confiDential wikiHowl

The Anaconda Method

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:06:00 +0000

Have you smelt this stuff? Well, If you are here to report it works, then great!

How to Get and Keep the Girl of Your Dreams: the Anaconda Method

Girls Are Like Radios

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:12:00 +0000

For a short while at wikiHow there was on file an article about How to Approach a Teenage Girl in India. I don't think I will add the article to our large collection of funny how-to articles, although it might fit nicely in our naive section. However, since we are all about finding and preserving the gems for posterity, I thought our readers might find this tip intriguing.

When you have started talking to a girl, make sure that you dont offer a secret to her, as girls are like radios.

What does that mean, exactly?

Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/nate/360493355/for providing the Creative Commons photo via http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

How to Count to Fifty or 250 as the Case May Be

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:44:00 +0000

Sometimes the funny stuff on wikiHow is not visible in the silly articles, which as we all know, get deleted poste haste. So if you are looking for humor over at wikiHow, you might consider scouring the comments left in various places scattered across the site. For example, one anonymous user recently lamented thusly about an article about how to count to fifty in French:

Dear Authors,

This website didn't help me at all because it only counts to thirty-two and it lied because it said it was going to teach me how to count in French to fifty but it only counted to thirty-two. Hope you and your friends can log on today or tomorrow and fix this website so it will show me how to count in French to fifty and not thirty-two, okay?

Of course, this complaint is unfounded, blatantly false, one might say. There are 32 steps showing how to count to fifty, but perhaps the reader overlooked that subtlety. If you look you will see. But that particular article is not all that funny, and if you are not looking for funny articles, then what are you doing here on the wikiHowl blog? Oh, maybe you came here looking for something about French.........

Surely you would rather take a peek at a little something about how to tell if your rat understands English, or perhaps a petite piece about parrots. Those birds can be remarkably talented at learning a foreign language. Beyond that, the closest we get to an article about French is our article about the people who live in Canada. If those how-to guides don't work for you, there are 247 other articles you could try. After all, we've just published our 250th creative commons article to wikiHowl, the largest collection of funny how-to articles in the entire world.

Vous êtes Bienvenues.

Anyone See a Theme?

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:42:00 +0000

It snowed, so we had an article about how to shovel the snow. It is Valentines Day season, so we have an article about how to buy a gift. And now, because people drink soda we have now present an article to help you out there as well.

Best Candy Practices

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:53:00 +0000

Watch that candy consumption, Dave. Just in time for Halloween be sure to actually read our article about how to eat in the very best way! Snickers may be good for you nutritionally, but let's not take it too far.
Photo used by creative commons license provided by Abbamouse.

No guesses?

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:42:00 +0000

I am going away, and not to Greenland.*

But I understand there may be an announcement of some kind in my absence, coming up quite soon. Oh wait. There won't actually be any absence, because I will have my wires with me, and where you have wires, you are connected to the world. And indeed, connected to wikiHowl. And to all the goings-on there. Or here. So I will feel like I am away, but I won't really BE away. Now I am starting to confuse myself. How is that for logic, Dave? Anyway, I will try my best not to get stranded, but if I do, I will just order a little smackerel of something to eat.

Have a nice time, all, while I am not away.

*GREENLAND. Yes, that is the answer to our little quiz. We have long waited for our first reader from Greenland and he (or she) finally decided to come in and visit with us on the date of July 11th. Welcome to you and yours from Nuuk, which as we all know was founded in 1728 by Hans Egede and is and enchanted place of reindeer on the land and humpback-whales playing in the fjord.

Location

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:45:00 +0000

Ah, but it IS location related. And it IS a large land mass, but I am not too sure about the penguins. Well, it LOOKS like a really large landmass, but only on the mercatur projection.

Are you getting even warmer than that reader of ours, now that you know these thoughts, Dave?

(Glad we're keeping quiet on the aquarium experiments and stuff! At least for now.........)

