Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day ... and more!

About This Site

>> Click here for the latest Website of the Day picks

Hello, Miles here.

If you've come to this site deliberately you'll probably know me as the webby bloke on Steve Wright's show on Radio 2. This site was launched in May 2004 as a kind of companion to the Website of the Day pages on the official Radio 2 site. You'll find a lot of the same content here, but this isn't part of the BBC site, so bear in mind that what you read here is my opinion, and not that of the BBC.

What's the site for? Three things really:

* To provide more information about the Website of the Day selections than I am able to do on the Radio 2 site, and to make it easier for you to find links to those sites. All links are archived here both by date and by category.

* To showcase various sites which haven't featured on Website of the Day. Some of those sites may feature on the show at some point in the future, the rest are sites which I like but which aren't suitable for the show either because they're too commercial and you have to pay to use them, or because there's not enough to say about them to fill five minutes of radio

* To show how easy it is to create a simple site using a 'blog' service. For those that don't know, blog is short for web log. At its simplest a blog is a web-based, regularly updated journal, on which the newest content always appears at the top of the page. Blogs also typically carry copious links to other sites. Some blogs are updated many times a day, some only when their owner feels they have something to say. And blogs usually provide a space for readers to add comments, making it easy for readers to interract with a site's creator. Website of the Day's guide to some of the different Blogging services is here.

My plan is to add links to this site as I find them, so hopefully you'll find far more good stuff here than I am able to cover on the radio.

Please feel free to email me or use the comments system on this site to suggest sites for me to feature on the programme. When posting a comment please bear in mind that your suggestions (and your email address if you enter it) will be visible to other users of this site.

Bye for now
Miles

Website of the Day: The Book

The shameless plug starts here.






If I had a fiver for every time someone had said to me "You should do a Website of the Day book", I'd have well over twenty quid by now. Maybe even £25 actually. But once I'd given the idea some serious thought, I realised there might be some demand for a webby book that's not remotely geeky.

So in my ongoing bid for multi-media super-stardom (or something), I spent the spring and summer turning the Website of the Day archives into a book.
The whole thing is cunningly designed to appeal equally to people who wouldn't be seen dead anywhere near a book about the internet, and those who fancy themselves as webby know-it-alls. It's got lots of lovely pictures and thousands of links (many of which have never featured on the programme).

I've tried to make it the kind of book you could enjoy on the bus or in the bath - It's chatty and enthusiastic (like the on-air feature) and there's stuff in it for your parents and for your kids as well as lots of fantastic sites you won't have found for yourself.

You’ll find detailed guides to getting the best broadband deal, spambusting, legal music downloads, online DVD rental, family history research, eBay and route-planning.

The whole thing starts with 15 sites you can’t live without then moves onto sections on Online Shopping and Money Saving, Travel, Music, Film & Telly, Kids Sites, Extreme Sports, Retro Sites & Nostalgia.

And of course there are plenty of the kind of daft sites which have been the bread and butter of the on-air feature – games, diversions, timewasters, bets, quests and silly stories. Rent A Peasant, Skateboarding Bulldog, Big Whale on a Lorry, The MC Hammer Project and Banana George (the legendary nonagenarian jet-ski enthusiast) are all present and correct.

As you can probably tell, I'm really proud of it. I would say this, but it's a fantastic Christmas present - and it's in the shops now - Waterstones, Smiths, Borders, Tesco etc etc (and the BBC Shop of coure).

Please make my Mum happy and order a copy!

>> More info on Website of the Day: The Book