Yesterday Malachi (my flat mate) No wait, actually: On Tuesday evening, Malachi and myself headed to Newcastle at about 11pm to catch a night bus to London. Why would we put ourselves through this torture?! (It really was that bad – we figured the coach would be empty and we could spread out, unfortunately this was not the case and two six foot+ guys had to cramp/try and sleep on a coach…) For StackOverflow DevDays London of course!

StackOveflow DevDays

If you don’t know what StackOverflow is, shame on you: it’s a programmers question and answer site also a developer careers centre (?) as well as a blog, (excellent) podcast and belongs to part of a wider community of self-help sites (“The Trilogy”).

The idea of the site/trilogy is a brainchild of Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror fame) and Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software).

DevDays is a series of 1 Day conferences held mostly around the USA with a couple of stops in the UK and Europe. The day was really a chance for the StackOverflow community to get together and to hear a series of intro talks on a number of new(ish) technologies and a chance for the sponsors/technological evangelists (?) to share their “messages” with developers.

Back to the story… So at 6.20AM myself and Malachi arrived into Victoria Coach Station (this is where I wish I’d thought ahead and taken photos throughout the day to better illustrate this..) pretty [expletive] tired, groggy, stiff etc.   We made our way round to Kensington High Street and grabbed large coffees from Neros and borrowed their bathroom facilities for teeth brushing and general freshening up!

The event was run by Carsonified (a company based in my “hometown” of Bath actually) and was generally pretty smooth, especially considering there were 800 odd attendees (making London by far the largest of the events). Though there were a few quibbles, the “waiting” (and/or networking) area was far too small and the projector didn’t seem very bright or completely in focus, I had a great day.

The keynote was by Joel himself and was about the whole simplicity vs. complexity argument or the 37 Signals vs. Microsoft argument. He actually came to what seemed like a very reasonable conclusion: that elegance is the answer. Your software probably should be capable of doing everything the customer wants, it’s just that it should do it elegantly without the average user having to wade through a million and one check boxes and preference menus.

The first tech talk was by Michael Sparks from the Beeb R&D Labs going over an “elegant” piece of Python code that was a fully fledged spellchecker in an unbelievably small number of lines of code. It was pretty interesting and flew through some of the features of Python. It was hard to get a lot out of as it was so fast but it did make me wish Perl had a standard REPL ‘cos they just look like a fun way of playing with a language!

After that Joel did a demo of FogBugz and Kiln, which both looked impressively slick and fortunately being a student, who also happens to be project managing younger students – I get free access! Plus, part of the schwag we grabbed included a book on project management with FogBugz – Sweet Deal! I was looking at the #devdays twitter stream and a few people were grumbling about the “advertisement” but I thought it was fair game as the conference was so cheap.

A selection of the free stuff we grabbed.

Next was an Android talk but that seemed pretty uninspiring to be frank, the guy was half demoing code but it was just a bit of a mess ‘cos no one far off could read so he zoomed in and blaahaha.. it was too boring to write about: basically he didn’t live demo and instead showed screenshots of “what would have happened” which I thought was a bit lame – plus they didn’t give us free GPhones – haha!

Remy Sharp then did the most interesting and solid (’til that point) talk of the day all about jQuery. It was slick, I like jQuery and it was cool seeing how to turn your code into a reusable plugin – I had no idea how to do that until then. A lot of people seemed to think it was too basic but I don’t think he could have assumed that half the people already used jQuery a lot and if you do want to know more in depth he mentioned the jQuery conference coming to London soon.

At some point (not quite sure the order) was lunch – we skipped the queues and grabbed pancakes down the road… Apparently they ran out of food and the coffee was terrible. I’m more of a tea man but the coffee seemed okay to me? Poor show that they didn’t have enough food though.

Then there was a talk by Jeff Atwood which was very cool – kinda feel I know him and Joel just by the sheer number of podcasts I’ve listened to. It was inspiring: basically the take away was learn to write and communicate clearly because that is the most important skill developers require (and also read that new book of coding interviews!).

Next up was a talk about Qt (Cute not Cutey – I think). I believe that Qt is a wrapper for C++ which takes your code and makes it executable on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows CE and Symbian. I thought Pekka Kosonen was a good speaker, pretty amusing to listen to (although I was struggling to understand some of the Finish-accented English). Qt itself doesn’t interest me that much – I don’t want to learn C++ particularly. I think he mentioned that there are 130,000,000 Symbian devices out there so if mobile development is your thing it’s probably worth checking out.

Phil Nash then did a proper live coding demo of Objective-C and iPhone development. He was a very unassuming guy and I really enjoyed the presentation and the fact it was a proper, from scratch, demo. Also Objective-C really seems quite managable once you get around the INSANE syntax. Seriously. [ Object method Param :yParam ] (something like that anyway…). According to Phil it is to do with Objective-C’s roots in Smalltalk…

Jon Skeet then came up on stage with a pony named Tony and gave a talk – “Humanity Fail” – about our lack of understanding about basic concepts like numbers, strings and time. I thoroughly enjoyed it – I don’t really care about timezones but it was slick and well presented. I also enjoyed having a couple of less tech specific presentations mixed in throughout the day.

