Recently several people have asked me questions about tagging on Facebook. I'm not as up to speed with Facebook as I am with Twitter, but I reckon I've got the hang of tagging - so tag along with me and I'll explain it.....
There are actually two things known as tagging on Facebook. I'll call them tagging in an update and tagging a photo.
If you tag somebody in an update, you write a message on your own wall that can also be seen on the wall of the person or business you have tagged. Why would you want to do this? Well, you might want to send a message to a friend without visiting their wall, or you might want to send the same message to several people at once, but if you are a comper the most likely reason will be that the promoter has asked you to write something on your wall, in order to enter a competition. Imagine you are entering a competition run by Bloggs's Biscuits and they ask you to write "I love Bloggs's Biscuits" on your wall. If you just write it like that, only your friends will see it, and Bloggs's won't know you have entered, so you need to TAG them. To do this, type an @ symbol and then start typing Bloggs's Biscuits immediately, without a space. A drop down menu will appear and you can select Bloggs's Biscuits from it and when you have finished typing, the @ symbol will no longer show up but the words Bloggs's Biscuits will be highlighted.
If you have tagged somebody in an update, the message appears on both your wall and theirs. And anyone who clicks on the highlighted word will be taken to the tagged person's page.
Tagging a photo. This was originally intended so that groups of friends could tell each other who was in a photo, which is why you are sometimes asked to "Click on a person's face" when there are no faces in the photo. When a photo is used for a competition it is just an easy way for the promoter to collect entries while sometimes showing you some of their products. Before you can tag a photo, you will need to "Like" the promoter's page. Once you have Liked the page, you should see the words "Tag this photo" in the list under the lower left hand corner of the photo. (Unless,of course, Facebook is playing up, as it was when I was writing this!). When you have clicked on "tag this photo" you will see the "Click on a person's face" message I mentioned earlier, but unless the promoter has asked you to tag a specific part of the photo you can click anywhere. Click on the photo and choose your own name from the drop down menu that appears, and then click on "finished tagging" to make sure your tag is saved.There you are, done!
The snag is that a photo can only be tagged 50 times. Any more than that and you will get a message saying the photo is full. Sometimes a promoter will run a quickie competition for a small prize and close it as soon as the 50 tags are reached;sometimes they have photos of several items and ask you to tag your favourite; sometimes they will keep on adding more photos each time one is filled up, and sometimes once the photo is full they will say that you can enter by commenting on the photo instead. And sometimes they simply don't know about the 50 tag limit and are surprised when they start getting stroppy messages!
Sometimes when you tag a photo you are asked to tag several friends too but in fact it is often possible to tag friends and enter on their behalf anyway. Do be careful when doing this though, in case the competition only allows one entry per person. It would be a great pity if they entered too, maybe on a different photo where you hadn't seen it, and you ended up disqualifying them instead of doing the good turn you had intended.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Keep the kids amused - and they could win a prize!
For most parents, this is half term week- and as usual the weather is wet and miserable. I've spent most of today out searching for new competitions to put in Grape Vine, and every shop and supermarket is full of grumpy children who really REALLY don't want to spend their school holidays shopping and harassed parents and grandparents who have resorted to bribing the kids with sweets (and will regret it later when the sugar rush and e-numbers start to take effect).
Why not try to channel some of this energy into creativity - and at the same time put your child in the running to win a lovely prize? Artful Adventures are offering your child the chance to win an art set worth around £100 consisting of:
•Wooden easel (choice of colour pink or blue)
• Mister Maker bumper craft box
• Play Dog Magic Ice Cream Playset
• Rainbow Aquadraw
To enter, you will need to print off the paint by numbers sheet and then get your child to colour it using any technique they like - painting, crayons, collage, glitter - the more creative the better! Then upload an image of the finished result to a blog post or a photo sharing site, making sure you include the age of the artist a link to Fly Thomas Cook's free online printable games and a link to Artful Adventures' competition page. Finally, pop back to the original page and leave a message saying you have entered - The instructions don't say you need to leave a link to your entry but I'm sure it would be helpful.
