School Privacy

I'm entertained/worried by the issues relating to parents photographing/videoing their own and other peoples children at school events.

In respect for other people I haven't posted any pictures of any other children taking part in Linus's school nativity.

I am however less concerned about posting pictures of their parents taking pictures.

My/our position on the posting of normal family pictures on the internet is fairly obvious, but I'm interested in what other people think.

Hyderabad Hotel Pano

This is mostly a work-avoidance strategy, but I just got a really poor-quality panoramic picture from my hotel room window.

Click to enlarge.

This would seem to be starting to be a recurring theme, so see also Bocham

Maybe later I'll see if I can get to the roof and do something better from there (and/or blag a better camera).

Also, see Where is Bob.

My Three Boys

It is a rare occasion that we get a nice picture of the three boys sitting mostly nicely - but somehow Claire managed to take this:

PPC Networking

On Monday I was asked to present to the London SEO/PPC meetup group to talk about our approach to PPC bid management and optimisation.

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Web Anlytics Wednesday

Last night's Web Analytics Wednesday event went down well - at least sixty-five people attended (I'm sure some got past without being checked-off the list)

There are some pics here

Twitter is showing some nice activity via #wawlondon and the Web Analytics Wednesday London LinkedIn group is doing nicely.

Thank you to all who attended - hope to see you again in October - registrations are now open : http://www.sclanalytics.com/waw

Comments via here, email, twitter, linkedin or flickr.

Sea King

While on holiday we happened to be passing though Bideford on the day of the Water Festival (a rather apt name, given that it had been raining non-stop for the past week).

Anyway, at the festival was a Helicopter and RNLI display, showing a casualty being winched both from the water and to and from the inshore lifeboat.

Without any planning I managed to get a couple of decent frames of the helicopter.

Click to enlarge.

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Asa in the press

Asa has been featured in 'the press' - well almost. A new website has just been launched - Crawley Happy Times Online - which is dedicated to bringing you happy and positive events from and for Crawley.

Asa has his page here: Welcome to the world.

I'll be watching closely.

Where is Bob

As an experiment with Google Latitude and my first stab at using JSON data I can tell you where I am :

Of course, it's really telling you where my phone was last seen, but in any case, is this is dumb thing to do?

If anyone is interested in the details of how this is done, leave a comment and I'll write it up.

First Light (3)

So, we have a new baby - born at three thirty-eight this morning, after a short labour, a baby boy (oh no! Not another one!) - weighing 9lbs 11oz - with everyone happy and well.

Click to enlarge.

More pics and words to follow later.

(You will note the comments are open.)

::edit::

He has a website Asa Mitchell

Sets

This is a online, browser-based tool that implements set operations such as union, intersect, difference on lists of things. It is implemented in Javascript.

Scratch an itch. Right?

I wanted an easy way to take a list of email addresses, de-duplicate them and remove any other names that appear on another list.

This could have been done in several tools (I used a combination of Excel and the GNU utility comm (although it was probably possible to do it all in the spreadsheet), but I wanted a single-use tool that I could pass to other people that was simple, quick enough and I could make changes to.

It could probably be used for other things, but I can't think of any right now.

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Web Analytics Wednesday

We have a Web Analytics Wednesday coming up on the 17th of June in London.

• Presenter - check. (Aurélie Pols)
• Venue - check. (bluu - Moorgate)
• Guests - check. (about eighty and running)
• Drinks - check. (sponsored by Mtracking)
• Shameless promotion - check. :-p

(although there must be things that I've forgotten)

If you want to know more and to register go to http://www.sclanalytics.com/waw

Kids and Cake

For reasons that I won't go into right now, Claire and I have created a new forum, it's called 'Kids and Cake' and you can find it at http://www.kidsandcake.net .

It's a general parenting forum, aiming to be free / open / fair and I am trying to get new people on-board.

So, go along to http://www.kidsandcake.net and register and/or send the link along to someone that might like it.

Breaking Social Web Rules

While browsing in my local library I found Joshua Porters book 'Designing for the social web'. After reading the book and writing this post I realise that I'm breaking the following 'rules' right here on my site:

• Assuming that once you've shared, or in this case clicked on one of the links out to Amazon, that you don't want to do anything else.
• While this page has a unique URL, I haven't given a URL to each comment – unless the comments aren't social objects – I'm still confused.
• Not providing sufficient options to share.
• Not measuring (I'll go outside and shoot myself for that one right now)
• Not really thinking about ongoing participation or collective intelligence.

Shameless affiliate link to Amazon: Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Mostly this is a brief review of the book as well as a summary of its contents. Read on...

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Comments now open

I've gone and added the ability to comment on posts. It's secure right now but open to abuse.

I'll lock things down in due course.

(addendum - half a day later)

Spambots have already found the site and started posting.

Facebook?

Should I join Facebook?

About four or five years ago there was some weirdness between a really good friend of mine (Stafford Cawsey, in case he goes searching for his own name and finds this). It all got messed up and we haven't seen or spoken to each other since then.

Last week my mum happened to meet him and he said that he really wanted to get back in touch. He suggested that I could find him on Facebook.

Herein lies my dilemma.

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Bump (3)

It seems like we are expecting another baby. There are scan pictures to be had, but I thought I'd start with this extremely flattering picture of a rather bumpy bump.

It is due in June and everyone is well.

Blackberry Bold flower wallpaper

The following are nice flower wallpapers or backgounds that are scaled for the screen resolution of the Blackberry Bold (480x320)

To set these as your background wallpaper use the menu key (to the left of the ball), select 'Save Image', then check the 'set as home screen wallpaper checkbox' and then 'save'.

(both mine)

Blue flowers in a field - June summer blackberry bold wallpaper.

(that one from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net)

Here's one other marginally useful thing, a charging pod - it makes use of the little silver pads on the sides of the bottom of the handset (no, I didn't know that, either) - much easier than plugging and unplugging the blackberry all the time.

Blackberry 9700 Charging Pod

or Other Blackberry 9xxx charging pods

Selective Logging

A recent question from a client related to why data for part of their site wasn't appearing in their web analytics data (they happen to be using NetInsight).

For reasons that aren't important, this customer isn't using page tags, instead using the raw IIS server logfiles.

They had inadvertently deselected the 'log visits' checkbox for that portion of the site. This was duly re-enabled and the logging then continued and everyone was happy.

Click to enlarge.

Of course logging is generally configured at the ISS site level, but there is an opportunity here to do something a bit smart...

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