That Special Day

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:34:00 +0000

So, KiS. We've had that special wikiHowl day.... the one about the thing, where the stuff happened. Oh yes. July 11th, I remember that well, people will be asking where they were when they first heard it had happened...

Ok, what happened??? I can't believe I have missed such a major(?) milestone..? And a groundbreaking day too? Oh! It's not location related is it? No it couldn't be, could it? Large cold land mass with penguins and stuff? I'll await your announcement with baited breath.

Umm... you have mentioned the giant squids KiS. The aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacle things. Have you forgotten the wikiHowl aquarium... the experiments... the growth hormones... the flushing.... Ahem, I think we'll say no more on this subject.

A Very Special Day (At Long Last)

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:07:00 +0000

Exciting news for wikiHowl, the World's Very Largest Hilarious How-to Do It Manual, Dave! July 11th was a groundbreaking day for us.

WHEEEEEE!

And I bet you don't EVEN know WHY!

If you don't figure it out, I am not even sure a brain transplant would help, but you never know. Give if your best try, Dave. Say you will! Try to guess what happened on July 11, 2009. And if that viewer of ours beats you to it, I will be shocked!

Hint: You are probably warmer than he is........

wikiHowl's Crystal Ball

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:36:00 +0000

Dave, remember our brainstorming session? When just after the new year we kicked back and thought about what we could do in the face of an invasion of giant squid. Or something. You know, just in case such a thing would actually happen a few months later. In the summertime. That led to us combing the archives of wikiHow to see if they had anything on the matter. And they did. At the time. Someone had written all about how to fend off a Giant Squid! So we rescued the article and threw it up on our pages for posterity because wikiHow does not keep that kind of article around. For long.

And sure enough, soon after that, a veritable swarm of aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles took a swim up to San Diego from where they had been congregating off the Mexico coast. Doubtless, many (perhaps BOTH!) of our California readers have read the article and have gotten hold of a "A solid gold blessed harpoon". That is what our article says you need to be successful in your bid for protection against the California invading Humboldt Giant Squid. After all, they can grow up to the size of 100 pounds, down there in the deep waters off Mexico, where they have been known to attack humans. So you need a nice big weapon, and gold is all the rage these days anyway.

Ooh, Dave! I keep forgetting we are a humor site, so this article might not actually work. Shall we just tell our SoCal readers to stay out of the water?

WE WANTS WAN 2, U KNOE

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:43:00 +0000

The funnest thing (as opposed to the funniest thing) about doing wikiHow (and wikiHowl, of course) has got to be that we learn so much, right Dave? I learned a new word last night, which is LOLCAT!

I had seen these before of course, here and there, but never really thought of them comprehensively as an internet phenom.....but of course they are. And it seems to have started back in the nineties, which may have perhaps been their heyday. Anyway, who knew?

It occurred to me that we really ought to have our own, so here ya go, world!

With appreciation to ColKorn1982 for the cat pic!

Pink Shirts and other Vanity Issues

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:17:00 +0000

Dave, you are the best to go ahead and get that all wrapped up for us! I wonder how many people even KNOW that you can now get a custom vanity URL at Facebook? Usually internet and tech information filters very slowly from younger people (okay, downright children or teenagers or whatever you want to call them) up towards me. But in this case, the info went the opposite direction. So there were some very impressed people in my house recently for a good ninety seconds or so, until something came up and they were all on to the next exciting thing modern day life has to offer.