The competition closes on March 6th and you will all be very pleased to learn that the winner is going to be judged rather than being chosen by public vote.
Why not try to channel some of this energy into creativity - and at the same time put your child in the running to win a lovely prize? Artful Adventures are offering your child the chance to win an art set worth around £100 consisting of:
•Wooden easel (choice of colour pink or blue)
• Mister Maker bumper craft box
• Play Dog Magic Ice Cream Playset
• Rainbow Aquadraw
To enter, you will need to print off the paint by numbers sheet and then get your child to colour it using any technique they like - painting, crayons, collage, glitter - the more creative the better! Then upload an image of the finished result to a blog post or a photo sharing site, making sure you include the age of the artist a link to Fly Thomas Cook's free online printable games and a link to Artful Adventures' competition page. Finally, pop back to the original page and leave a message saying you have entered - The instructions don't say you need to leave a link to your entry but I'm sure it would be helpful.
The competition closes on March 6th and you will all be very pleased to learn that the winner is going to be judged rather than being chosen by public vote.
Friday, 18 February 2011
My life in cookbooks
As most of you know, I am a keen cook as well as a comper, and have sometimes combined my hobbies to win some wonderful prizes in recipe and food related competitions, including a cookery holiday to Italy, a gourmet tour of India and a new kitchen.
So where does my inspiration come from? I love shopping for food,watching cookery programmes on TV, wandering round farmers' markets at home or abroad and collecting recipes. I have hundreds and hundreds of recipe books, as well as piles of cookery magazines and several folders and photo albums stuffed with recipes cut out of magazines and newspapers or scribbled down on scraps of paper. One of my favourite recipes, Jamaican brown stew chicken, is scribbled down on the back of the till receipt from the restaurant where it was served to me. It wouldn't seem right to make a fair copy of it now!
I can't list all my books - it would take weeks and you'd get bored (you probably already are) and when it comes to the classics and the celebrity chefs, you've probably got them yourself or you aren't interested. So apart from possible one mention of Delia before she became famous, you're not going to see Jamie or Gordon, Nigella or Gary or even the unmatchable Elizabeth David mentioned here. Instead, I am going to use selected books from my collection to illustrate an autobiography.
When I left home for University, I literally didn't even know how to warm up a tin of beans. And since I was going into fully catered accommodation, my parents saw no need to teach me. However one of the many crises of the 1970s (was it the oil crisis? the miners' strike?) meant that the college decided to save fuel by closing the kitchens at weekends, and my options were to either find a boyfriend who could afford to take me out for every meal, live on crisps all weekend, or learn to cook.
So off I went to the bookshop but was horrified at the price of all the recipe books. I couldn't buy them on "tick" so I had to find some alternative I could pay for gradually. Help was at hand in the form of Cordon Bleu Monthly, which had just started to be published in 18 monthly parts.
So in the space of a few weeks I went from being totally unable to cook to producing sophisticated (for the time) Cordon Bleu dishes and eating meals far better than those served up by the college. Forty years on, those magazines are still in regular use and have pride of place in my bookshelf.
After University I married Mark (see my link to Marksvegplot on the right for more about our love of food) who was at that time an officer in the Brigade of Gurkhas. We went to join his regiment in Brunei and I immediately became interested in the local food, influenced by Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Singapore. There was only one bookshop in the town where we lived, but from there I got two books which have had a huge influence on my cooking over the years. "Art of Indonesian Cooking - the ABCs" is still one I use on an almost weekly basis; it contains many of our all time family favourites.
From Brunei we moved to Hong Kong, where we were to live on and off for several years, until Mark left the Army. I have dozens of Chinese recipe books, but my favourites are a collection of small bilingual (right up to this point I've been thinking "Must not type bisexual, must not type bisexual...." because that's what I jokingly call them) which contain the sort of everyday recipes eaten in Chinese homes and the more "ordinary" restaurants visited by local people rather than tourists. Some of the recipes are ones I use over and over again - others, such as one that needs 10 pairs of duck's web, 3 oz fish maw, several xanthoxylum seeds,a piece of old orange peel and some lard, are kept just for entertainment value. The translation is quaint in places too: it was a relief to get to the end of one rather unpleasant sounding recipe and read "discard all ingredients".
