WARNING! Extreme guitar nerd content!

If you are into either guitar, recording music, or listening to the music of Porcupine Tree, head over to one of my other sites in the super Swollen Pickles network and check out the guitar gear of Steven Wilson, vocalist, guitarist and producer of Porcupine Tree.

I found some pictures of his most recent pedal board, and even though he's simplified things a bit since dropping a lot of the rack gear, it's still fairly complex in comparison to some of the other rigs I've looked at lately.

If you haven't heard of Porcupine Tree I'd highly recommend giving them a listen. Their 'In Absentia' album is one of my all time favourites. Over a year ago now, I put together a list of some of my essential albums, needless to say, it was on the list. Actually, I think it's time I added to that list...

Any who, go check out the Steven Wilson stuff on Digital Burn DOT ORG, that's Digital Burn, and not Miracle burn, I'm sure the two are easy to confuse.

If you've been waiting for the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight, then I'm guessing the 18 July 2008 release date, currently being thrown around, can't get here quick enough.

Based on everything I've read and seen, the Dark Knight is set to carry on the grimy gothic vibe established in Batman Begins. The Joker looks evil and truly psychotic, which can only be a good thing for a Batman villain. As the hype continues to build, WB have released a few more screenshots of the Dark Knight. » Read the rest of the entry..

Now I'm going to bring it down a notch, and get somewhat serious. A friend of mine asked me the other day how did I go about selecting a web host. In the very early days, before I knew what wordpress was, I hosted SwollenPickles.com with a local hosting company. My first host was found via "word of mouth", and, not knowing anything about hosting at the time, that is all I went on. No research, no shopping around, and clearly I exercised no common sense! I got locked into a 12 month contract and it didn't take me long to figure out I could get a similar, if not better, service and still pay far less.

I finally settled on HostGator, after looking into a few of the higher profile hosting companies. Since I've been with them I've had no problems whatsoever, and there support has been excellent. The shopping around was a bit of a pain in the a$$, and it was a little difficult to compare plans as it was often a case of not being able to compare apples with apples. Since then, I've found out that there are sites, like http://www.webhostingchoice.com that can make the research phase a lot easier. If I'd known that three years ago, I might have saved myself quite a bit of money!

My advice, if you are looking to move from blogger to your own hosted blog, shop around. Don't just take the first hosting deal that comes along, ask questions, and get the opinions of a wide range of people. Hope that helps.

This has been a sponsored post.

Ever since Swollen Pickles turned up on one of those "blogs with top commentators installed" lists, the number of comments here have increased quite a bit. I've also noticed quite a few inbound links coming from sites that seem to have cut and pasted the original list.

The whole thing has made me wonder, are people commenting to comment or are people commenting to get the link love juice from the top commentators plugin? Either way, it doesn't bother me so much unless there is gratuitous keyword stuffing in the link text.

Never the less, what would happen if I did remove the top commentators plugin? Would you still comment, or would you go else for the link love juice?

So... here's the poll...

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In the proud tradition of other great train wreck live music performances (remember Stephanie MacIntosh?) I present to you the G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S Fergie hitting all sorts of ungodly notes, and missing 99% of her vocal cues, whilst murdering "Live and Let Die".

The only thing that goes close to salvaging this performance is the pyrotechnics show in the background. I guess I really should apologize. This is not the sort of thing you really need to hear first thing on a Monday morning.

Thanks to blankshooting for sending me this and permanently damaging my hearing.

I have to say, after the BlogRush fiasco I was a little hesitant when I saw Entrecard begin popping up on a number of sites I visit. After looking into it a little more, I decided to give it a try. If you haven't heard about Entrecard, here is some information from their site.

Entrecard is your business card 2.0. It's a 125x125 image which represents you and your blog. Its part advertisement, part business card. It comes with a widget you place on your blog, so that others can leave their Entrecard for you. You can also use Entrecard to promote your blog and launch free advertising campaigns.

Long story short, unlike BlogRush, Entrecard appears to work. Want to advertise on JohnChow.com for free? Then you can do so through Entrecard. A lot of other "big name" blogs are using Entrecard as well, so the opportunities for you to get a 125x125 ad in front of a lot of viewers is easy and free. You can "buy" ad space using credits. You "earn" the credits by doing things like dropping your card on other Entrecard users websites or "selling" the ad space on your own blog.

At the moment, you can "buy" the ad space on SwollenPickles.com for the price of 18 credits, which is not a lot considering this blog has averaged around 1,000 unique visitors a day over the past couple of months. But to put that into perspective, an ad on JohnChow.com is worth over 200 credits.

According to Google analytics, Entrecard has brought in over 100 visitors in the past 4 days, and I haven't even used my credits to display my ad any where yet! Based on that, I can only expect the amount of referred traffic coming from Entrecard to increase! You can check out my Entrecard in the sidebar. There's no referral program, and no fine print, so give it a try.

Call me a late adopter, but I finally decided it was time to check out Yuwie. What is it? It's kinda like MySpace, only it also gives you the ability to also make a little cash on the side. The thing that bugged me most about MySpace was that it was taken over by advertising and the user never saw a cut of the action. So you work on your profile, write on your blog, and they get all the revenue.

In theory this is where Yuwie seems to differ. I'm not expecting to make a fortune, and at the moment I'm friendless, but I have joined up and created a profile so I'll see how it goes. Visit my Swollen Pickles profile on Yuwie, and add me as a friend. I need friends!