Well there’s a varied headline for you.

Okay, first things first. Fried Chicken.

I once made the Pioneer Womans Fried chicken strips. All three of the males living in my household were over the moon with it. (It kicks KFC’s ass royally and is really worth trying)

Since that first time I made it, it has been requested nearly every weekend since.

Yeah, my jeans are really pissed about *that* but moving on.

I have played around with the recipe somewhat, and added my own concoction of spices to the buttermilk and the flour that you use, and the last batch I made, my husband pronounced as ‘ohmuhgoshzisispuhfect‘ whilst burning himself in his eagerness to eat one right out of the pan.

Since I have this dodgy thyroid, I’m really *very* careful with how I prepare foods and most nights it’s strictly low fat grilling that goes on, but I make the exception with the chicken, well, because it *is* delicious and it’s the only food that I ‘fry’ as such.

So yesterday being Saturday, the request for fried chicken was yet again made, and I set about making the buttermilk and soaking the chicken in it.  I pottered on, letting Skip stir the flour while I added salt and cayenne pepper and cumin etc and then as I started dipping (in fact yesterday’s version involved double dipping) I suddenly realised that I didn’t have enough cooking oil to be able to be able to finish the dish.

I had barely uttered the words “Honey, I need more cooking oil” when there was a vague tinkle of car keys, shortly followed by the screeching of car tyres in the driveway. About 5.6 seconds later I had two brand new bottles in front of me courtesy of our corner shop.

My mouth literally fell open.

Had I say, needed, I dunno, lettuce, or tomato, or even butter at this stage, it would have been met with a ‘oh well, do without’ comment or something like that. (I must admit, when the PMS is strong with me, the hubby has the same reaction about fetching me chocolate. After 10 years together he’s learned to pick his battles I suppose).

Now I’m just trying to figure out what I can leverage as a bargaining chip *next* time. Honey, if I make you fried chicken will you rub my back for an hour?

Okay, onto some internet stuff.

Remember a long long time ago, I talked about Google Page Rank and Alexa? You can read it again at that link. Anyway, after I wrote that, google did this huge swoop on blogs and cut the page rankings of any blogs that appeared to be doing sponsored posting. One of the side effects of this swoop, was that blogging platforms built into their commenting sections, a little tag called ‘no-follow’. What this meant is that when google ‘crawls’ a site to check for new content that it’s little spider bots completely ignored any links with the no-follow tag, grossly reducing the ‘respect’ of the website.

What this meant is that when you left a comment on a popular blog it no longer gave your website a boost.  Remember, when a site with a higher page rank than yours links to you, it counts in your favour with google, bringing you bigger traffic and in blogworld traffic=money. So here is me, Ness page rank 2 on my graphic design blog, going to say, a page rank 6 blog and leaving a comment, and baddabing, google looks at me with a bit more respect. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, but then they went and changed things).

So as a result a lot of people stopped commenting on blogs. A lot of blogs that had been popular lost google ranking, and with it, a lot of opportunities to produce content for remuneration disappeared, and I still can’t believe that they axed things the way that they did, but there is some good news!

An enterprising group of people have written some plugins which removes the ‘no-follow’ tag from the comments boxes on websites.

You may have noticed this little graphic now in my sidebar:

What this means is that I have removed the no-follow tags from my comments page, and that if you leave a comment on my blog, it will count towards improving your rank in google. I have done the same for my graphic design blog, my photography blog, and for my magazine blog. So leaving comments on any of those three blogs will count in your favour.  I’m just sayin’. If you would like some help removing your own (wordpress) no follow tags, I can help you out with that, it’s the simple installation of a plugin, and then activating it.

A word on linking.

Linking in the blog world is a polite thing to do. It’s proper netiquette, if you talk about someone, say I want to mention something about bathtubjunkie, or Lisanne, or Kristi, or Mel or other Mel, then the correct thing to do, is to pass on the link juice by linking to those blogs. Otherwise it’s like gossiping about someone behind their back. Trust me, it’s appreciated. That goes for re-tweeting things too! You don’t have to retweet everything verbatim, just the things that you like.

In the same vein, if you read something you like, and the blog offers a ’share this’ button, with links to things like stumbleupon, digg, facebook etc, then if you feel like you enjoyed the post, then share it. Remember, some of us make a living from blogging and any extra traffic is appreciated whole-heartedly! (Feel free to share anything on any of my OTHER blogs, just don’t mention *this* one on facebook please!).

If you’re interested in more stuff about Technorati Tags: SEO (search engine optimisation) or Technorati Tags: SMM (Social Media Marketing) then you might want to subscribe to nessworld, because I’ll be talking about that a lot there in the coming weeks.

Okay, now onto the photos.

We drove a bit to find a nice quiet spot today where Skip could practice riding his new bicycle, and we could push Flip (who is currently awake at 11pm and refusing to go back to sleep I might add…) in his new tricycle.  We ended up going to a local cricket clubs sports fields, it was quiet (but not too quiet..that’s never a good sign) but we spotted another dad pushing his son along on his bicycle too, and another guy hitting golf balls, plus the ever faithful ADT security guys patrolling so we felt safe enough to let the kids run wild for a bit.

We made sure that the boys stayed outside the cricket oval ropes, so no grounds keepers would be annoyed by the bike tracks (not that we saw any).

Many of you overseas folks probably think I’m nuts talking about security like that, but in order to survive here (mentally and physically!), you need to be realistic, and alert, and not do anything stupid. So I’d rather be cautious and be aware of who or what is in my surroundings rather than just throwing caution to the wind and saying c’est la vie.

It turns out the local cricket field had a bit of a play area too.

It was such a glorious day, and we even had some running races. I was actually surprised by the sensation of running again. The weather was just right, the temperature perfect, and we were running anti-clockwise around the pitch (the same direction as an Technorati Tags: athletics track) and I had the most vivid flashbacks of training, and competing (gosh is it really 13 years ago already?).

Now before you all think I’m a slow poke and this far behind, I kept running back and forth like a complete nicompoop taking photos and then jogging to catch up again.

…and lastly…

This little dude.

Boy, oh boy. He melts my heart daily.  My older boy, is at an age now, where he melts my heart, periodically, and has me tearing out clumps of my own hair inbetween. Right now, the little dude is at an all time high in terms of cuteness factor. He is talking, a LOT. But only about 20 percent of it makes any sense.  Physically he is very big for 20mths, so people sometimes wonder why he isn’t more vocal, but he’s really still technically a very little dude.  So today when I said to the husband, “I wonder if he wants a yoghurt.” Through all the baby talk I heard, “Yah, I wanna yah-yah.” Then he went to the fridge and pointed at the yoghurt, followed by going to the cutlery drawer and helping himself to a teaspoon.  We were *so* impressed! Of course, I’m sure your kids were all doing higher mathematics at this age, but my boy? Gosh I couldn’t be prouder!

Hey, Lotus just announced the prizes for her Weekly Winners of 2009!

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Tags: Alexa Ranking, Google Page Rank, Link Juice, SEO, SMM, What is 'No Follow'?