Never Say Die tour - Paris this Saturday!

So guys, on an entire night without sleep in order to fix my sleeping pattern ( I haven't been able to fall asleep before 5am for awhile) I headed off to the train station today. After a nice 30 minute bike ride along the riverside, I shackled up my bike and wearily headed to the ticket office.

As I approached the counter part of me was kinda excited, I mean although I do get nervous, I genuinely do enjoy speaking French when I have to. So after double and triple checking that I was indeed heading off to Paris this Saturday (30/10/2010) and not Bratislava next April, I arranged to leave this Saturday, and return the following day.

Now, why am I going to Paris? A day trip? Kinda. To sight see? Hell no.

For those of you who haven't been victim to my constant Tweeting, this Saturday is the Paris leg of the Never Say Die tour. If you're into similar music as me you'll be well aware of what this tour is and how many awesome bands are playing it.

So, why trek all the way from Strasbourg to Paris for a gig? Well this isn't just any gig.

This is Never Say Die 2010

So, why am I spending a ridiculous amount of money on train fair and probably on merch? And spending a long time travelling?

Well all of these bands to me are AWESOME! That's why. And being a hugeeee fan of Your Demise I am so stoked to see these guys live again. Oh and after Tweeting them about how excited I was and how far I was having to travel, they said they would try and get my on the guest list!


However, this gig has it's ups and downs for me. When this tour once announced I practically exploded with excitement. Halloween with all my friends and all these awesome bands and only 45 minutes away! AMAZING! Then I realised I would be in France for these dates and felt disappointed that I couldn't go. At a stretch I joked 'Ha. I'll just go to the Paris leg,' although this was just to kinda hide my jealously.

As October loomed nearer, the goal of going to Paris for an all day Hardcore festival didn't seem to hard to achieve. And now, I hold the tickets in my hand.

This Saturday, I am going to bouncing off the walls like a little kid. I am going to go absolutely mental. Going to show these Frenchies how us UK kids do it best!

The slight downside, well I'm going to have to kip on the station floor again, but this is so going to be worth it!








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How to increase traffic to your blog with Google searches

OK guys, so although this post may not be directly related to travelling, in this post I'm going to tell you one way, that successfully worked for me, to increase traffic to your blog.

Now, this certainly isn't going to bring you 5000 million viewers over night, but if done correctly, you will see a steady rise in your traffic.

Ok I'm going to try and make this as simple to follow as possible as it can be quite confusing.



Now, I know a lot of you are having trouble with making your blog Google searchable. The computer and coding literate amongst have tried added Meta tags to your blog in order to increase traffic. Although I have tried this myself, I haven't noticed much on an increase and have been told that Google no longer uses Meta tags to make it searchable.


Step one. The first thing you need to do is to visit http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ and add your blog page URL into the URL box. Underneath this box there is a comment box. Now here I just wrote a simple description of what my blog was about. Keep it short and sweet. No need for more than one sentence.
After filling in the Captcha click submit and you're blog will have been added to a list for Google to crawl.


1) Next up we need to open http://www.google.com/webmasters/ 



2) Then sign in with your Google account.

3) Next you need to click the ADD A SITE... button which looks like this:

4) A small box will appear - Enter your URL here.

5) After clicking Continue,we have to verify that we are the owner of this blog.

6) Here there will be 4 options in which we can choose how we want to verify our site. However, the only option we are interested in is the META TAG. Now we should see a code which looks a little something like this:

Picture of code

<meta name="verify-v1" content="z6MLWEMxLvMFcoVNvGPKOMvAn1oJBKem+eTEpZ1F/DU=">

                                                                                                Actual code ^

7) Now after we have copied this code (DOUBLE CHECK YOU HAVE THE ENTIRE CODE COPIED) we need to go to the Dashboard of our Blogger, then select Design > Edit HTML.

Now, we nee to look for the <head> tag. This is only a few lines down in the coding so shouldn't be too difficult to find. The easiest way to find it is to bring up the Search function, with Ctrl + f and type <head>.

The Meta code needs to be pasted IMMEDIATELY AFTER the <head> tag.

Once you've pasted this code, simply Save the Template and go back to the Webmasters Account, and click Verify to Complete the verification process.

8) If you've done everything right, you'll see that your site is now verified. HOWEVER, KEEP READING as we're not done just yet.

SIDE NOTE - DON'T REMOVE THE META CODE AFTER VERIFICATION. IT MAY BE USED BY GOOGLE AT A LATER DATE.

9) Now you should see a list of verified sites (Most likely just one, your blog) on your Webmaster tools homepage.

10) Click on your site, and you'll be taken to a dashboard of that site.

11) From here you need to click Site configuration, then Sitemaps.

12) On this page you need to click Submit a Sitemap and it will ask you to enter the sitemap of your blog. As you can probably see, the first part of your blog is already there and you only need to enter the second bit;



feeds/posts/default?max-results=500


Overal all, it should look something like this

http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=500

13) So Submit your sitemap there and within the next 24 hous, Google will start to index the contents of your blog!

Now, give it several hours (I gave it 24 hours) and return to your Webmaster tools. On your dashboard, on the left hand side there should be a Your Site on the Web button. Expand this and you can see data gathered from Google searches! For example, Google will crawl your site and show you the keywords found on your blog!

If you've found this helpful and used it guys, simply Tweet this The button is located below the post title.

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Off to Oktoberfest / Beautiful photo of the Cathedral

Just a short two part post guys. Part one is that tomorrow at 7:30am I am getting the train to Germany to take part in the world renowned Oktoberfest!

In short, 12 hours of drinking non stop in Germany. This picture kinda sums it up:

Don't worry, you'll receive a post upon my return filled with pictures of me no doubt completely off my head!


Part two


A photo of the Cathedral I took. I planned to upload way more but the plugin crashed so I will post another update when I return!

Cya soon!

Remember, if you like the fact I'm off to Oktoberfest or enjoy this picture I took, you can 'Like' it on Facebook by pressing the button up there^

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Photos of Strasbourg

These photos are all taken by me guys :D I said I'd provide pictures once I could, so here we are:

I'm so lucky to be here! Was going to take more pictures today but it's raining so doesn't look as awesome. This weekend I'm going to venture around the city like a proper little tourist and take way more photos! Hope you enjoy these in the mean time!
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