Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

It’s easier than it sounds…

1. Ask for a list of clients. Most dodgy SEO companies will want to keep exactly who their clients are quiet because it’s ridiculously easy to work out what their SEO strategy is. Many use Link Farms which makes it more than easy for your competitors to report your efforts as spam and get you dumped from Google.
2. Simply ask them how much they will recompense you if and when you get blacklisted by Google. If they aren’t doing lots of naughty things this won’t bother them, if they are you can enjoy watching them squirm as they realize you are onto them.

My next article may well be titled, How To Discover If Your Competitors Are Using SEO Companies That Use Link Farms And Get Them Blacklisted By Google.

The ethics of telling tales may still have a certain stigma attached to it, but … THEY STARTED IT!….

All’s fair in love, war and SEO.

Isn’t it funny when people apologize for not posting… As if anyone gives a toss, as if there’s a lack of blog posts. But sorry anyway.

I haven’t blogged in a while because all my ideas for blog posts have either been too tiny and end up as tweets, or just too big and they end up languishing in my Drafts folder waiting for the flash of insight needed to de-bigg-ify them. I’ve also been really, really busy, but that’s not an excuse is it.

But you probably know the real reason for my lack of blogging. Hasn’t it been lovely lately? Here’s a picture of my office this week (during the brief showers). I don’t know why but the wifi reception is better than on the garden table. (p.s We just saw Mrs Duck emerge with ten ducklings from under the pampas grass… awwwww!)

Working in the sunshine (on a computer) requires four things…

1. A tool like WriteRoom so you can actually see the screen. I really like WriteRoom but really couldn’t contemplate buying it because, in the good old days, it’d be the sort of thing I’d knock up in a few minutes (and regularly did).
2. Sun tan cream. My face is not strawberry red anymore. All you people stuck in an office can think yourself fortunate that you aren’t burning up in this glorious heat wave. You lucky people
3. Wireless power
4. A greenhouse

So, my first blog post in a quite a while. Aren’t bluebells lovely?

The Londinium Espresso Blog: Summer’s here … time for the Londinium affogato!

Reiss has got his “Art you drink” cups made and is putting them to good use in this hot weather.

Stephen Barber ( barbd.net ) really likes the My Starbucks Idea site and although the coffee isn’t a patch on Reiss’ (trust me), I also really like the stunningly simple idea of asking your customers questions. How simple is an idea that?

Why isn’t your company asking questions? Maybe it is… I forgot to ask.

Rick over at Wall Glamour Blog lets slip that he had a stand at the Grand Designs Live show.

I once sat next to and chatted with Kevin from Grand Designs on the London to York train, and it wasn’t until Newark that I realised exactly who he was, but by then it was too late, he’d already convinced me what a thoroughly lovely bloke he was… and shared his fizzy pigs.

I am partially celeb-blind.

A site for making timelines such as the History of Mongol Empire Timeline. Damn, I’d started creating one of these in the Google App Engine but haven’t received a full pass yet.

I think time as well as zooming are two of the richest un-tapped seams in interaction. Many have tinkered on the edges but always fluffed it. I quite like the zoom and pan interface over at Disruptive Research, but again, I feel they haven’t yet quite hit the nail on the head with regards to what zooming and panning affords.

One day, when the wind is in the right direction I will get a bite at the zoom and pan cherry. Lately I’ve been dabbling in Flex development, but don’t feel quite yet skilled enough to start throwing things around the screen….

The Byteflow Blog Engine is written in Django. I will have to give this a whirl sometime.

I’m still getting my head around the quirks of the new Wordpress Add media interface which to me is as ungainly as sitting Eggs Benedict on top of two circles of toast rather than the more traditional english muffin.

It was at a lovely hotel in Norwich that they served up this oddity, I mean, circles of toast?

Whilst in NZ I did a comprehensive survey of Egg Benedicts and found that apart from the eggs, what constitutes a “benedict” is completely up for grabs… I had them on muffins, bagels, bread baps… the meat was sometimes cooked ham, bacon or italian ham which made the ranking of the various Eggs Benedicts very difficult.

The outright winner though had to be “The Cup” up in the hills in CHCH.

That someone has done this is remarkable, so remarkable I think his site has crashed under the traffic….

John Resig - Processing.js

… and on the York Freecycle list, the fact that someone has done this is even more remarkable…

OFFERED: Kitchen Waste for Composting (Heslington Road) From: Charlotte Bonner

… Thank you Charlotte for actually believing that a Free-cycler might empty your bin for you…

The Spectra Visual Newsreader at msnbc.com is swooshy AND floaty. The first two things I look for in any application nowadays.

I was just finding NetNewsWire struggling lately to display all my newsfeeds and thinking, blimey, there has to be a better, more swooshy and floaty way to do this… and here it is…

Recently I’ve been on a project that uses BaseCamp. I really don’t know what all the fuss is about surrounding BaseCamp, for me it doesn’t do anything very well at all.. and often breaks to boot, but you tend not to know this stuff until you’ve been using the tools for a while (by which time your entire project is in there).

I wonder what the The Tools Google Uses Internally are like, better or worse?

I wonder if a consumer version of Subversion, with wiki knobs on, would be better than BaseCamp….

Because everyone told Sophie she looked terrible in the pictures I’d taken of her, she went to see Jim Poyner and she looks gorgeous doesn’t she?

This week, I am going to use my blog like twitter, only without the limitation on the number of characters… it’s the old new thing, it’s called blogging.

I was wondering, what is this off the coast of Lincolnshire? Volcano? Meteor hit? A washed up barrow? A mud circle made by boffins or kids to perplex me? Any ideas?