So the boring international break leads this red post anything but football to keep the blog posts flow.

Sorry.

It’s about a problem that many web developer/designer face on daily basis, CSS positioning. It’s a small line of specific codes that present how your website look on internet browsers. I was struggling to fix some CSS codes on some of my client sites last night and see this is a problem at many sites. Even at huge sites like ManUtd.com and SkySports.com. So it’s not a problem for only small developer like me.

It’s not obvious if you use 1024×768 monitor since many sites are optimized for this size of medium, but will find it weird by using 1280×768 px resolution and bigger. I think SkySports has fixed the problem but the Official Site hasn’t. It’s small problem but hey it’s still a problem…

Click on the image below to see what i’m talking about and check it out yourself at the Official Site.

When i first hear Rafael Nadal updating his blog in between the Wimbledon, i was like wow, awesome.

Yes, he own his domain name and blog in it. He didn’t write it by himself, he dictated it and someone do the typing for him (why should he type, he smashes mind you). He blog about what he does and what he feels at his own media, as well as share the feelings and connect with his fans from everywhere with internet connection.

Cristiano Ronaldo (cristianoronaldo.com bought by a ‘fan’, cronaldo.com domain parked while cr7.com lead to a spammy site) don’t have his own media. That’s how the so-called big media both in UK and Spain sold his saga stories for the whole summer holiday.

Yesterday Ronaldo committed his future (another one year, more than that only God knows) to Manchester United (nevermind SAF is his ‘father figure’). Almost 1 month, we the fans tortured by the media, and all shitty rumors (our feelings even dictated by Roman Calderon,  what a s**t!) concerning his future club. I smell skeptic feeling among the fans, i too feel skeptic. I think demanding the fan to grow up and understand his position is too much. Why blame the fans? What if the fan don’t want to do that? What if the fans too childish to understand?

All in all i think it takes too long for him to confirm his ’simple’ statement to commit his future to the club that we all love, that also grow and feed him in the last 5 years or so.

I demand nothing from him but to help the club to get more silverware. F**k loyalty if it’s too much. That make the likes of Giggs, Scholes and Neville even more valuable.

Imagine this, Cristiano has his own website and connect with his fans. He shouldn’t do it by himself, his paid staffs can do that for him. Hey nobody (know) care. His agent or personal manager or whomever responsible for his public image should count the internet power. Rather than let the fans play the guessing game and media made more money by selling his modern slavery stories. In the end, he has the biggest risk of losing not only his own credentials but also self dignity. By having his own website or blog he can sell his image more for his own good. Anytime and anywhere he want, even in between his LA parties.

I might be naive but hey Rafael Nadal can do that… then why can’t he? He can update his ’status’ whenever he want to all people if only he has a blog.

Forgive my ramblings i’m just sick of this s**t (not this s**t like the s**t i mentioned in my earlier post).

Eurofootball.biz has revealed Premiere League club website visitor stats from a Comscore study. The big four dominating the most visit websites while Manchester United official website’s most visitors came from audience outside of the U.K. (64% of them!!).

Visitor numbers visiting the top four clubs during August 2007 - May 2008 (07/08 season):

1. Manchester United - av. 912.000 visitors per month.
2. Liverpool - av. 887.000 visitors.
3. Arsenal - av. 718.000 visitors.
4. Chelsea - 402.000 visitors (no wonder Chelsea redesigned their website and adding new features last month. They’ve left so far behind…).

However, Premierleague.com, the official site of the FA Barclays Premier League attracted 1.2 million and 55% of them came from outside U.K.

comScore analyst Jamie Gavin:

“These data suggest that there is a substantial market for Premiership football beyond the confines of the U.K.”

“It therefore makes sense that the Football Association would be considering staging an additional ten games per season overseas to help raise the profile of the other clubs. Generating additional exposure of these teams across other continents will help establish the Premiership as a sports league with a truly global fan base.”

Manchester United global brand rules!

