Tag Archive for thebabywebsite

TheBabyWebsite’s Down aka Passing The Buck

I’m having an ‘Angry Day’ today. Tamping mad I am. Having spent a month or more researching an extremely funny, if a bit daft, story about Silly Names, we duly sent it out to various national and regional newspapers alongside a shed-load of radio and telly people too.

We were over-the-moon this morning to see the ‘story’ had made The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Record, The Sport along with the Telegraph, Sun, Daily Mail and BBC websites. Great news , we think. Lots of new people looking at TheBabyWebsite! Loads more people joining….. Full of sunny optimism we were.

Just as the first phone calls started coming in from journalists wanting a bit more information, the unthinkable happens. TheBabyWebsite goes ‘down’! Crashes or whatever you want to call it? Server problems? Noone knows.

The techie bods start investigating as do the hosting company and the server management people. The words pillar and post come to mind along with several unprintable words which I’m sure you can add in your heads but possibly not with quite as much feeling as me right now.

It’s been 6 hours now and it’s still not ‘sorted’. The various server-involved parties are apparently passing the buck left, right and centre.

ARGHHHH…. this ‘running a website’ malarkey is fraught with all sorts of stress-inducing episodes.

If you’re reading this and TheBabyWebsite is still not up and running then spare a thought for us ……………..

Kathryn Crawford

X Factor – Sob Factor

The third and fourth quarters of the year are upon us again and the time has come to endure another few months of X Factor. 

Now we on TheBabyWebsite.com are regular followers of X-Factor, and have been since it started.  However, whether it is something to do with our age, or simply the repetitive nature of things, we are becoming rather Meldrewesque over certain things.

The standards appear to be very high this year – that I can’t deny.  I find myself with even a slight excitement at the potential of the final few live shows, but these Meldrew moments…. well…

OK, I’ll cut to the chase! I’ll spit it out for you!

X Factor?  Flippin Boo-hoo, sob-sob, cry your bl***y eyes out factor I reckon!  What is it with the generations of so-called ‘men’ these days?  Can they not answer a simple question without crying their eyes out? (or is their hair gel getting in their eyes?).

I don’t remember crying that much even when I lost half my teeth as a child to an unmerciful cricket ball doing 70 mph!  I do remember a tear welling up when my oldest was born though, so perhaps I do have just a couple of grams of ‘new man’ in me somewhere.

Come on you bunch of Cissies!  Bite your tongues and get on with it!  Save the crying for when you’re all old enough to receive your own gas bills!

I can’t remember many other occasions when I’ve sat on a Saturday night cussing and grunting at the television screen.  Aaaargh!  Pull yourselves together for heaven’s sake!  You’re driving me nuts!

It’s going to be a hard-fought race I think – If the Nancy boys can stop crying for long enough to perform, that is!  Bunch of wet rags as they are!

Am I alone in my thoughts and feelings? Because if I am, wheel me off to the appropriate psychiatric unit and do what you need to do.  I promise I won’t cry!

Nigel.

The Baby (Website)

thebabywebsite logo

It’s always hard to know when to start, isn’t it!

I’m Nigel, one half of the editorial team at www.thebabywebsite.com . Although we’re cutting in well into the site development, there are still plenty of new things going on. Kathryn, my better half, is probably the better known of the two of us, but we’re still a team.

After receiving one of the latest Kia family cars to review this week, the phone rang and our friends at Red Dragon Radio were looking for comment on the latest Baby-related research story, which is the age-old debate about smoking and pregnancy.

Should they or shouldn’t they? …. was the inevitable question. A study commissioned by a school of economics rings my alarm bells every time – call me a cynic – so I had a very brief “think”. Never having been pregnant myself, how can I answer a question like that? Stupid statement! Of course I can answer it. I’m a staunch anti-smoker, strongly supported by K as a result of her enforced passively smoking developing years. The amount of evidence is mind-boggling. The aforementioned report focused purely on the birth-weight issue and seemed to skirt around all the serious stuff like premature birth, stillbirth, cot-death and such.

I managed to temper my tongue sufficiently to get through the interview uninjured and then went to Coffee Mania for a quick Latte (skinny nowadays I hasten to add).

The morning now out of the way, it’s time for some work. Reviews take up a fair bit of our time these days. We communicate to the child-bearing and child-rearing world the merits of this and that, be it a family car, a short break with or without the kids, a gizmo or gadget that a PR company wants us to praise. The up-side is the wealth of discounted or even free offers we get in return for such preachings. Call it what you will, I reckon it’s a weird form of extortion. Just try to imagine the stress of having to live these luxury hotel and posh car experiences every few weeks, to have to write about it, fit it in and around your working week. Could you do it?

I personally reckon we should be campaigning for a 25th hour, to allow the last things that we miss at the end of each day not to be missed and therefore not passed onto the following day.

The trouble is… I’m now going to be using up another chunk of editorial time from my day to describe my editorial day. What a waste! Should be preparing for something new and exciting.

Before I go, a little bit about my (our) site.

Launched Summer 2006 as a full-time enterprise by Kathryn and I, it has experienced a steady and in many ways reassuring growth. Growth, when you’re in business is never fast enough, I know, but as long as it’s in the right direction, there’s some justification. We currently entertain almost 10,000 registered members who hit our site around two and a half million times a month. Sounds impressive, but it could be far better. Shall I set a target of 5 million hits a month and see how long it takes to get there? Yeah, why not!

Back Soon….