Archive for the ‘News’ Category

I have this new thing going: Worfolk Anxiety Management. It is going to act as a brand for my new book, and some other books following on from it.

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I have a new book coming out. It’s called Technical Anxiety: the complete guide to what is anxiety and what to do about it. If you have read books about anxiety, you might have noticed that a lot of them seem to be written by people who do not really seem to know what it is like to have anxiety or how it makes you feel.

Technical Anxiety cuts through all of that. It covers things like talking to your friends and family (and work), being less self-critical, coping strategies, health anxiety, social anxiety, building a lifestyle that improves anxiety and loads more. To be honest, there is too much in it.

It is available for pre-order on iBooks and Kindle.

Yesterday I announced that the Leeds Restaurant Guide had returned to the iBook Store. Today, I am pleased to announce that my novel, Summer on the Horizon, is available on the iBooks Store for the first time.

It is already available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle edition, and is now available on the iBooks Store as well.

When I originally released the Leeds Restaurant Guide, I originally published it via a company called eBook Partnership. They are a great bunch of people, and get your book into pretty much every eBook store there is.

However, it was not perfectly suited to the format of the guide. We push out new editions regularly, and it was not practical for us to push these changes through in the same way we could with Kindle. Therefore, after two years, I decided to call it a day with the other eBook stores.

That changes today, as I now have direct access to the iBooks Store. The guide is back in there and will receive updates for future editions too. View on the iBooks Store.

Ren Men is a men’s portal designed to be the antidote to the traditional image of lad-ish publications. I like sex as well, but I’m also interested in mental health, relationships, parenting and a whole array of issues that modern men have to grapple with.

You can visit the website, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

I hope you enjoy reading the things I publish on my blog. Chances are it is a mixed bag: some stuff you do enjoy, other stuff maybe less so. For those posts that you do enjoy, feel free to share them on your social media accounts.

To make this easier, I’ve added share buttons to the bottom of each post:

They only appear on the post page (if you click the title and go through to the individual page) so they’re not cluttering up the place. They offer loads of different services including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, email and many more.

Speaking of Twitter, I tweet all of my blog posts. So if you want to keep up-to-date with new posts, follow me on Twitter. It’s not heavy traffic: I tweet once or twice per day.

Follow @chrisworfolk

It’s official! Team GB will finish second in the Rio 2016 Olympics medal table. Nicola Adams’s gold in the women’s boxing moves us up to 26 gold medals. China have 23 and only have medal hopes in three remaining disciplines (men’s 10m diving, team volleyball and taekwondo). Given they are so far behind in the silver medals, they can no longer overtake Team GB.

On Thursday 16 June, Jo Cox was attacked in her parliamentary constituency of Batley and Spen. She died from her injuries. There can be little doubt that we are all horrified by this event. Such a thing happening here in Yorkshire seems almost unbelievable. The attacks leaves a family without a mother, and a constituency without a tireless champion of the vulnerable.

Sadly, we may simple be seeing the reflection of the values we have built. As BHA chief exec Andrew Copson put it:

This is the whirlwind we reap if we sow hatred and nationalism in our country. https://t.co/3Sz6qBZsuk

— Andrew Copson (@andrewcopson) June 16, 2016

So what do we do? How do we respond to this event as a society? The quote that comes to mind the most is that beautiful Martin Luther King quote:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The way we recover from this is not by seeking revenge. It’s not by becoming angry or further dividing our society. It is by coming together, to re-build and re-affirm our values of tolerance, respect and openness.

Have you ever been working on a PHP project and found yourself thinking “what I really need is a way to quickly and easily drop a word search in to this code”? The answer is almost certainly, no.

However, while working on Learn Finnish I found myself in exactly this situation. Being unable to find a good library, I wrote one and published it on GitHub. It is freely available under the MIT license and registered with Composer:

composer require xmeltrut/WordSearch "^1.0"

All you have to do is pass in some words and it will generate a puzzle. It supports horizontal and vertical words, intersecting words and comes with two alphabets by default: English and Finnish.

If you’re feeling generous, head over to GitHub and star it.

I have added a related posts feature to my blog. If you click through to the full page for the post (by clicking the title), you will now see a list of up to four related posts at the bottom. Unfortunately WordPress is not picking up the images correctly on all posts, so some are missing thumbnails. The content seems to work quite well though.