Anyway, speaking of cool internet communities and the fascinating things about modern day life, I did promise a photo of me (sort of) in a shirt, some time back, I believe. And here it is. I understand these free wikiHowl t-shirts you have been giving out over in Second Life have been all the rage!

wikiHowl in Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:35:00 +0000

Ok, it's either mow the grass atop the wikiHowl penthouse or write you a quick note about wikiHowl in Facebook. Hmm, that's a cloud over there on the horizon, might rain.
wikiHowl has a growing presence on Facebook ably managed by our fair KiS, when she isn't doing our colouring-in of course. It is becoming quite the place to chat with us and receive updates about our many doings. Of course a minor failing of Facebook in the past was linking to profiles, the links tended to include 500 (ish) random integers and were far from pretty, certainly not something you could drop on a business card. This all changed yesterday with the launch of Facebook Usernames. Custom vanity URLs for all users, nice. This certainly wasn't something to be ignored, so your valiant Dave stayed up till 5am in his time zone to await the launch (ok, he was up for another reason too but that would spoil the story). Come the witching hour we joined the 200,000 who registered a name in the first three minutes of the launch and are now happy to announce you can reach us at facebook.com/wikihowl.

Possibly not a Joke

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:46:00 +0000

Wow, Dave.......I was pretty sure the robot article was a joke, but maybe not! Yesterday I happened to tune in to a fascinating show about how robotics are already being used in warfare. The speaker pointed out that there will be much more of this to come, because when you can send a machine out to do the attacking, the true cost of aggression is much smaller than when you send a human.

Plus there is the aspect of not having to talk the attacker into carrying out and completing the mission, which comes in handy when the people sending the attackers are not governments at all, but instead, rogue entities with nefarious interests. I wanted to listen to the entire show, but when I got home and tried to track it down, I was unable to find back-scheduling info on XM about the NPR stream they happened to be carrying at that time. Too bad. It was fascinating, if scary stuff.

Anyway, maybe we will all just retreat into Second Life when we find that we actually do have reason to go to the internet to seek information about how to protect ourselves from cyborgs or robots or whatever the experts decide they all are. Might we protect ourselves from machines by inhabiting worlds inside of machines? Oh, this is getting too heavy a topic for this time of the morning, my weary head is telling me.

Anyway, speaking of Second Life, I have been so busy exploring there since I got my lovely pink wikiHowl shirt (thanks to ALL who made that possible!) that I forgot to come out and blog about it, lol. Now that I am one of those blogger peeps, I really ought to show a little more responsibility! Let me just assure our dedicated blog reader (that is, if we still have one) that when I get back to my First Life home I will see about uploading a nice pic.

Robot or Cyborg

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Our latest contribution to the world of the 'be prepared, it just may happen' is How to Avoid Being Shot by a Robot. It is full of what look like quite believable tips but what does a Kill Switch look like? Will it be labelled?
The other question I had was will this work on cyborgs too? I took that question off to the good people currently studying T209: People and Interactions with the UK Open University, Those chaps (and chapettes) are researching the technological and social issues with regard to cyborg technologies. (Well, somebody has to, lol.) This isn't the straightforward question it appears to be. Apparently we first have to define cyborg and this involves contemplation such as this.
Dalek: Robot or cyborg?
Terminator: Robot or cyborg?
Inspector Gadget: Robot or cyborg?
And so on... including; C3-PO, Metal Mickey, Borg, RoboCop.
Do you know, after all this I forgot the original question that I put to them, but maybe that was the intention. Ok, I'll leave them watching the Terminator movies and get back to vacuuming the wikiHowl penthouse. Try the article, it's great!

Randomly wikiHowl

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:46:00 +0000

It has been a while since we had a chat about wikiHowl's iGoogle gadget. We revamped it back in December and the all new random selection of cute pictures, funny mouseover caption and article snippet is proving more popular than ever. It is currently being fed by the details from 170 of our finest articles and that number grows every week.
Our faithful followers in the USA, Australia, UK and Canada are being joined now by friends from such super places as the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Sweden and Barbados. What great taste you all have!
This raises a question though, how are our non-English speakers coping? Our visitor analytics suggest that in the last month, Estonian, Chinese (Taiwan), Romanian and Polish were the most common non-English languages being used in our visitors browsers. If we were to create a second iGoogle gadget which language would YOU like to see it in? What about Dutch? The most popular in the last year. Go on, make a suggestion, it could happen.

