Entries from January 2009 ↓

Apostrophes in street signs have been banned by a council because its staff spend too much time dealing with complaints about grammar.

From now on, no sign produced by Birmingham City Council will contain the punctuation mark.

Debates over whether Kings Norton really should be King’s – or even Kings’ – Norton may rage on, but they will be useless.

And nearby Druids Heath – which was never actually home to one, let alone many, druids – will never take on the possessive, no matter how furious local apostrophe advocates become.

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

However the decision was described as “absolute defeatism” by John Richards, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

from: Telegraph

The simplest is when an apostrophe replaces a letter

• It is = It’s.
• I am = I’m

Singular Possessive.

An Apostrophe is used to indicate possession.

• E.g. Richard’s computer. (the computer belonging to Richard)

Singular Possessive ending in s

• Socrates’ discourses (the teachings of Socrates)

Plural Possessive

If many people are involved we put the apostrophe at the end

• The nurses’ uniform (the uniform belonging to the many nurses.)

Google’s grip on the internet seems to take on far reaching proportions, there seems to be no area that Google don’t seek to dominate.

Recently, they bough Feedburner. Last week, there was a notice that we would have to swtich over to Google Feedburner, so I made the switch. In the process, I seemed to lose about 40% of my hard won readers. On some blogs it was more than 50%.

• 8 Effective ways to increase RSS readership

Before upgrading wordpress, it is always advisable to save a copy of your mysql database.

1. An easy way is to install WP automatica database backup - this saves going into phpMyadmin. Once installed just click link and backup a copy of database to computer. It can be uninstalled after backing up a database.
2. Wordpress automatic upgrade Just install and follow simple instructions. It has worked fine for me.

Improve Performance of Wordpress

• WP-cache Install and then activate. you can increase the expiration time from 3600 to 9993600 to make it more static.
• WP-Super Cache offers even better performance making pages static. It requires rewriting .htaccess. Though if the file is writable it will do it automatically. Wp-super cache also enables you to just run ordinary wp-cache