Someone else I know and like

Following on from my post the other day, I'd like to link you up to the musings of Oliver Dore.

I’ve known Oli for about 6 years now, since we met while I was teaching at the University of Lincoln.

He has worked at a few top class agencies here in the UK including mN and now works for HUGE, Brooklyn in New York.

Oli is a fantastic developer with a very strong eye for design and he’s possibly one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever met! Go check him out on his tumblelog.

Blogging and Advertising

I've been blogging on and off for just over a year now and I'm consistently getting around 300 hits per month which I'm really impressed with. Most of my traffic (about 50%) comes through a single post about resizing images which leads me to believe that 90% of the folks that read this blog are developers like my self. And I guess this was alway my intention as I doubt anyone really wants to read about how I just mowed the lawn after playing 9 holes of golf, but I had reason to believe (and now have proof) that a few of my ramblings would hold some interest for a few people out there.

As a web developer I don't really like banner ads and rarely ever click on them (I think I've clicked on maybe 2 in my 10+ years of internetting) and a never click the sponsored links that show up at the top of Google, they're only at the top because someone paid for them, and to me that spells a false positive. The non-sponsored links below stand a very strong chance of being more relevant.

So, anyway, as a bit of an experiment and a completely transparent attempt to make a quick buck I've taken advantage of the quick and easy method blogger now provides to "Monetise your blog" and lobbed AdWords on here.

Obviously I hope I make my millions from it but I'd like to see if I actually make anything from it at all. I'd like to see if all developers are like me and see right through online advertising. Or if it's just me that thinks I can do a better job of finding what I'm after than Google can.

Here's hoping!

People I know and Like(?)

Quite a lot has happened in and around my little blogosphere in the last few months.

Back in February I mentioned the development blog of my friend, ex-colleague and ex-house-mate, James (Jay) Field's work for his Interactive Media MA project "Frontier".
Frontier is a massively multiplayer online game that Jay is building in Flash. The blog has gone a bit quite at the moment since he was made senior lecturer at the Hull School of Art and Design.


iheartspaceships
Nearly a year and a half ago, Ryan and Andy bought a domain name and said they were going to produce a blog. Yesterday they launched "a day early".

Ryan is a Flash Developer here at twentysix Leeds and works across many large brands on both web and AIR based Flashieness.

Andy is our UI Developer working on many of the same clients and projects but does miraculous things with JavaScript and CSS.

Hopefully they'll have some interesting thoughts soon over at iheartspaceships.com


niid.to
About a month ago James and Tom C left twentysix Leeds to persue a life of love and freedom as freelance developer and designer respectively. Amongst various freelance work that they won't tell us about they also founded niid.to, a social to do list and they have an accompanying blog over at http://niidto.blogspot.com/

26point1
Our Technical Director, Matt, used to run two blogs for the different types of nonsense he likes to spout off about. "matts 2 minute reviews" and "matts random days". Not that long ago, he merged them into one central repository of nonsense over at 26point1. Hop on over there to read about all kinds of rubbish, both technology-based and not...

Final Frontier

My old friend James only just showed me the devblog for the project he's basing his masters work around. Swing on over to http://www.frontier.lincoln.ac.uk/devblog/ and check out the crazy work he's doing.

Tidy Up

I just deleted all my old half started posts in an attempt to get some more writing done, I figured I would never finish these posts now or in the future as the moment really has passed and would seem even less applicable as time crawles on.

Well, what else am I going to do at 8am on a Saturday :(

The Pixel Chicken

I just found out that my mate Liz has buggered off back to Australia without somuch as a good bye! The cow!

So anyway, I thought I'd link her up... If you're reading this, you're based in Sydney and you're looking for a top class interactive designer / developer then give Liz a shout and check out her blog over at www.pixelchicken.com.

Liz, next time try saying good bye ;)

The internet is a funny thing

When I first started this blog I couldn't help feeling a little self concious about "baring my soul" to the internet and thinking, what is the point? What have I got to say that anyone might be even slightly interested in?

However; In true Field of Dreams "If you build it, they will come!" styleee this blog has gone from getting bugger all hits to now getting "a few" hits from all over the world, and the bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit are on the decline/up/up respectively.

It's interesting to see which articles are getting the most traffic, courrently most popular is my little write up of an easy way to upload and resize in C#. Which is almost nice to see as I did intend on making that one quite big on the search engine front. So that seems to have worked / It's a very popular search topic (which is why I wrote it, Because I was sick of searching for it so I thought I'd use my blog as a kind of extended / shared note book for code snippets).

So the ramblings keep on coming (although I had another drought the last month or so) but I think the next thing I'm going to try and write will be an article on securing ASP.NET applications as we recently had a little incident at work where some rogue links go into one of our site and as a result I got volunteered to write some best practices. Bugger... and on the theme of writing articles I'm going to look at an article on versioning web services too. I know there has been pleanty written about this already but I haven't really read any of it and it's one of the things I want get my head around and writing it up will probably help me drum it in.

So watch this space for more absolute cobblers and other possibly useful things.

IPod what!

I'm sat on to virgin cross country service from Leeds to Sheffield and there is a girl sat next to me seemingly using an old laptop kitted out with iTunes to do nothing else but listen to music. I on the other hand am listening to music on my IPod, while blogging from my phone. Technology ay?!

More...

More mindless drivel and ramblings now available free over at twentysix Opinions.

Blog code formatting tool

While I was writing that last post I went hunting for a code formatting tool for my code inserts and came across Format MY Source Code for Blogging.

It's not quite what I wanted but I'm not about to write a C# syntax highlighter so it'll do for now

My Transatlantic Lover

So I've been blogging now for all of 3 weeks and I completely wasn't expecting anybody to read this diatribe at all. I didn't even think my work mates would find it mildly amusing...

HOWEVER; wading through the four visitors I've had, google analytics has revealed that I've had a visitor from Reston in Virginia.

Who are you mystery person? and did you find my blog interesting

Damn Internet

So after my post last week about redesigning this blog the internet at work has been bloody slow so all I have managed to do is hack the template and change the background colour.

But I like it. One day I'll follow up what I say...