wikiHowl in Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sat, 09 May 2009 18:07:00 +0000

Well, what can we say, Second Life. The virtual world for virtually all tastes. We (well, I... KiS is kept far too busy here doing coloring-in and stuff) have been roaming the continents making friends and generally forgetting to mention wikiHowl while sky diving from 4 kilometres up (it's quite a rush). Not to worry, it's all about the experience, and when you have your give something back to the community brainwave you find you have contacts all over who can help out. We were thinking about creating something nice that we could share out along with the bicycles (don't ask, well do, it's a good story). What we came up with is an exclusive range of wikiHowl T-shirts. Modelled here by yours truly. Yes, we know pink is for girls, but there were none around when I took the photographs (honest). Mind you, I think I carry it off ok.
We were put in touch with what must be the most patient fashion designer in Second Life, Becky Arado. Just how many changes can be asked for with four lines of text? Dozens, trust me. It is likely that the air in Becky's workshop was as blue as the shirt. So in return (and it's very small recompense) we offered to highlight her good works in the First Life.
Becky has been designing in Second Life for about a year, starting with Sky Boxes (imagine manouvering large floating structures while hovering and flying about yourself, pretty cool), and eventually finding her niche in fashion and unique/weird household items. We're waiting to see the results from designing clothes with unique textures too, glass clothes can you imagine that!
Becky's shop, Becky's Hideaway, has been open for about a month and is located at the picturesque Isla del Amor run by Kara Dae and Hooyah Voom (do IM these friendly people for a chat).
Shop stocked items tend to be newbie friendly and are priced around the 50L$ mark. Do drop Becky Arado an IM when in-world, and hey with very little arm twisting at all she has agreed that if you mention wikiHowl she'll talk discounts with you.
One more thing though, how do YOU get your exclusive wikiHowl T-shirt? Just IM UKDave Dodonpa, and it's all yours. Ah, you're likely to get a bicycle too, just humor him and take it.)
Pictures from the interview, Becky is the pretty one.

wikiHowl interviewing Becky Arado

Nice work if you can get it.

Becky Arado

Becky's Hideaway

Shop with a view.

Examine the Evidence

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:52:00 +0000

Ooh, good point, bringing up our licensing, Dave! Very timely. We have quite a few new articles which people might like to share through Creative Commons. It is more and more likely they will do it right about NOW! Why? Because we are close to exam time! As the end of the school year kicks in, exams are coming up, and long and tedious papers are waiting to be written. Naturally, we are likely to see people going to their blogs and twitter and facebook to waste all kinds of time sharing important (ahem) info with whoever will listen. High school students and even college students are not going to be spending all their available time studying, even if they kind of want to. Seriously, which seems more fun to you? Learning the formula for the area of a sphere or investigating How to Put a Tutu on a Penguin ? In a contest between reviewing a list of 500 vocabulary words in Spanish, or reading all about or how to fall in public, which one do YOU think is going to win?? Sociology 101 is a heck of a lot of fun (not) , and so is Advanced Physics, (totally not), but neither is likely to hold a candle to a chance to learn all about how to survive in Walmart for a whole day!

But we digress. We should be responsible adults and remind those who have happened upon our blog during exam time, to scoot out of here and get back to studying. Move along.......nothing to see here.

Crisis What Crisis?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Well, we had a treat a few weeks ago. Our tounge-in-cheek How to Get Your Family out of a Financial Crisis was picked up by the popular Instapundit.com political blog. What a reaction that was, the clever writing of our original author hit a very big nerve. We were linked to from dozens of interesting blogs and had some great republishing under our creative commons license. With thirteen thousand plus visitors to the site all clamouring for a look, we had to borrow chairs from next door and pop down the shops for some more tea-bags. Great fun.
Likewise, How to Talk to a Heinz Pickle was a surprise hit in March too. Mind you, I tried it, it works!
So, thinking about the sharing of our content this would be a great time to restate our republishing conditions. All are welcome to reprint any of our articles online or offline under our stated Creative Commons license, and our attribution requirements are easily satisfied. For internet republishing a direct link back to the article and text stating the material came from "wikiHowl.com - The How-To Manual That YOU Can Laugh At" is all we ask for. Any usage outside of our license can be considered, just drop us a line. Go for it, we really do want to share this great content with a wider audience.

