Gordon's WebLog

In the grand final of BBC Television's Strictly Come Dancing 2006 Mark Ramprakash and Karen Hardy won with a dazzling display of five separate dances. The judges said that the quality of dancing in the final, which also included Rugby Union player Matt Dawson and his partner Lilia Kopylova, was "exceptional". Indeed Mark and Karen achieved a maximum score of 40 out of 40 for their Salsa dance. However the last of their dances, the Freestyle, provided a fitting end to a great competition. With marvelous lifts interspersed by many different dance steps, Mark and Karen received two, yes two, standing ovations before the voting public eventually awarded the title to them.

After the show Mark attributed his success to Karen. "Karen has given me the experience of a lifetime," said Mark.

Mark was the second English cricketer to win this competition. In 2005 the winner was Darren Gough whose partner, strangely enough, was Lilia Kopylova, partner this year of Matt Dawson.

UPDATE 24th December 2006.
It's official. With sales and downloads exceeding half a million, Leona becomes the Christmas number 1 single in the UK,
ousting Take That's "Patience" which was number 1 for 6 weeks.

Many, many congratulations to North London's 21 year old singer Leona Lewis on a very well deserved win in the Independant Television's X-Factor competition 2006.

As the winner of X-Factor (she is rumoured to have received almost 5 million votes) Leona’s first debut single will be “A Moment Like This“ which will be available in stores from 20th December 2006, and it is confidently expected that it will become the Christmas number 1 single in the UK - already having clocked up the highest number of downloads in 2006.

NOTE. The following links all point to pages on the YouTube web site.

In the contest each of the 2 finalists were asked to sing the song which had been chosen for the record release of the winner. After the result had been announced, Leona sang a reprise of “A Moment Like This” (3:49) which you can view by following this link.

The song A Moment Like This by Jörgen Elofsson and John Reid was written to be the first single for the winner of the first season of American Idol, the winner being Kelly Clarkson.

Kelly's winning persormance can be viewed by following this link. In the video Kelly is exploring an abandoned theatre. She can be seen taking the stage to sing, and clips of her singing on American Idol are also shown.

UPDATE. SEE ALSO THIS POSTING.

In this posting I gave details of a free site map generator/ which I used for some time and found it excellent.

However, I have now come accross one at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which I believe is far better.

So what can you do with it by logging onto the site ?

Build your Site Map online (XML, ROR, Text, HTML) This website will let you:

Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.

Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.

Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.

Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.

It is limited in the number of pages it will crawl, but you can also purchase (and put in a folder on your web site) a paid-up version available here which is NOT limited and has additional configuration features. It is well worth purchasing this version - particularly as it only costs 14.99 US Dollars !

Here is the brief summary of its features:

1. It generates any kind of sitemap you require: XML, Text, HTML site maps.

2. It is developed in PHP languages and works with most web-server's configurations

3. Fast and easy installation onto the same host that should be crawled

4. Flexible configuration that allows you to set any sitemap parameters and crawler settings

5. Support of LARGE websites, dividing the sitemap on the parts per 50,000 URLs each and Sitemap Index file according to the Google sitemap protocol.

6. "robots.txt" exclusion protocol is supported

7. GZip compression supported (optional)

8. User-friendly progress indication for sitemap generation in manual mode

9. Allows to setup the cron job to create sitemaps without a user interaction

10. Informs (ping) Google automatically when sitemap generation is complete

11. Website structure analysis feature represents the tree-like layout of your pages distribution within folders

12. The script collects all generated sitemaps details and provides the log chanages in it, including the number (and the lists) of added and removed pages.

13. The broken links are detected by the application and reported on the special page, providing also the URLs pages that refer to these bad links.

And it give change logs and broken links reports as well.

Give it a try - you will find that it is an excellent srcipt, easy to use (start the crawl and it's all automatic - even to pinging Google) and you will notice that your page ratings increase together with the number of visitors to your site you get.