In the last couple of days, i’ve been working on Manchester United Wiki. The Wiki page is planned to be hosted here in Manchestered.com in separate directory. I have done with the installation and some CSS make ups to make it look RED. However, i am yet convince when to launch it since i am still working on the site tutorials and importing Wiki Reds related articles from other Wiki sites.

As soon as i think it’s ‘enough’ then i’ll launch the Wiki site.

However, as Wiki’s nature is about collaborating between people with the same enthusiasts that has the knowledge about the topic, i am sure that anyone, of this blog’s visitor’s to some degree, can contribute to the success of the wiki. So, if you think you have knowledge about the club’s history, legend and culture, i invite you to contribute to Wiki and to share your knowledge with all Manchester United enthusiasts all around the world.

Please do consider to contact me as i am open to all possibilities and opportunities to make this Wiki project a success. You can contact me through manchestered at robinmalau dot com or you can simply use the Contact page (click here).

Thank you so much for your time of reading this post and may the Reds force be with us all.

Update: I’m temporarily take down the wiki site due to security s**t that i am yet able to handle. Hope this can be resolved soon.

I missed this story. Really. It was published at November 28, 2005.

I found this old article from Cnet reporting that after diminished the sponsorship contract with Vodafone the club has started sponsorship talk with some technology giants.

Excerpt from the article:

Manchester United is in talks with a number of global high-tech giants, including Google, about replacing Vodafone as its shirt sponsor, according to reports.

The paper, citing sources in London’s financial center, said the Vodafone brand is not well-known in the U.S. and the termination of the deal gives the Glazer family the opportunity to bag a bigger global brand that will help give Manchester United a higher profile in America.

Two of the nontech brands believed to be in talks with the soccer club are Coca-Cola and Levi Strauss.

Given Google’s high reputation in Open Source communities and it is now the biggest internet company in the world, i was wonder how big ManUtd can be now in terms of the internet presence. And, we, bloggers who blog about The Red Devils must be… um… much more bigger thing than now. Um… maybe.

But i’ll be super glad if Google sponsoring the club.

This is useful for those who:

1. Will blog about European Championship next month.
2. Blog about Football using Wordpress.

There’s a Wordpress plugin name WP-Championship, which is a plugin for letting you play a guessing game of a tournament or championship e.g. soccer.

Some features:

1. Define number of groups, and points given to the winner, looser
2. of each match
3. Define teams and a team specific icon
4. Define matches finalround and pre-final round
5. For each user you can set a substitute
6. Sends mails about current game status (if wanted)
7. Define game admin to edit match results
8. Shows some stats for admin and users
9. Sql for the EM2008 championship in sitzerland and austria

This may sounds dumb but i haven’t try it. Why?

1. I am not going to watch Euro 2008. No England team, no use to watch Euro.
2. The plugin homepage is written in German. I don’t understand.

However, if you see the features, this plugin can be useful to gain community and readership for your football blog right?

So here’s the download link, and here’s the plugin homepage.

Via Wordpress Plugin Database.

This is my 3rd time this season that I miss the LIVE game. Today’s reason is the most retarded among others, the government blocked my cable TV provider since last Friday so there’s no way I can watch tonight’s game.

However this post is not intend to show how pity I am so heck, I follow live text report from BBC so in fact I follow the game LIVE. If you’ve never follow a game via live text, let me tell you how it feels. It feels awful. Simply because you can’t see what’s going on visually and because of that, you will always expect the unexpected every time the page refreshes. But, ever since I use Twitter, this time I don’t feel like I am a retard by following live text report.

Anyhow, from what I read, seems like we’re a bit shaky in the first 20 minutes of the game and Arsenal had 57% of the the ball possession. But dude, we ended it with style by fighting back the gooners and take full points.

