Meeting James Martin (Leeds Loves Food Festival)
It’s not often you meet a genuine celeb, and I guess James Martin is the real deal.
Via good old twitter, I was invited over to meet James at the Leeds Love Food Festival, which is going on right now and over the weekend. Admittedly, this is not a food blog, but having a soft spot for most types of nice grub, plus knowing Mr Martin was a petrolhead, I went over to meet him.
He was a really nice chap – you can see why he is well liked – a marketing person’s dream. Before he left I grabbed a couple of minutes with him talking cars and Macs – just click the play button below:
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It was very encouraging to see that the PR firm who were involved had organised a session for bloggers (that’s me that is) to meet him and ask questions, so there was a few of us who turned up and got asking. I made a few notes, and managed a couple of foodie questions before getting onto the good stuff 
- He doesn’t think of himself as a celebrity, but branded one
- He finds inspiration by going to great places
- He started out as head chef at Hotel Du Vin in Winchester (and in fact I remember him back then in a Lotus Esprit Turbo), where he was discovered by a “lady old enough to be my Mother” who “popped her card in his pocket and said she would make me a star”
- This led to an interview and job on the Big Breakfast on Channel 4
- He had his birthday a few days ago, with hundreds of people attending a party, with 100 plus chefs of course. He said “what the hell do you cook for Michelin starred chefs?” Well, he did fresh langoustines, wood-fired pizza and then an ice cream van turned up for dessert. I like it!
- The good news – he is a Mac, not a PC and has used them for 12+ years
- He is driving a number of cars at Goodwood Festival of Speed this weekend and cook for 1100 people one evening!
- He has just got the new R8 V10 a couple of days ago and is very impressed (he’s a big Audi fan)
- He hasn’t been to the ‘Ring (the big girl’s blouse)
- He is going to do the Mille Miglia again in 2010
- Top tip for office lunch is to hollow oout some fresh bread, fill with chicken, pesto, mozzarella etc, then put in the fridge and take a slice to work each day – it will last all week
- His latest project is a serving 30,000 meals around the world.
WordPress 2.8 Launched
Check out the video below, telling you all about the great new features of WordPress 2.8 “Baker”:
Great job guys! 
Launch details can be found here >>>> click!
Blogging and SEO from Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts works for Google, and has a great reputation as a good guy, and a VERY clever guy. He is currently head of Google’s Webspam team.
He has just added a superb post on his blog here, which is a presentation on Blogging and SEO – All you need to know from Google. He presented at Wordcamp in SF yesterday. I highly recommend you to watch it
WordPress Add Media Issues
For a long time, I’ve had a BIG issue with my WordPress installation on this server, and it’s been a BIG one.
Not being able to upload any media.
So, yes, a right, royal pain. However the good news that it is now fixed and I thought it would be useful to let you know about it. There are 2 things you must do to make sure that you can upload pictures to your WordPress Blog.
1. Ensure that the permissions are set correctly on the wp-content folder/uploads folder on the server – you must make sure that the permissions are set to ’777′ or tick all the boxes.
2. You also need to make sure that you have filled out the appropriate info on the WP backend, see below:
I hope this will help anyone suffering from the add media problem!
I like WordPress
Hi everyone – demonstrating WordPress to some VERY nice people
habari – new blogging platform
habari looks interesting. I don’t think it is going to rival WordPress just yet, but it’s new, getting a little press and perhaps offers users a choice when they are starting a blog.
Habari is different
While there are a number of technical reasons that highlight the differences and advantages Habari has over other blogging packages, a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.
I’m going to keep an eye on this one and see how it develops.