Paul Biggar then gave a reasonably in-depth talk about scripting languages, compiler optimisation and I thought it was pretty interesting. Also it was nice to see someone nearer my age giving a talk – and he was impressively confident, prepared and passionate about the topic.

Final talk of the day was left for Christian Heillman. I had actually seen him talk before, with Kristian, a few years back about Ajax and Javascript so I was expecting this to be a fairly solid talk. I was not disappointed – YQL was awesome and the drag-and-drop/build your own grid layout tool also looked really useful.

We grabbed some super tasty Burmese food and then headed to the Big Chill House to wait for our train at Kings Cross/drink beer.

I can tell you now that trains are a far superior form of transport than coaches!

A few beers later and it was 2AM and finally time for bed. All in all a great one and a bit days out!

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When I was travelling a while back I got an email fired to me about “a new, free tool for automatically analyzing URLs for a comprehensive range of SEO issues”.

I was going through my old emails (kinda – still need to properly sort them, anyway..) and I just checked it out.

What to say? What to say?  It has a massive fucking ugly advert (in Comic Sans?) and it looks like something I would have tried to make in Photoshop 4 years ago.

Also what it analyzes is really boring and mostly to with speed of page.

Anyway it’s here if you want a look.

No related posts.

I’m off to Europe for a month next week, and consequently I’ve been looking for travel insurance and it’s really the first time I’ve had to look for insurance – Aside from student insurance for uni!I figured it would be pretty pointless searching for ‘cheap travel insurance’ or something similar as all I’d get would be a load of hyper-optimised crap.Consequently I thought I’d give the aggregators a shot. I tried MoneySuperMarket, confused and something called SquareMouth.

SquareMouth

SquareMouth, weird name by the way, where who I looked at first. It was super quick getting my quote but they were ridiculously expensive? One was £307.80 ?!?! That’s almost as much as my month long interrail ticket!

So they ruled themselves out instantly.

The site reminded me of an OS Commerce site or something too, maybe a directory, I’m not entirely sure but it feels pretty dated.

Confused

I was pretty annoyed with the confused website.

Firstly, the quote form was in a popup. How unnecessary is that? I’ve got about 50 tabs open. I LIKE having it all in one window.

They also insisted that I had to give them my email address, “no we’re not spammers, honest gov”. Yeh so I’ll be expecting lots of ‘reminders’ about their ‘great offers’ and other crap.

The email thing was particularly annoying as the other sites I looked at didn’t ask for my address.

Their tab indexing was all over the place! Yeh so, maybe you should try tabbing through your quote forms next time you change the order of the questions…

Some people have a phobia of using the mouse – it’s trackpad at most here…

MoneySuperMarket

Onto the most offensive site but also the one, ironically I’m likely to get my travel insurance from.They have the most god-awful quote button I’ve ever seen. Did they get a 3 year old chipmunk in on work experience week? I could have puked a better button myself. It’s like < blink >BUY OUR QUOTE< /blink > but worse.

Check it out:

These pictures don’t actually do the badness enough justice, I can assure when it’s flashing every half a second it’s the worst eye sore.

I can’t believe that such a massive, successful(?) company can employ designers/project managers who think that kind of button is decent and is going to help increase conversions.

What the fuck were they thinking? Have they just come back from 1999?! They might as well add a background .wav file or something too..

All things said and done though, their quotes were by far the cheapest and they’ll probably be getting my business.

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1. You can’t hire top SEOs

A few weeks ago I received an email asking if I wanted to review a new internet marketing product, The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan [aff link] and I figured I may as well.

Essentially the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan is an informational product designed to teach a beginner about internet marketing. It covers a wide variety of topics and is quite a comprehensive package.

It was created by the people at Purple Internet Marketing a British internet marketing company.

What’s included in the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan?

In the box you get four workbooks, four DVDs, eight CDs, a poster and a tshirt.

What does the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan cover?

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan is broken down into four main phases:

1. Website Structure – this covers the planning and creating of your website: keyword research, site architecture etc
2. Automation & Launch – this is about blogging, building email lists, and using press releases and pay per click to market the launch of your website/product.
3. Broaden Your Base – this phase is pretty much all about link building: directories, forums, articles etc. Pretty standard stuff.
4. Broaden Your Horizon – the focus in this phase is social media, widgets and other marketing techniques.

Is the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan any good?

In a word: yes. The DVDs are essentially a video of a training seminar where David Bain is teaching a group of business men and women about internet marketing. It is slickly produced. There are no wobbly cameras or dodgy audio in the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan and it covers a lot of topics.

The target audience will be absolute beginners to online marketing as it is all fairly straight forward stuff that you could easily learn from blogs and forums but it’s convenient to have it all in one easily accessible format.

The workbooks are transcripts of the DVD with space for writing notes. Which is nice for reinforcing what you’ve watched on the DVD.

There were a few things I thought were a bit odd about it, for example, there is quite a long section about wordpress and blogging which goes as specific as to discus plugins yet fails to mention plugins I see as being essential, like the All-In-One SEO Pack. Also the whole thing felt not very cutting edge, information wise. It seems to be all the same things that have been said over and over: create great content, submit to some directories, write some articles, start a blog, participate in forums social media…. etc etc but I guess you could argue not much has changed?