By now it was time to start thinking about starting a family and then buying our first home - naturally that meant we had less to spend on food and I had to start collecting books of a different kind. Ones about budget cookery! You can see from the condition of them that they have become much loved favourites - in fact these books now live in a basket in my kitchen so I can grab them for quick reference. And there's a little glimpse of St Delia, with her book "Frugal Food" which was first published long before she became a TV celebrity, and was reprinted in a bigger, glossier format a year or two ago.
Now moving on to the present day. Naturally I have bought recipe books from all the places I have lived and visited, but my knowledge of food around the world has been enhanced by the beautiful books in the Culinaria series. These books are far too good to cook from!
Food from the early to mid 20th century is a particular interest of mine and I have an extensive collection of both old and new recipe books from and about the period, from promotional leaflets to facsimile books. My favourite is called "Economical Cookery", published in 1937. It starts with a suggested menu for every meal of the year, with Sunday's menus being costed out. How eating has changed! For instance today's menu should be
BREAKFAST Prunes, coddled eggs
LUNCH Celery soup, Skate with black butter, Sauté potatoes, Honey Cap Puddings
EVENING MEAL Welsh rarebit, Coffee rice mould.
Sunday's roast beef would have been a 4lb piece of topside at a total cost of 3/- (15p).
I'm going to finish with a couple of real gems from my collection. The first is one that Mark brought home when he went to Papua New Guinea on Army business. Kaikai Aniani is a fascinating book about food of the area, past and present, showing how all sorts of things such as crocodiles, turtles, snakes and even people are (or were) prepared and eaten, and including such tempting treats as Sago Grub Satay and Flying Fox and Prune Casserole.
The second is called "The Erotic Baker" - a collection of recipes with rather naughty names, designed to be dished up in suggestive ways. This book always reminds me of a rather stuffy army dinner party we went to just after I bought the book. You know those moments when the whole room goes quiet and all that can be heard is one voice? Well that happened to me just as I was telling the woman next to me about the book. My voice rang out across the silent room, ".... and of course Penis Pie." The General had to call for another gin and tonic.....
So where does my inspiration come from? I love shopping for food,watching cookery programmes on TV, wandering round farmers' markets at home or abroad and collecting recipes. I have hundreds and hundreds of recipe books, as well as piles of cookery magazines and several folders and photo albums stuffed with recipes cut out of magazines and newspapers or scribbled down on scraps of paper. One of my favourite recipes, Jamaican brown stew chicken, is scribbled down on the back of the till receipt from the restaurant where it was served to me. It wouldn't seem right to make a fair copy of it now!
I can't list all my books - it would take weeks and you'd get bored (you probably already are) and when it comes to the classics and the celebrity chefs, you've probably got them yourself or you aren't interested. So apart from possible one mention of Delia before she became famous, you're not going to see Jamie or Gordon, Nigella or Gary or even the unmatchable Elizabeth David mentioned here. Instead, I am going to use selected books from my collection to illustrate an autobiography.
When I left home for University, I literally didn't even know how to warm up a tin of beans. And since I was going into fully catered accommodation, my parents saw no need to teach me. However one of the many crises of the 1970s (was it the oil crisis? the miners' strike?) meant that the college decided to save fuel by closing the kitchens at weekends, and my options were to either find a boyfriend who could afford to take me out for every meal, live on crisps all weekend, or learn to cook.
So off I went to the bookshop but was horrified at the price of all the recipe books. I couldn't buy them on "tick" so I had to find some alternative I could pay for gradually. Help was at hand in the form of Cordon Bleu Monthly, which had just started to be published in 18 monthly parts.
So in the space of a few weeks I went from being totally unable to cook to producing sophisticated (for the time) Cordon Bleu dishes and eating meals far better than those served up by the college. Forty years on, those magazines are still in regular use and have pride of place in my bookshelf.
