Coldbrain.

Easy, flexible midweek pasta dish for two:

• Cook a small pan’s worth of broccoli and cauliflower florets. Add spinach if you have any. Roughly mash with salt, pepper, nutmeg and a soft cheese like ricotta.
• Saute some onion and garlic, add oregano, wine vinegar and tomatoes and simmer until slightly thickened. Introduce chili or anchovies as desired, or indeed anything else that might want to get eaten (think mushrooms, peppers, courgettes).
• Fill cannelloni tubes with the former and place on the latter, or layer everything up with lasagne sheets. Top with any leftover brassica mix and parmesan. Bake until the pasta is cooked, about 25 mins.

Serve with a dressed green salad and an Italian white. A straightforward way to use up any vegetables that might be lurking in the fridge.

Like a lot of people, I spend a large amount of my time at work and at home consuming content on the web. I’m exposed to a wide variety of publishing and layout approaches. It’s a mixed bag. Some are great; others are atrocious. I take the view that unless you are selling something on the back of your blog - an ebook, t-shirts, ice cream, whatever - then your written content is your ‘product’. Your primary aim should be to make your product as easy to consume as possible.

Why, then, would anyone want to surround their product with so many distractions? So many reasons to look away? If you were selling a physical product, it’s unlikely that you would plaster it with logos of other companies, animated ads, ‘related’ products, polls, sharing buttons etc, so why would you include it on your content?

Do your readers a favour. Lose the Google Adsense. They’re ugly, and too often unrelated to your product. Don’t employ those horrible rollover banners ads or interstitials. Only use the ‘Share This’ functionality with dozens of icons if your analytics show you that your readers use it: most users of Delicious, Digg etc know how to submit/vote for your site, and won’t need a button to do so. Don’t paginate a 1000 word article into three pages: if you want people to enjoy your product, you want them to read to the end. Pagination is just a barrier to this.

Ultimately, if your business model is based around advertising - particularly pageviews - then it can be decimated by Greasemonkey scripts, Readability, Instapaper or Safari’s Reader. That’s a shaky place to be. Far better to work on improving your product rather than selling someone else’s.

Need a model? Daring Fireball. John’s site has no comments, no social media widgets, no related posts, no obtrusive advertising (just some discreet advertising via The Deck), no distractions. It might be a step too far for some people, but realise this: nearly every pixel on DF is John’s own product. Not many people can say that.

Could this World Cup be a watershed moment for the traditional European powers?

Italy set new lows in their failure to progress. France’s entire football infrastructure has been shaken by their utter ineptitude and misplaced arrogance. England have stuttered into the second round. Outside of the readership of The Sun, I suspect that most people will not give England much hope of overcoming the likely opponents of Germany, Argentina and Brazil and lifting the trophy this year.

Conversely, Spain’s previous lack of success at international level has been very notable, but their highly technical approach has been markedly more successful in recent years. The Guardian’s Sid Lowe comments on their revolution:

Winning Euro 2008 did not just change Spain’s history, it changed their future too, removing a dead weight. It reinforced a football identity previously lacking and proved that the aesthetic could be effective. There was a newfound, unwavering conviction about tiki-taka – the nonsensical phrase that roughly means touch-touch and defines Spain’s technical, ball-playing approach.

It has also been a World Cup notable for the lack of progress by African teams. Cameroon have been very disappointing, the hosts lacked the firepower to truly compete, Nigeria were dreadful and Ivory Coast have flattered to deceive. Traditionally a continent of up-and-coming underdogs, most African teams are now dominated by a world-class player or two, and the cracks in their team spirit have shown.

The strengths of many of these European and African teams have been based around work rate, an organised defence and the ability to aggressively retrieve the ball from the opposition. With every successive World Cup, FIFA have made steps to discourage this. Strong tackling is penalised. No longer can teams win by sheer power or muscularity. No longer can Norway play a tall, muscular 4-5-1 and expect to sneak 1-0 wins throughout their qualifying campaign. Success is now achieved by displaying good technical attributes: retaining possession, stretching defences, and playing previously unorthodox formations with asymmetric lineups, trequartistas, false nines, and doble pivotes.

Spain aside, the main beneficiaries of this paradigm shift - and I truly believe that it is - are the Central and South American nations. Whilst it would be foolish to paint an entire continent with the same brush, much South American football is a highly technical, possession-based game of tiki-taka. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico et al have all impressed to different levels during this tournament, with variations on this theme.

Yet, they face their own interesting challenge. Yet it is harder than ever for South American teams to qualify for the World Cup at all. With one qualification group, much rides on a consistent qualifying campaign. In Europe, teams can get away with a poor result or two. In South America, this can cripple a team’s performance. The advantage for the teams successfully qualifying is that they have a more competitive mindset, ready for the rigours of a World Cup.

The takeaway point: in order to compete at the highest stage, the traditional powerhouses need to adjust their mindsets even further. Traditionally, a combination of good mental and good physical attributes with a trickle of technical ability would see a team achieve at least modest success. These times are over. Technical skills have become far, far more important. A team that specialises in ball retention but lacks the mental or physical skills are now able to achieve the same modest success - qualifying for a major tournament, perhaps causing an upset whilst there. A combination of all three types of attribute - think Spain, and at times Argentina and Brazil - are streets ahead. (We’ll conveniently ignore Spain’s defeat at the hands of Switzerland. They are still my favourites to win this year’s tournament.)

This change is brought home even further by the fledgling success of the German national team, who in recent years have relaxed immigration rules and invested substantial amounts of money in their youth and regional set-ups. This is beginning to bear fruit, with German sides performing well in recent UEFA youth championships, with a side made up of talented ball-players.

We’ve been saying it for years and years, and I remain unconvinced that the English FA can or will do anything about it, but nothing less than a cultural change is required for England to ever be power again at the highest level. Simply being the biggest, quickest, or most determined (aka ‘having the most heart’) will not win you a thing at the highest level.