Summary

If you’re new to internet marketing and want a convenient, easily accessible introduction to the field you could do far worse than purchase the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan [aff link], which I should mention is retailing for £399, however, if you already have an idea about internet marketing and are reading some of the top blogs then you’ll be fine without it.

I may have suggested you should consider Aaron Wall’s SEO Book but he has recently changed his business model and is no longer offering the ebook.

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan probably fills a void in the market, not replacing SEO Book, but offering an alternative, which, money-wise, is probably more viable than something like Internet Marketing Ninjas (although they’re all slightly different products).

Related posts:

1. The big social media marketing myth
2. Carnival of Internet Pros
3. Can social media marketing be performed in-house?

I recently came across a blog about making money online by a guy named Angel.

I’d came across a post discussing the recent slapping Google seem to have given directories and I left a comment with my thoughts, I also said I wasn’t so keen on his navbar or post titles and here is why.

worldofangel.com’s navbar

In my opinion, the navigation bar on worldofangel.com is the weakest part of the blog design. I love the sidebar! There’s something about those bulletpoints which is just cool but the navigation bar lets the blog down a bit.

I think it needs to be stronger and more prominent. The links could do with being all in bold so they stand out more. Perhaps the make money blogging link could then have it’s colour changed. That way all the links would be stronger and there would still be a prominent call to action for the important link.

Also, I think some kind of mouse over effect would be nice too – maybe change colour or underline or something.

worldofangel.com’s post titles

Now I only have one small quibble with the post titles: the font. It just seems to different from the other fonts used throughout the blog. I personally feel the titles should be in the same font as the font used in the body of the posts but just bigger and bolder (they can stay pink; I’m all for pink!).

Finally, Angel could think about moving his RSS subscribe button above his about angel link/image. You want that subscribe button as strong as possible (yes I am aware mine could be more prominent) as for a blog that’s probably the single most important action a reader could take.

Obviously, this is all very subjective, so take my suggestions with a pinch of salt but let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for my blog I’m all ears.

[tags]blog critique, blog review, worldofangel.com[/tags]

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1. How to write more readable blog posts
2. What every blogger should know about setting up and optimising their blog
3. When is a blog not a blog?

Well now that I’m a full time slacker I have to act like one as well. So earlier today, when I finally got up actually I think I was still in bed (the joys of laptops!), after stumbling around the internet a bit I ended up at the easyPizza website.

This seemed an ideal solution to the lack of food in the flat and my lack of motivation to get up. The following are my thoughts on the experience.

easyPizza website

The website’s a bit dated looking to be honest (looks like it was built with tables too…). Anyway, it’s reasonably functional but I think they could make some improvements.

You have to enter your postcode before you can chose food, which is not very helpful if you’re either a bit dim, or like me, spend spent too much time at work filling in forms and entering the work address – which I promptly did on their form. Unfortunately I only realised after I’d chosen my food and was ready to pay and I couldn’t see anyway to change the postcode without ‘rebuilding’ (they call chosing your food ‘building an order’) my order. It wasn’t too much of a problem because ordering a pizza doesn’t take very long but it would have been nice not to have to do it anyway.

I also felt that the ‘building the order’ process was something where AJAX could be used to improve the user experience and make the process slicker.

When I had to fill in my card details one of the input fields was skewed and should be moved down. It doesn’t bother me hugely but it could be off putting for less web-savvy users.

I had a quick check on the competition and easyPizza appeared to be far cheaper than Dominos – that was a plus, I probably wouldn’t have ordered if it was at Dominos’ prices and would have been forced to go out for food!

Delivery

You had to chose a half hour slot for delivery and I chose the nearest one as I was quite hungry! It arrived right in the middle of the slot and I have no complaints (apart from having to hop down four flights of stairs to pick it up ;]).

The Pizza

Well I’ll be honest with you, I was a bit disappointed when I opened the box as the pizza looked a bit overcooked.

Having said that it was a lot tastier than it looked, and I hadn’t exactly been expecting gourmet excellence. So while it looked disappointing; taste wise it lived up to my expectations.

Another thing, I ordered diet coke (gotta have something ‘healthy’) and a normal coke came! On the other hand, I had been worried the drink might not be cold but it was in fact chilled so that was a bonus.

Summary

So, for about £8 I got a huge pizza and a bottle of coke (it was too much for me, I only ate about half!). It seemed like good value and I didn’t even have to get out of bed to order it. A little more attention to detail by the Earls Court franchise and I could have had a better cooked pizza and the right coke. The best thing was: I didn’t even have to get out of bed to order!

All in all I’d probably give it a 6 or 7 out of 10. Having said that, I doubt I’ll use it often – don’t take it personally Stelios, it’s just that I don’t often order pizzas and this was a bit of an impulse buy.

As a side note: I filled this post in Public Relations as I think it serves as an example of customer power in shaping a company’s brand perception on the web through blogs, forums, social groups etc.

[tags]easyPizza, pizza, branding, public relations[/tags]

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1. State Of The Aggregators