Firetop

Following the Midnight Mass ceremony at Westcott Church I’ve had some sleep, opened some presents, completed Chapter One of Star Wars Lego II for the Xbox 360, chopped one hundred potatoes, and will now proceed to prepare the dinner table for visiting family due in fifteen minutes. Happy Christmas to one and all!

When, in November, Suzie_Q and I finally set a January date for our wedding, we thought it would take a little while to get pregnant. There are entire books devoted to fertility treatment, dos and don’ts, life style changes etc. However, it would seem that Suzie_Q and I are just plain lucky, falling pregnant on our very first attempt. We didn’t exactly expect it to be so easy - I’m all in favour of the ‘practice makes perfect’ mantra… thankfully we will at least have been married for six months when junior arrives! On Friday morning we headed to the anti-natal department at East Surrey hospital for the first ultrasound scan. (more…)

I was checking out my new miniature vegetable garden this week (which is a complete failure despite my best efforts with organic compost) - to my amazement, all the Daffodils have sprouted in the borders (and lawn) with stems a good three to five inches high. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were flowering in January - which surely can’t be a good thing as there’ll be very little chance of pollenation! I had a look online to see if my garden was unique, I discovered it’s a UK wide phenomenon (and that Daffodils are deadly).

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With internal flights cancelled at Heathrow and Gatwick today due to thick fog, I wasn’t sure how clear I’d find the M25. Sure enough there was an accident at junction 18 and the variable speed limits were in force to slow everybody down right back at junction 11. I only got stuck in queued traffic twice, but it still took forty-five minutes to travel from junctions 9 to 13. The reason for my trip? Visiting my accountant to drop off the 2005/06 accounts, a return due to Companies House in January… and more importantly - corporation tax due on January 1st (how depressing). (more…)

This morning I visited the Grange Fitzrovia Hotel in London to attend a Forrester Research presentation. There the folks at Forrester went through the results of their second 2006 UK Internet user study. Forrester run such surveys every 6 months, collecting user data from over 130,000 UK consumer profiles visiting the UK’s most popular websites. Typically this data is collected through invitation to an online survey, as a visitor surfs a website. Participants are questioned over their basic demographic information such as age, sex and income - data which is then reviewed against their own described online behaviour to identify trends. For me the results were fascinating, giving a great insight into the real UK usage levels of blogs, social media, mobile phones and media sites. (more…)

One or two sites I’ve worked on of late have had problems with the relevance of Google Adsense adverts appearing on their website. Typically the problems have involved adverts being relevant to the website’s name (or domain), but not what the website is actually about. For example, this website ‘Firetop’ on initial installation of Adsense saw a huge amount of advertising for ‘fireplaces’ - relevant to the content? Nope! Whilst rooting around in the Adsense help pages I came across a couple of useful comment tags which enable a webmaster to emphasis key areas of content for the Google Adsense spiders to prioritise, with inverse tags to highlight areas to ignore. Within 48 hours these fixed 99% of the problem and increased relevance accordingly. (more…)

Last week I managed to pick up a cold, one of those ones where you feel it coming on for a few days, do your best to fight it by drinking lots of orange juice… but in the end wake up at 3am in a cold sweat and a memory full of nonsensical fever dreams (mine usually involve cats dancing on tables). I’ve been exhausted for the past four days, so the weekend was a frustrating write-off - no trips out of the house at a vital ‘Christmas shopping’ time… just Web, TV and Xbox Live. I did manage to find a few hours to upgrade this blog a bit with some useful functionality though - ‘Mapstats’ and ‘Snap Preview’ of most interest. (more…)

Tonight I received an email from my domain registration vendor Fasthosts, it offered me five free credits on the Fotolia image bank website. Fotolia allows both individuals and professionals to buy and sell their photographs or illustrations legally - at reasonable rates too (£0.57!). Having gone there to check it out I found it pretty good. I purchased four useful high quality images using my free credits, and loaded one or two of my own photographs to see if they might be saleable. This website looks like a great alternative to the likes of Getty who greatly irritated me earlier this year by sending a £1000+ fine in my direction. (more…)

On Sunday afternoon Suzie_Q and I headed to Balham to have lunch with the husband of my former friend and colleague Lale Metzinger (nee Gurel); Lale sadly passed away in April of this year after suffering from a very aggressive form of cancer. I owe Lale a lot; she gave me my first big break into online marketing, as well as providing some PPC contracts for Firetop Ltd whilst she later worked at Greenpeace. Working with Lale was a major crash course in digital advertising - and it sent me on my current path. She was a very kind and generous person so I will always be grateful that I knew her. I’d never met with Peter Metzinger before, but was thoroughly glad he was able to find time for lunch with us whilst here on business. (more…)

Since I started this blog I’ve had one or two people tell me that they  wanted to be alerted whenever somebody posts a comment on an article. On both occasions I’ve explained about the RSS feeds already in place, but it did make me realise that maybe it deserved a further explanatory entry. In addition I have set up an email subscriber service in the right hand menu. If you enter your email address in the box you will receive an email each time I write a new entry - a handy alternative to RSS feed use. (more…)