the stuff in my head

Give a man a handout… and he eats for a day. Teach him to farm and he (and his country) eats for a lifetime.

‘ We used to have a big farm – five hectares. We sold it one hectare at a time to pay to live. Now we can’t cultivate any more…We don’t have food because there is no-one to go and find food: my eldest children are dead. Before, I was able to work, but now we stay with hunger because there is nothing I can do. We miss our land.’

Milembe Mwandu, Shinyanga, Tanzania, April 2006

OxFam: Causing Hunger- an overview of the food crisis in Africa

A sobering report on the problem of starvation in Africa, and why after over four decades of trying to alleviate it, the situation may be actually be worse.

When you build a web site, especially an online store, it pays to be search engine friendly. This means that you make sure your site is easy to crawl, has a unique and descriptive title for each page, and that you use semantic markup to give the spider (search engine indexing program) clues as to what is important on your page.

What you do not want to do is feed the spider a special message saying you don’t want to be indexed… because this is what your Google listing looks like:

It appears an automatic system is trying to index this on-line …
It appears an automatic system is trying to index this on-line store. Currently, our resources do not permit this.

If you don’t want search engines to index your site, use a robots.txt file instead!

Here endeth the lesson.