When you put something online, there’s always a risk it will be stolen by some lazy deceitful chancer looking to profit from your work.

The injustice of having your work stolen makes you feel violated and helpless but you don’t need to let these feelings roost because many web-hosts and social-media companies have established procedures to deal with website scraping and copyright infringement happening on their servers.

It recently happened to me and I got the thief’s website shut down in around three hours of discovering the theft.

The most important thing you need is proof you own the copyright. With online content theft, proof can be the URL of the original article, preferably date-stamped. …

A puzzle for algorithms to toy with. My husband’s doing his best to contain his smugness, but he’s been proven right. I’m just a piece of byte, and gutted that the store I’ve loved for 20 years has done a Brutus on me.

Et tu, Amazon? Why hast thou forsaken me?

We’ve been joined at the hip since 2000. For birthday treats, hobby supplies, daily essentials, and offbeat oddities, this Alladin’s cave has been my answer for everything. If I had a problem, a genii rose from a lamp to fix it.

They gave me time travel too. Through the wish list and “save for later” areas, I can track the path my life has taken and see when I nearly took certain roads, got serious about writing, became a psychotherapist, got my dog, went through trauma, started playing the guitar, delved into spirituality, got into…

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has been trawling the internet since 1996 caching snapshots of webpages, even entire websites, and holding them in a virtual museum at https://web.archive.org.

Here’s a snapshot it took of the Twitter homepage on 30th June 2007. The black bar along the top of the image shows the number of snapshots it’s taken of that page over the years.

The teacher is vexed. Instead of a name at the top of the page he’s grading, there’s a doodle of Robin Hood at the bottom.

That impertinent boy simply won’t stop spelling his name with a drawing. Detentions and canings haven’t convinced the delinquent to use ordinary letters so the teacher plots a new punishment as he scars the paper with long red slashes.

I’d rather train dogs, he fumes. And he really hates dogs.

It’s nineteen-fifty-something and the boy is chock-full of that youthful immortality we’ve all tasted. …

I keep a journal, and sometimes a bit of woebegone “twaddle” finds it way in. It’s not twaddle when I’m writing it but a few moments have to pass for perspective to kick in and then I shred the pages. There’s no desire to see those words again.

Without that perspective, all I’d see is that it’s dog-eat-dog out there in this big bad world. Or cat-eat-baby-bird. Misery is a given and man born of woman hath but a… yeah.

I once read that every single fear or anxiety you have stems from the thought of dying. But the fears are insiduous and don’t tell you that’s what they’re scared of. …

2020 has been a complicated year for business marketing. When Covid-19 first struck, a widespread panic made some people shame others for daring to work, and marketing budgets took a tumble.

Despite this, newsletter marketing stayed strong. Research has found more people are opening email during the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before.

Newsletters rank as one of my favourite marketing tools. They’re the perfect relationship-builder and you can use them for brand recognition, imparting knowledge, sharing information, and of course, sales.

They’re also perfect for people who don’t want to lurk around social media hoping to catch a glimpse of you. They want you in their inbox. …

In business, it’s not easy to accept that motivation doesn’t stay as enthusiastic as your drive.

In fact, you can be extremely driven and still finish the day with very little achieved.

Here’s why:

Drive: The mental brawn that gets you to take action.

Motivation: The mental fuel that decides whether or not you’re going to.

These are some signs that you’re running out of motivation:

• You can’t get your priorities straight
• It’s getting easy to say you’ll write that blog post, or market, or make a sales call tomorrow
• You’re stuck on a plan of action that hasn’t given you a monetary result in the last year, but you live in hope it’ll be different…

If you’re not in the position to hire a coach to help raise your game, there’s one thing you can start doing today to give yourself a leg-up.

Practice being consistent.

Be consistent with everything… from your mood to the time you eat.

As a creative, consistency is a shackle I resisted for as long as I could. But it wasn’t until I committed to being shackled-to-boredom-for-the-rest-of-my-life that life actually became more interesting than I could have imagined.

TOP SECRET: Being consistent gets things done!

In the past, I’d wait for the mood to take me before I did anything. That’s normal, right? …