After University I married Mark (see my link to Marksvegplot on the right for more about our love of food) who was at that time an officer in the Brigade of Gurkhas. We went to join his regiment in Brunei and I immediately became interested in the local food, influenced by Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Singapore. There was only one bookshop in the town where we lived, but from there I got two books which have had a huge influence on my cooking over the years. "Art of Indonesian Cooking - the ABCs" is still one I use on an almost weekly basis; it contains many of our all time family favourites.
From Brunei we moved to Hong Kong, where we were to live on and off for several years, until Mark left the Army. I have dozens of Chinese recipe books, but my favourites are a collection of small bilingual (right up to this point I've been thinking "Must not type bisexual, must not type bisexual...." because that's what I jokingly call them) which contain the sort of everyday recipes eaten in Chinese homes and the more "ordinary" restaurants visited by local people rather than tourists. Some of the recipes are ones I use over and over again - others, such as one that needs 10 pairs of duck's web, 3 oz fish maw, several xanthoxylum seeds,a piece of old orange peel and some lard, are kept just for entertainment value. The translation is quaint in places too: it was a relief to get to the end of one rather unpleasant sounding recipe and read "discard all ingredients".
By now it was time to start thinking about starting a family and then buying our first home - naturally that meant we had less to spend on food and I had to start collecting books of a different kind. Ones about budget cookery! You can see from the condition of them that they have become much loved favourites - in fact these books now live in a basket in my kitchen so I can grab them for quick reference. And there's a little glimpse of St Delia, with her book "Frugal Food" which was first published long before she became a TV celebrity, and was reprinted in a bigger, glossier format a year or two ago.
Food from the early to mid 20th century is a particular interest of mine and I have an extensive collection of both old and new recipe books from and about the period, from promotional leaflets to facsimile books. My favourite is called "Economical Cookery", published in 1937. It starts with a suggested menu for every meal of the year, with Sunday's menus being costed out. How eating has changed! For instance today's menu should be
BREAKFAST Prunes, coddled eggs
LUNCH Celery soup, Skate with black butter, Sauté potatoes, Honey Cap Puddings
EVENING MEAL Welsh rarebit, Coffee rice mould.
Sunday's roast beef would have been a 4lb piece of topside at a total cost of 3/- (15p).
I'm going to finish with a couple of real gems from my collection. The first is one that Mark brought home when he went to Papua New Guinea on Army business. Kaikai Aniani is a fascinating book about food of the area, past and present, showing how all sorts of things such as crocodiles, turtles, snakes and even people are (or were) prepared and eaten, and including such tempting treats as Sago Grub Satay and Flying Fox and Prune Casserole.
The second is called "The Erotic Baker" - a collection of recipes with rather naughty names, designed to be dished up in suggestive ways. This book always reminds me of a rather stuffy army dinner party we went to just after I bought the book. You know those moments when the whole room goes quiet and all that can be heard is one voice? Well that happened to me just as I was telling the woman next to me about the book. My voice rang out across the silent room, ".... and of course Penis Pie." The General had to call for another gin and tonic.....
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
New TV quiz show seeks contestants
Calling All Quizzers!!
Passionate quizzers needed for pilot for brand new Channel Four quiz show. If you love a challenge and think you're King or Queen of Quizzes, we'd love to hear from you!
Contact hayley on mailto:hayley.brunton@stv.tv
Passionate quizzers needed for pilot for brand new Channel Four quiz show. If you love a challenge and think you're King or Queen of Quizzes, we'd love to hear from you!
Contact hayley on mailto:hayley.brunton@stv.tv
Sunday, 13 February 2011
superlucky - a comper's blog: How to Run an Online Voting Competition
superlucky - a comper's blog: How to Run an Online Voting Competition: "So, you’ve read about what happens When Voting Competitions Go Wrong, and you still want to run one? Here’s some advice to ensure your compe..."
superlucky - a comper's blog: When Voting Competitions Go Wrong
superlucky - a comper's blog: When Voting Competitions Go Wrong: "So you want to run a fun competition, where the public are encouraged to visit your website or Facebook page and vote for their favourite en..."
