As the clock ticked down to the end of the January transfer window 2016, it was becoming clearer and clearer that for Sheffield United this window would be one of more outs than ins.

After the deadline had passed, and with no incoming signings, Jim Phipps took to social media as usual to give us his thoughts on “SUFC’s JTW 2016”.

Jim says:

We accomplished some, but not all, of our goals for JTW 2016

The not all - i.e. bringing some new players in - will be the most upsetting to blades fans. Jim posted one of his flash votes to help him understand collective view - you don’t even need to vote to know what the top answer will be.

So no new signings, but a bloated squad trimmed to free up wages. Players moving on either permanently or on loan included Wallace - undoubted ability but always injured, Higdon - worse than Porter?, Alcock - decent player but unnecessary signing, and...

On Sunday 27th April 2014 I ran the Shakespeare Half Marathon in Stratford-Up-On Avon.

My half marathon PB at the time was 2:06:57 set in Sheffield in 2013. This time I was aiming for a sub 2-hours which meant a pace of around 9:09 a mile - that actually felt so tough thinking about it but I was determined to do it.

I’d been constantly checking the weather forecast which switched between heavy showers and light rain - when the day come it had been raining but had stopped. There were only a few spots of rain during the race, it wasn’t too cold and just a light breeze - perfect running conditions actually.

2 miles in feeling fine - the Sporttape keeping my knees going

For my race/pace tactic, I had been reading about negative splits (where you run slower at the start of the race and then pick up) so I was concious of not starting too fast, slowly building up and then maintaining a...

It’s great to see the “no makeup selfie campaign” raising awareness and donations for cancer research, a great cause so well done everyone.

If you are considering donating to cancer research I would ask that you consider donating directly to support Pancreatic Cancer research.

Funding for pancreatic cancer research has increased marginally over the past 10 years, yet it still accounts for only one per cent of overall research funding - this is despite it being the fifth largest cause of cancer death in the UK.

In 2011, £5 million was spent on pancreatic cancer. In contrast, Breast cancer received £42 million.

Five year survival rate for Breast cancer has increased from 55% in 1971-1975 to 84% currently – this is fantastic. In contrast, five year survival rate for Pancreatic cancer in 1971-1975 was 3% and currently it is still 3%.

It is clear to see a correlation between investment...

Some of the pictures we are seeing coming from Kiev are unbelievable and I don’t claim to know or understand what is going on or why.

I try to avoid the news as much as I can, but this I could not avoid as the pictures I am seeing are made more unbelievable for me as I was there in 2011 with friends.

Here is a picture from that trip in 2011 taken by my friend Bob compared with a picture from this week.

This is Independence Square, we had a great time there. It was busy and there was great atmosphere sitting out having a cold beer. It’s hard to imagine how it is now.

I love If this then that. Connecting apps together and making them work for you. The concept is so simple yet so powerful.

With IFTTT you make “recipes” which are made from “channels” which are basically all of your favourite apps from Twitter to Facebook, Instagram to YouTube.

A recipe says “if (something happens in this channel - the "this”) then (do something in this channel - the “that”)“.

For example: "if (a new entry appears in an RSS feed) then (tweet the link to twitter)”. Cool eh?

I use the recipe above to look at the Sheffield United BBC news feed and automatically tweet the page from my @sufc twitter account when a new item is added.

IFTTT and Trello

I love Trello, but sadly as it stands there isn’t a Trello channel (come on guys sort it out!)

One area we use Trello is planning our marketing tweets. We’ve got an ever growing list of tweet ideas in there which...

So after my previous WordPress blog got hacked and sent out spam to the entire Internet, I decided to try out Svbtle instead.

I noticed that it was a quiet day on the email front (I wasn’t complaining!) but also noticed that some of my IFTTT recipes hadn’t fired. Recipes that were looking at RSS feeds hosted on my website. My website that wasn’t there any more!

After a bit of digging I found that the guys at Catalyst2 had suspended my domain due to some spamming coming from the WordPress install I was using.

Looking on FTP there were loads of strangely named folders, containing some horrendous looking PHP scripts EVALing everything in sight.

Definitely my fault for not updating WordPress (I am a sucker for technical debt) but it was nothing the good old delete button couldn’t sort.