I’ll go straight to the most important things, the goals:

47:22 GOAL - Emmanuel Adebayor
Man Utd 0 - Arsenal 1

51:13 GOAL - Cristiano Ronaldo
Man Utd 1 - Arsenal 1

70:03 GOAL - Owen Hargreaves
Man Utd 2 - Arsenal 1

This is to be likely ended Gooners title hopes as we now lead them 9 points and there’s only 4 games left. Come on, we’re not going to lose that much are we? Let’s just hope we don’t.

Come on you Reds!!

Note to sports media: Prepare for Mr. Wenger’s moaning.

Note to BBC: i think you guys should give coveritlive.com or other similar service a try. Your live text report is so 90’s! But thanks!

I check website traffics for my own blog and my client sites. I see a cool traffic rise to Red Conspiracy lately, mostly came from Search Engine. What happen?

Well. Ever since i move this blog to Wordpress from Blogger, almost every thing went great (except for the consistent outage from cheap host i’m using). Wordpress has given me the space to customize almost everything on this site, which are the features that i found it impossible to do in Blogger.

Other than keep this blog content updated, i did some tweak to optimize the blog structure to meet a better Search Engine Optimization standards. I’ve change several sets on the blog’s meta keywords and this morning i found out that this blog has improve its ranking on search engines.

1. Google

Google is the biggest search engine in the world. In terms of Manchester United Blog keyword, i found Reds Conspiracy now has a place in the first page of search results of Google.com (USA). Then in Google UK, it’s also in the first page, as well as in Google Indonesia.

2. Yahoo!

In Yahoo! search result, this blog placed 2nd on search result on term of Manchester United Blog.

3. AskThis blog is also appear in the first page of Ask.com search result.

4. Google Blog Search

In terms of ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Manchester United Blog’, this blog is not on the search result, it’s in RELATED BLOG at the top of search result!!!

Eventhough this blog is quite young (6 months old), gets a lot of link exchange rejections from older blogs, and those which ranks higher are all high quality and senior blogs that blogged from the great Manchester area (i envy you!). So i think by far Red Conspiracy, that manage and maintain a rookie blogger from Bali-Indonesia has done a good job to be appear in search engine result pages.

In Manchester United news, i suppose the scousers could expect hostile reception from OT fanatics. We’re counting on your direct support for the lads, we need the win so much.Come on you Reds!

PS: You can contact me if you need to improve your blog (any blog in any niche) on Search Engine rankings.

Yeah, if you don’t have cable TV then it’s the chance to watch EPL game online. Joost.com provide it, but not LIVE games.

From their page:

Full edited coverage of the Barclays Premier League. With access to every Barclays Premier League match plus weekly roundups, top 5 goals, top 5 saves, team of the week, player of the week and archive footage from the past 15 seasons of the World’s greatest league.

Not bad, so i tried to click its link to watch one of games provided, booooom, apparently the service is not available for my country (yesterday, it was Hulu.com that i found retarded). Ah! Joost is retarded. But no problem, i have cable TV so i can never miss any LIVE game.

If you want to check it out, well you will need a fast internet connection, you can head to Joost.com. If your country is eligible, then you can try it out.

PS: No link for you Joost.

I’m always been a fan of Soccerlens, but the site is not a specific Manchester United Fan/News site. In sites like ManUtdPies (use its own domain manutdpies.tv) or TheOffSide (use subdomains like manu.theoffside.com), you can pick your own favorite club news to subscribe.

Of course general football news is a wide range of topic to cover but heck i don’t really care that much about ‘football’ and other teams to fill my feed reader. So i was wonder how to choose my subscription option to the cool Football news site.

Well, what i just did was finding the tag. In Wordpress blogs, every tag has its own feed. After finding the tag i wanted, any articles tagged as Manchester United, i added a word ‘feed’. For example the tag structure at Soccerlens look like this (find it by right click the tag link and ‘Copy Link Location’):

http://soccerlens.com/tags/teams/manchester-united/

Then my favorite feed address would be:

http://soccerlens.com/tags/teams/manchester-united/feed

Add that link to your feed reader. That’s it. You are now subscribed to Soccerlens’ news specifically about Manchester United.