It only took an hour or two to get unhacked, but we spent considerably longer puzzling over 4li’s manifesto: “If you hate Islam, We hate anyone who does not hate you!”

4li, we don’t hate anyone, except those two blokes in the BMW 1 series adverts. And hacking isn’t very nice.

The other part of it is that I enjoy freelance and I don’t like feeling that I’m doing it badly. The extra time should allow me to catch up with existing commitments before seeking out a few new ones.

The prospect seems to have given me a boost, even extending to some renewed enthusiasm for blogging. And today, my first day ‘off’, was good. I learned:

-I can see stereograms, but the ones with dots are shit.
-Pigeons actually bob their head so they can create motion parallax, and thus judge the distance of objects.
-A dog’s head with a man’s hands is inherently funny.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post about the state of the economy, but when I re-read it I realised I really didn’t know what I was talking about. It was easy not to worry about it back when it was the credit crunch. It sounded like breakfast.

I’ve been having something of an involuntary holiday from journalism of late. My mojo’s fucked off again for a start, but I’m less comfortable than I have been with work. An ex-colleague’s leaving do at the Dennis local stirred up a host of memories: I’ve come a long way in the last couple of years. It hasn’t all been the right direction.

So, normal Hackbashing will be resumed at some point. In the meantime, talking of Dennis, the man himself is in Brighton tomorrow night to read from his latest book of poetry. I’ll be there if I can get a ticket.

Also added plugin that can email you when someone adds a comment after yours – hope it’s useful.

I wasn’t sure why we started Hackbash, except that it might be a useful dumping ground for the discussions Charlie and I were having about our job and its place in journalism. That’s pretty much how it turned out.

These days Hackbash is a little less professional, a little more personal and a lot more profane than it started out, but I find it as useful as ever to be able to come here and set my thoughts in order.

Via Antony I’ve just seen the AJP Taylor quote: “I write so I know what to think”. That’s exactly it for me. The fact that some of you are good enough to offer the occasional sanity check helps, too – cheers.

The good ones, I am reminded, live in Google Analytics and tell you fascinating things about how few people find your blog interesting, and what it was that the other people were looking for when they visited it by mistake.

I’ve noticed one particularly amusing trend. There are people out there, according to Analytics, who are searching for very specific things. Let’s take the delightfully worded how to turn off the fucking autoformat of word 2007. I’m reassured that at the time of writing we’re topping Google for that particular search.

As the box above suggests, quite a few people are finding Hackbash through a search for how to disable Word’s annoying formatting foibles. What’s odd is that Analytics says they’re all leaving immediately without reading the post they land on – which tells them exactly how to do that.

Hmmm. The post opens with a lot of waffle, so I’ve just updated it to let people skip to the relevant bit. But looking through the terms people find us by, there’s no end to the very specific searches for which we’ve got very specific posts that people seemingly aren’t reading: define piecemail, iconic bt home hub (and iconic means) and mnemonic plague, for example.

No doubt most first-time visitors to Hackbash don’t find what they’re looking for. Perhaps a proportion are slumping inert on their keyboards as I embark on another tirade about BBC News. But maybe Google Analytics lies, too.

Are you sure you want to permanently delete this blog? it asked.

Yes, I duly confirmed.

I’ve just discovered that exporting the blog to our self-hosted WordPress install at the beginning of January didn’t bring 2007′s image uploads along, too. All this time, absolute URLs in 2007′s posts had linked back to the images stored on WordPress.com

Until I did has killded thems.

Anyone know how to edit WordPress themes?

Here, in the interests of being constructive, are my suggestions:

1 Choose the right blog – find somebody who blogs with a degree of authority and influence, and who might give the slightest shit about your brand, what it represents or the environment in which you operate. Read the about page, at least, and a couple of other posts.

2 Read the post – don’t comment for the sake of it. Read and properly understand the arguments being put forward, and whether they’re pertinent to your product or its values.

3 Understand sentiment – if your brand is mentioned, be sure to understand the context. Don’t make a generic comment if somebody has been disparaging about you. Either address their criticism or don’t comment.

4 Add value – don’t leave short, empty comments starting with “Some interesting points” or similar: that’s what spammers do before asking about my penis. Contribute opinion, provide some information, disagree constructively, whatever.

5 Be honest – if you’re leaving a comment on behalf of a brand, make it clear. If the comment passes all of the previous tests you should be contributing something useful.

Example

Applying this to the comment that raised my hackles:

1 Right blog? Not really. Perhaps it’s time to improve our about page. We don’t blog about consumer credit, but…

2 Right post – I did mention credit. It was in the context of being appalled by the awful calibre of the products advertised on Facebook.

3 Sentiment – I mentioned the brand in question because it offers credit cards at 39.9% APR. The implication was that this was rather high, but that a loan at 437.4% APR (provided by an entirely different company) was really taking the piss.

4 Add value – I felt that you didn’t understand the extent to which I was unsettled by the adverts in question, particularly the one that offers to “track your lady” like she’s a personal possession. You seem to accept that the worst-case changes I imagine will be introduced, but don’t seem troubled by them. Why not? Am I being over-sensitive? Are you considering them only from a marketer’s point of view?

More pertinently, no thoughts about 39.9%? The product’s obviously targeting people with a higher credit risk, so perhaps the rate is fair? You’re commenting on behalf of a comparison website, so you should know more about it than me – is a credit card the best solution for people with bad credit? Perhaps the target group wouldn’t qualify for a loan at a more favourable rate?

5 Be honest – no real complaints here. The commenter used the company name and provided an email address. Personally I think it’s more open to put a link in the body of your comment where you can better explain what it links to and why you’re providing it, but I know that this is a bit hit-and-miss given that some blogs strip html from comments.