Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

……..or should The Northern Herald be taken away?

In my last look at The Northern Herald we discussed the author’s cookie management policy in relation to the Sitemeter that he previously had employed (and which he made available for us all to see exactly who was visiting his site), and concluded that visitor numbers were wildly and artificially inflated, and that it had become the gathering point for a few die hard leftist supporters of the South Tyneside Independent Alliance councillors. We discovered in that post that Peter’s rather lax cookie management effectively meant that his own IP address was not recorded by his Sitemeter when he was logged into his Blogger account, but was recorded every time he simply looked at his own site!

Today I am going to take a closer look at some of the “characters” reputed to have left comments on Peter’s site, and using some evidence gathered from his old Sitemeter I will question the veracity and bona fides of these comments. The first point to note is that there was a one hour difference between the time stamp of the posts or comments on his site, and the recorded time on his Sitemeter (this was due to the difference between GMT and BST and a time management setting that had not been addressed by Mr. Shaw, his Sitemeter was one hour ahead of GMT). The second point is to help you understand how some visits recorded on his Sitemeter show a visit length of a big fat 0, nil. Peter’s sitemeter records a visit length of nil when the visitor looks only at one page, it does not start to record visit length until the visitor starts to look at a second page.

When making a comment on a Blogger blog, the visitor needs to be at two pages (the post page and the comment page), so therefore, anyone making a comment on his site will have a visit length recorded by his Sitemeter. For a full explanation

see this screenshot

Before I go any further, may I point out that I do not propose to reveal any IP addresses linked to names in this post, it won’t be necessary to prove my point.

Let’s now have a look at this post on Thursday 20th. March when “Duffy” said at 10:12

Have the Chuckle Brothers finally lost the plot?

and compare it to

this screenshot

which strangely shows that there were absolutely NO VISITORS on his site at the time the comment was posted by Duffy, the last two “long stay” visitors (marked in red) left the site just before the comment was made – how very odd.

Now let’s have a look at this post of Sunday 23rd. March when a comment was left by someone calling themselves Pigeon Cree said at 15:00

I CANT WAIT FOR THE COMMITTEE ATTENDANCE SHEETS, Eddie ‘ive been tango’d Mctominey attacked certain Cllrs and members of the public in the Chamber regarding attendances.
Some of his Labour puppets are the worst offenders, Lewell, Gibson and Strike being the worst offenders.
Calling the kettle black steady ed?

and compare it to

this screenshot

(remember to look for 4.00 p.m. because of the one hour time difference) and you will notice that once again there were absolutely NO VISITORS on site at the time the comment was posted.

On Monday 24th. March a comment was left by “Denny” at 06:34 which said

Political correctness gone mad I’m afraid. However, he does not help his cause using a title such as ‘Sex Photo Shock’ to describe what happened. Although it shows how desperate he must be to push his traffic up, search engines will love it.

now have a look at

this screenshot (looking for anyone on site at 07:34)

Do you notice, once again, that there are NO VISITORS to his site at the time the comment is made?

Now take a look at this post on Tuesday 25th. March when Anonymous at 19:00 says

Ya, making them do work for freedom is far more desirable as an immediate solution. We could start mit the gypsies as they often have the most large families and they smell slightly worse and then move on to the ugliest chavs next. Sterilising treatment is very expensive; perhaps we should get them to build the new generation of nuclear reactors we need?

and then

look at this screenshot

which shows NO VISITORS on site until two minutes after the comment was posted (marked in red)

I don’t want to bore you too much with this, but here’s another post on Tuesday 25th March with two comments attached from floorwalker and adi amen

look at this screenshot

and you will see that there were NO VISITORS at the time that floorwalker made a comment

and this screenshot

shows that there were NO VISITORS on his site when adi amen made a comment!

I won’t bore you any further with the many more examples that I have, I think I’ve illustrated my point sufficiently, but do keep an eye open on the Northern Herald bog newspaper for comments from characters such as Anonymous, Sperm Bank, Denny, Duffy, Pigeon Cree, and Donny Osmond, who all managed to make comments when there were NO VISITORS on the site!

I suppose you might now be wondering why the author of the Northern Herald has removed his Sitemeter now, eh? Now, to recap what I said at the beginning, the only time when Sitemeter did not record the IP address of the author was when he was logged in to his Blogger account.

In this post on Monday 7th. April Peter told us that he had access to a full version of Sitemeter, a statement which is easily debunked by looking at the source code for the site (there is no off site counter at all in the html code), he also makes the ludicrous claim that people had been trying to “hack” into his site (again fanciful seeing as the site is hosted by Google owned Blogger on servers in California, Shaw is unlikely to know what, if any, security issues Google are suffering) he also alludes to his free Zone Alarm firewall working overtime (to protect Google and Blogger for heaven’s sake!) Then there’s the fanciful legal advice that someone has passed to him about the Data Protection Act and the requirements for Data registration, which school of law did they come from?

So, if he can fabricate the content in his posts, why not fabricate the comments too?

It’s bad enough when you are talking to yourself, but answering back? Come on!

There was a time when the men in white coats would come and take you away for strange behaviour like that, did someone recently say that the “lunatics have taken over the asylum?” oh, I almost forgot, if you are planning on making a comment at The Northern Herald you will be advised by this warning

“Please don’t post anonymously. I have given you my full details, have the courtesy to give yours.”

Oh really Peter, which one is yours then? Where does this leave your integrity and credibility?

If our Independent councillors and supporters in South Tyneside particularly want to hang around this bog newspaper they really do need need to seek some advice and get themselves sorted out, before their credibility drops to the same level as Mr. Shaw’s.

The Northern Herald right now ought to be taken away by the men in white coats!

Stay tuned for some more juicy bits about some of the other comments there – coming shortly.

Update

Two down one to go has the sheer brass nerve in this post and comments to talk about Integrity, honesty, virtue, honour, morality, principle, uprightness, and  righteousness. Words that could no longer be synonymous with The Northern Herald. We know that Two down one to go is a bona fide poster, but are unsure about Henry, Paul, (sounds like the late Princess Di’s driver), and Anonymous, well it’s difficult to be sure about many of the names in there these days!

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