Itching for a New Post

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:09:00 +0000

It's been a while since the last post with much going on here. A part of that is the wikiHowl team studying for qualifications that will aid the backroom processes and help make wikiHowl an even better experience for all. That will be a post in the near future when the exams are finished.
We have also been interviewing new advertisers in the hope we can provide something useful there, we are as against in your face advertising as the rest of you, so hope the little we do show are at least partly helpful.
One of the team has also been investigating wikiHowl outreach possibilities in Second Life (we really do suffer on your behalf) and hopes to have news to share in the near future. (The visit to the shemale dancing club really was very accidental, hilarious but accidental). If Second Life is your thing do feel free to IM UKDave Dodonpa next time you are in-world.
Ok, getting back on track. We have been scratching around as always, hunting down the best of wikiHow to share, and have been itching to get the latest article out in the wild. So, having gathered our small pieces of string we are happy to present... Have Fun With Fleas... hmm, we picked this how? No matter; do revel in our orgy of tiny, bouncy, bitey insects.
One more thing. We have our first Follower using our shiny new Google Friend Connect Following Widget Thing! Great news, a huge wikiHowl welcome to Sock Eating Ian!

Canadian Mice

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:58:00 +0000

How many articles, Dave? 150 you said? How on earth did that happen? Here we are having fun putting this site together, little by little and suddenly we arrive at a milestone like that? That's a really big number. YAY US!

And by the way, Dave..........all the way over there wherever you are......I am a bit worried about our reader in Canada lately. Have you noticed anything weird? As everyone knows, we have as many as two readers of wikiHowl, and it would appear now that one of them lives up there in the Great White North. And that reader may have developed a bit of a problem. Or they have a sticky mouse or something, because they have clicked on us 382 times in the past few days! What is the story with that? Do we have a particularly intriguing picture, possibly in our titillating section or something, lol? We have so many articles now in our great big manual of hilarious how-to guides, that it is hard to tell. Anyway, I seriously don't know what possibly could have caused this. Maybe they are looking for our article about Cartoon Pie? (They will find it soon if they realize to click the pic.....do you think they will know this? Shall we send them an email or a twitter or something?)

Who knows why website readers do the things that they do, but we do cherish ours. (I wonder where the other reader lives?) Oh, and apologies to anyone looking here for a little something about chocolate. There really isn't anything at all here about chocolate. Nothing at all, not even about deep fried candy bars like the ones they have at some state fairs or anything. Sorry. But for some reason, I just couldn't resist using the chocolate tag on this post.

Blink, Breathe, Repeat 150 Times

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:58:00 +0000

How to blink and breathe, it is a great article and just has to be useful for somebody. Is this like sneezing and keeping your eyes open though? Can you do both at the same time? I can't recall if the article mentions this, this could be a good task for our team of celebrity article testers, we'll set them on it and get back to you. There has been good initial feedback, the lovely Lau ra of FanHistory.com found it particularly useful.
Now, here I am rambling over the content of the article and what I really wanted to announce was, THIS IS OUR 150TH ARTICLE! Except I'm not easily excitable, so won't shout it out loud like that. This is our 150th article and we really are quite pleased. There, that's better.
That's 150 of the weirdest, wackiest, irreverentest(?) and rudest that wikiHow doesn't have to offer. Here's to the next 150!

When is Florida's birthday, KiS? Of course I read every word you write, I just have the memory of a thing who's name I forget. It's just that I haven't bought a card yet and need to keep an eye on the postage times.
Following your lead with our Floridian site visitors, we should also mention our Floridian blog readers who have visited us recently from both St Petersburg and the lovely sounding Pompano Beach. Great to have you here.

