, after all, play barefoot, like any respectably self-indulgent singer songwriter).

Anyway, here it is:

I’ll be honest, I never got RSS feeds.

I’m no idiot when it comes to computers, but I’d ignore that little orange box with the pulse-wave-type-design at every opportunity.

But like Sky+ (well, probably - I don’t have it, but I’m told it’s great), once you get it, you can’t really live without it.

Well, okay, you could live without it.  It’s not like vitamins or Bruce Springsteen.

Google - unsurprisingly - is the source of my new found love for RSS.  Their Google Reader (good name) allows you to read all your favourite blogs from your iGoogle homepage.  To be fair, that’s probably what most RSS Readers do - but Google’s was dead-simple to set-up.

So in love I now am with RSS (and technologically fearless), I’ve set up my own feed.  So now, you can easily add this wonderful blog to popular feed readers by clicking that icon at the top of the left-hand menu.

If you’re scared, don’t be.  Look that little orange box straight in the eye and tell yourself “if I can put up with Rhianna’s godawful music, I can do anything.”