A New Website

On Saturday 14th November, teamfishcake will have a new website and a few new articles for you to read. It won't be the first overhaul performed on our website in it's filthy sordid history...

The website started in 1996, back when the internet was a primordial soup of obscurity - it was basically only used by people with beards who liked to stare at weather map images. Our website consisted of static html pages, which made the site a nightmare to update everytime we had something new to publish. Also, the more content you had stored, the more work it would become each time you wanted to update the site. As much time was spent maintaining the website as was spent on producing actual articles.



Scripting languages like PHP began to really take off in the early 2000's. PHP allows you to perform various tricks that, basically, make running and maintaining a website much easier and much more automatic. Since I was involved in a couple of voluntary/hobby organisations, I started to pick up bits of PHP from the people who ran websites for those organisations.

Despite getting our own www.teamfishcake.co.uk address in 2000, we still had a static HTML based website and we were producing quite a lot of content. In 2002, we released our first video onto the internet (3 years before the advent of YouTube). We continued to battle through 2003, until finally....


Our first PHP coded website went live in mid-2004 - although it seems like decades ago. The website and messageboard were integrated and this caused a surge in interest in our forums. Quite a lot of original content and some silly games like truth or dare were played out with our readers. The forums have died down since then because people prefer to hang out on Facebook, which is too bad.

In 2006, we changed the website around a bit. We improved the way it worked a little, and we tried to make it look better. Overall, I think the design is better, but I think the site became less intuitive and harder to navigate.

This Saturday, the new design should be somewhere inbetween. We hope it looks good, but we also want people to be able to find their way around more easily. Other things we hope people will like are the integration of social networking sites and a blog/editorial area that we can update more regularly. It can be frustrating to write silly stuff that perhaps wouldn't justify an entire article, but now we have a spot where we can put it. This is the biggest overhaul of the website since 2004, and hopefully it should last us for a while.

Speaking of articles, we have a few bits and pieces that we have lined up for release over the next few weeks. We hope to get our latest video "Baby Sham" released before Christmas. And don't worry, as you can see from the thumbnail preview of the new site, it will still have lots of blue colour to it ;)

The new site should be live by 10am on Saturday 14th November.

Strange Sound In Stockport Area At Night

Hello.
It's been ages since anyone has written on here. Sorry about that.

You know, it was about this time last year that Mr Mike Thorpe of teamfishcake went trawling through the list of statistics that we get from our lovely website. As most people know, it's possible to find out how people came across your website. Everytime a new (or regular!) reader searches for something on Google and they then click through to our website, we can see what they searched for.

This is useful to find out how people find our website. It's also useful to find out ways that people aren't finding out website, so we know we need to change something.

It's also quite entertaining because you get to see people searching for some really very strange things indeed. I've dredged up a few examples I found from the thousands that have been recorded over the last year, which I have split into sections.

Unnatural Things

asparagus kettle
winged gay wolf
czech family says they've got a rabbit with three knobs
Inside out gay lizards
genuine moon cheese

Searches in the form of a question/Research/People Looking For help

what is the strange sound in stockport area at night
my rover 416 won't start
how to open a packet of crisps upside down
i want to make sentences with the word crust grunt
trees that are psychologically good [as opposed to ones that are psychotically bad?]
there's a horse in my bathroom - help
do formula 1 drivers go for a wee in their cars
how difficult is medicine, chat rooms [maybe this was Hugh Laurie researching?]
why is my toy car is moving on its own even though the battery is dead
is spock half nun?

Bum related - There's always lots of these

anatomy of a fart
trousers down animation
daniel bum hole
how to breathe with eggy farts
fart noises around the world

Medical Complaints - Or things that sound like they should be

fridge cu*ting
her bladder in fear
what happens if I ate too many apricots
noisy diarrhoea

The Sexual - Tons of these, but most are too depraved

just let me touch it with the tip
girls whipping horses
bergerac strippoker
piss fucking
masturbating into his shoes
flashing knickers in church
superman fucks into sky [There are loads related to superman doing odd things - including one searching for 'superman credit card fraud']

Wardrobe Related - Someone was constantly searching for stuff about wardrobes, so it gets its own category

inside wardrobes
people inside warbrobes
i climbed inside my wardrobe
what are wardrobes made out of
wardrobe hitler jug

People who found our site in an unlikely manner

pedigree chum coupons
toy cars that turns flat down & goes up itself [Is this the worst possible way to explain Transformers?]
buy some knickers with musical notes on
shed plinths

The surreal - I don't even know what these people wanted

my other brick is...
lady with two jugs on the path
leek humour
humour parcel
children eat spider goat died
funny writings in knickers

People trying to start a conversation with Google

can I call you back?
how is david?
hello?

The psychologically unhinged

you don't know how much I have been through I nearly died
how to control murderous thoughts
aids fishcake
daddy i am your bitch



See you next year!

Non Specific Love Song

Phil has done a singy-music-audio-song about a woman he's never met, but would probably like to. It's lovely.

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Non_Specific_Love_Song

Immigration Antipathy

Immigration Antipathy is the latest article by Stu Hall


http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Immigration_Antipathy




"People are neurotic with the fear that "The British Identity" is being lost, but the loss of identity is always put at the door of immigrants "coming here, speaking their own languages, taking our jobs and refusing to adapt to our way of life". Well surely to Christ it's more of a loss to "British Identity" each time a British person emigrates?"



See it here:
http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Immigration_Antipathy

Why I don't date

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Why_I_Dont_Date

"I'm quite a pragmatic person. Some would say cynical. Actually, so would I. I'm quite a cynical person. I haven't always been that way. Well, I have. But I'm trying to introduce a story in an amusing fashion, and by God if I have to tell lies, then so be it."

By the way, we got over 25,000 unique visits to our Deliberately Inaccurate Calendar. RESULT!

Deliberately Inaccurate 2009 Calendar

Here's the latest one:

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/Deliberately_Inaccurate_2009_Calendar

It's basically a calendar that we've made several deliberate mistakes on. It appears normal, and it starts off accurate, but slowly it gets more and more wrong. I'd be interested to find out how long it manages to stay in peoples' offices for :D

The first calendar I did was the 2001 "Animals and Swearing" calendar and we've done a few more as well. There have been a couple of times where I've wanted to do a repeat of them, but to be honest, that sort of thing is all over the place now, so I thought I'd try something different. The second Team Fishcake feature in a row that's got child-friendly humour in it! It was tempting to fill the 2009 calendar up with vulgarity, but I thought "Nah - let's just keep it nice and clean, it's more of a challenge".

Don't worry though - we've still got a puerile sense of humour, and that will probably show itself off again very soon.

Shitty arses.

Mike

TV Tray Love Song

"You know that I love you, my TV Tray..."

This is a brilliant song created by Phil. We filmed the video in Phil's house in Trowbridge, and Reddish Vale in Stockport. There were a few scenes that we actually removed from the video, as they were a bit rude, and we thought seeing as the song lyrics were completely clean, it would spoil the feel of the video if they were thrown in.

Anyway, it's here, have a look and listen and let us know what you think.

http://www.teamfishcake.co.uk/articles/TV_Tray_Love_Song