Longer Tweets - a blessing or a curse?
We're a chatty lot, aren't we? And that means the 140 character restriction on Twitter can be very frustrating. Especially for compers. If a promoter asks you to retweet their message to enter a comp, and then uses up most of their 140 characters, the tweet becomes too long to RT the "old" way, by typing in RT @theusername and then copying in the message. But we tend to feel insecure about using the RT button. Even on NewTwitter, it is difficult to be convinced that tweets done this way will show in the promoter's @ mentions list.
So those of us who use Tweet Deck were delighted to see that they now allow tweets of unlimited length. Now we can do an old-style copy-and-paste RT for any comp..... can't we?
Unfortunately not. If you write a long tweet using tweet deck, only the first 129 characters of it are displayed on other Twitter platforms and Twitter's own pages. After that it says ... (cont) and then a link to a deck.ly page where the full tweet is displayed.
Now when you are chatting to friends, they will (we hope) be happy to click on the link to read what you have to say. But if a promoter gets hundreds, or thousands, of comp entries, then even if entries are being read by a human, they won't have time to bother. With most comps that isn't a problem, as long as everyone is RTing the same message and you don't have to include a tiebreaker or answer a question.
But what IS a problem to compers is the fact that many messages that need to be RTd include a hashtag - a word preceded by a # sign - to help the promoter search for entries. There are lots of Twitter search tools they can use to find specific hashtags, so for instance if they have asked you to RT a message including the hashtag #grapevine they can put that one word into a search and find every tweet that includes it.
Hashtags are most often used at the end of tweets - and this is a problem with longer tweets. Because a hashtag appearing after the 129 characters of a longer tweet does not show up in any Twitter search. No, not even Tweet Deck's own search, which displays the full text of longer messages!
The same thing applies to @ mentions- in a longer message, any @ mention afterthe 129th character won't show up onthe mentions page of the person it refers to. Although this probably doesn't affect compers much it is worth bearing in mind when chatting to friends and making lists for #FollowFriday.
So usung Tweet Deck's longer message function means your comp entries might never be seen! My advice is to either use the old-style RT and edit your tweets to make sure they come to no more than 140 characters, or, if you trust it, use the RT button.
So those of us who use Tweet Deck were delighted to see that they now allow tweets of unlimited length. Now we can do an old-style copy-and-paste RT for any comp..... can't we?
Unfortunately not. If you write a long tweet using tweet deck, only the first 129 characters of it are displayed on other Twitter platforms and Twitter's own pages. After that it says ... (cont) and then a link to a deck.ly page where the full tweet is displayed.
Now when you are chatting to friends, they will (we hope) be happy to click on the link to read what you have to say. But if a promoter gets hundreds, or thousands, of comp entries, then even if entries are being read by a human, they won't have time to bother. With most comps that isn't a problem, as long as everyone is RTing the same message and you don't have to include a tiebreaker or answer a question.
But what IS a problem to compers is the fact that many messages that need to be RTd include a hashtag - a word preceded by a # sign - to help the promoter search for entries. There are lots of Twitter search tools they can use to find specific hashtags, so for instance if they have asked you to RT a message including the hashtag #grapevine they can put that one word into a search and find every tweet that includes it.
Hashtags are most often used at the end of tweets - and this is a problem with longer tweets. Because a hashtag appearing after the 129 characters of a longer tweet does not show up in any Twitter search. No, not even Tweet Deck's own search, which displays the full text of longer messages!
The same thing applies to @ mentions- in a longer message, any @ mention afterthe 129th character won't show up onthe mentions page of the person it refers to. Although this probably doesn't affect compers much it is worth bearing in mind when chatting to friends and making lists for #FollowFriday.
So usung Tweet Deck's longer message function means your comp entries might never be seen! My advice is to either use the old-style RT and edit your tweets to make sure they come to no more than 140 characters, or, if you trust it, use the RT button.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)