Happy Birthday, Florida!

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:19:00 +0000

As one restlessly roams 'round the internet late at night, it is hard to miss the fact that we are quickly coming up on the birthday of the great state of Florida, which has been with us ever since March 3, 1845. Florida was around before that too, I suppose. Its a pretty big place and it did not just materialize out of thin air, even though it is just so much sand. But that was the day (March 3rd was) on which Florida became the 27th state admitted to the union. As everyone knows, Florida was named by Juan Ponce de León, who landed on that sunny paradise way back on April 2, 1513. You'll all recall he had come in search of the fountain of youth, as people continue to do to this day. And we are glad they do, because once they get to Florida, they very often come and visit wikiHowl for a bit. We either have a ton of followers who live in Florida, OR our two readers really get around a lot on their holidays. We are not sure which, but we do like to dream. Anyway, if we are not mistaken, we have Florida fans from Venice to Jupiter. Our fans also hail from Mount Dora (there is a high place in Florida??) to Tallahassee, not to mention a huge following in Pinnelas Park. And the favorite article for Florida seems to be the one about how to gain access to certain parts of a woman. Ahem. What are people out there in Florida cyberspace thinking, lol?

What we do hope for, in the very worst way is to have someone from Key West send us a tweet, or a blog comment or an email, or something..... and tell us they are watching us from the southernmost point in the continental US. So if you know anyone away down there in those parts, send them a link, why dontcha!

And Happy Birthday to Florida!

This Place is a Sketch!

noreply@blogger.com (KiS) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:20:00 +0000

As our followers (all three or four of them), must surely have noticed by now, we exist by dint of the generosity of those who share materials through Creative Commons licensing. All of our articles have been published on wikiHow before being carefully deleted to make room for more (ahem) "useful" material. That is not to say that OUR articles are NOT useful, but.....well....... I digress.....Anyway some of the most fun we have comes from choosing just the right Creative Commons photo to illustrate each funny how-to guide. For that, we sometimes use our own photos (those'll be the indecipherable ones you can hardly make out). But we more often use the formidable Flickr. And now we find a fun new resource in The Sketchory. There are over two hundred thousand sketches to choose from over there, and we will doubtless be dipping in to use some of those amazing drawings from time to time. Our readers, when they are not busy trying to plan for a zombie attack or learning how to get hold of a little free cheese, can help if they like. Many of the drawings over at The Sketchory could use a bit of tagging and voting. By rating the best offerings at The Sketchory, you make it more likely that sites like ours will find and use the really good stuff, all for your eventual amusement. It's a big job, and SOMEBODY is going to get to have a heck of a lot of fun doing it, so why not yourself?

International wikiHowl

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:17:00 +0000

I was having a chat the other day, with a fan of wikiHowl and the subject of non-English language writing came up. Well, I leapt in with our ground breaking use of a Spanish article, Cómo molestar a la Gente en McDonalds, and confirmed that we wish this to be the first of many. Initially these will be drawn from the other language projects of wikihow.com, but a longer term goal could include translation of exisiting articles.
Anyway, later in the day I am playing with my rubber duck in the bath and I have a eureka moment! We DO have more other language articles in our collection!
we H4vE 4 5UPeR 4rtICle reG4RDIn' th05E 4LL T00 tRickY 20m8IE inV45I0n2, wRiTT3N in L33t. [We have a super article regarding those all too tricky zombie invasions, written in Leet.] How to Survive a Leet Zombie Invasion.
& 2 go w DIS, a curious RtikL guiding us along d best path 2wRd BcumN a teen, RitN n txt spk. [And to go with this, a curious article guiding us along the best path toward becoming a teenager, written in text speak.] How to Be a Teenager.
Cool. Spanish, Leet and TxtSpk. Now, who do we know who speaks Klingon..?