There's a campaign over at Terry Wogan's TOGs site to get Danny Baker moved from his slot on BBC London's Breakfast show to Radio 2. It appears that his appearances on the Terry & Gaby show have endeared him to a whole new audience. With the listeners of Radio 2's most popular show on his side maybe there's a chance this time.

If you'd like to hear Danny Baker freed from the constraints of no music, traffic reports every 15 minutes and, with a bit of luck, also free from Amy Lame, head over there to sign the petition.

It was announed yesterday that from September 2003 all visitors to the US are going to have their fingerprints and photograph taken on arrival to 'help fight terrorism'. Could someone tell me any act of terrorism, anywhere in the world, that would have been prevented by this? If someone is already suspected of terrorism they won't be let in to the country; if intelligence is gained after they enter the country it's too late, and a fingerprint won't help track them down.

Consider this: in October this year, someone other than me enters the US with a faked copy of my passport. The US fingerprints and photgraphs them, and their details are added to the database as me as they are none the wiser. Unaware of this, I then visit the US some time after. As soon as they take my fingerprints it is going to be flagged up that I've visited before and the fingerprints don't match. Imagine the hassle trying to prove you are who you say you are, and that the first person was the imposter.

This just won't work unless other countries share information; as far as I know the UK government doesn't have my fingerprints, and even if they did, there is no plan to share it.

All this is going to hurt tourism. The last time I was in the US, in June 2002, the wait at immigration was an hour. After a long flight this was just about bearable - everyone understood that security would be increased after September 11 (even though you spend 5 minutes getting asked stupid questions that are not going to stop anyone). These new measures are going to double the time it takes to get in to the country. After an 8 hour flight, a 2 hour wait would be just too long. My tourist pounds will be going elsewhere, as, I suspect will many others.

It seems it doesn't matter how big you are, it's the simple over-sights that catch you out. Logging on to my adsense account this evening I was presented with this security window warning me the certificate had expired. Looking at the details, it expired at 19:52:39 BST.



They may be worth billions, but they need to spend a few extra quid on someone to do the admin. I've emailed them to let them know; let's see if they reply.

Googlebot was here for it's daily visit this evening - nothing unusual there - but what was strange was a couple of the URLs it tried to spider - /atom.xmlindex.phpatom.xml & /atom.xmlindex.php. Whilst this site is written in php and does contain feeds (which are already indexed), both of these returned 404s as I don't have these files on this domain and never have had. Judging by the filenames, it was attempting to find an atom feed, a syndication feed similar to RSS.

I can only think of two reasons Googlebot should have tried to spider these addresses - either someone has manually submitted them to Google or it is trying new tricks to keep ahead of the competition. The former seems rather unlikely as it would be a complete waste of time, which only leaves the latter. They already have Google News, which syndicates stories from 4500 news sites; perhaps they are planning to do the same with blog feeds or maybe have a dedicated blog search. Could this see them splitting out blogs from the main index entirely? Probably none of these, but I'm going to keep an eye on the logs, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has had similar visits.

If you're looking for a reason to choose b2evolution over any other blogging software, then your search is over - the latest (beta) release contains a fantastic new feature, AntiSpam Deluxe. If you find yourself getting spammed, either via referers or in the comments, you can immediately delete all instances of the URL and instantly block it. Better still there is a central domain blacklist, so if you update regularly, via a single click, you can block spam before it reaches you.

How was Wordpress chosen as the official successor to b2? b2evolution has easy installation, straight-forward skinning and powerful features, what more can you ask for?

In the vain hope of making a bit of cash, I applied for Google's AdSense program. I wasn't sure I'd be accepted, as one of their program policies is that they don't generally accept personal pages. Well, it seems that the content must be just far enough away from their definition of a personal page, as this morning I received a 'Congratulations, you Adsense application has been approved' email from them.

Concious of not turning the site into a billboard, I've decided not to put the ads on the front page, and have so far only put them on the gallery pages. When I can work out how to do it in b2evolution, I may also put them on the permalink pages. I'm not looking (or expecting) to make a fortune from it, but enough to cover my hosting costs would be great, and anything over a bonus.

**UPDATE** 14/03/2004
Well I'll be damned if I can work out how to get the Adsense links to only display on certain pages, so they're going on all of them.