Surprisingly this promotional literature (+1) does not appear to be too in your face about the general election instead focusing on the past work of local councillors one of whom, David Radcliffe, is the PPC and is featured on the front page. Recycling is mentioned but there is no photo (boo, hiss!). In fact Radcliffe isn’t featured next to any of the people/items for which points are awarded and the entire A2 sized ‘newspaper’ remains a Nick Clegg free zone.

The back page features a nice graph (presumably from last years local elections) showing that “The Conservatives can’t win here” (+1). This reminded me of a time that one particular party back home (can’t remember which) got in trouble for producing a similar graphic which was not to scale so showing a party in a poor third place when in fact they were much closer. The title of the bar chart is “It’s so close here” but with 674 votes between Labour and the Liberals this annoys me. “So close” is more like 3 votes.

They do have a nice photo of a facepalm Gordon Brown though. I’m almost tempted to give them a bonus point for that. Almost.

Points awarded:  2

I am currently away at University living in the Selly Oak constituency of Birmingham (a safe Labour seat since 1992) where the drought of political leaflets so far has consisted solely of a typo-ridden leaflet from the Liberal Democrats and something from Labour earlier this week.

Am slightly disappointed.  If I was living at home in the three-way marginal seat of Watford (for which I will use my postal vote) I am pretty sure the pile would be much higher by now.

To make the campaign more exciting I will be awarding the parties points for their various campaigning methods (how hard they have tried!). Points are awarded for the following starting March 1st ending the day after the election:

• For each piece of literature delivered on behalf of a party
• For each photo of the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (the word “Prospective” seems out of place here…):
  • Standing next to a sign for the local hospital
  • Standing next to their party leader
  • Holding a recycling box/bin or the waste that is to be put into it
  • Which contains a Union Flag or St George’s Cross
  • (-100 if the aforementioned flag is being thrown out!)
• For every mention of an opposition party that “can’t win here” or are in “a poor third place”
• For every mention of the incumbents expense claims
• One point each time a single piece of literature contains more than 3 quotes from the local newspaper
• 5 points if a canvasser knocks at your door
• 15 points if the candidate knocks at your door
• A bonus point if the door-knocking person uses the phrase “can we count on your support?”
• Double points for anything not from one of the 3 major parties

It’s true I do use a lot of tabs.  Most of the time I am online I will have between 10 and 2o tabs open at any one time, and when I am also working perhaps as many as 30.  This reduces my viewing of each webpage to a favicon only – one of the reasons why I was happy to recently implement such an identifier at Game Maker Blog.

Whilst having as many as 30 tabs open at time starts to become impractical (there are only so many that can be identified in a single line at a time), I don’t see anything strange it having around 15 active tabs.

For example here is Google Chrome’s Task Manager showing the tabs I currently have open having just returned from eating dinner after doing some research.

A nice mix of tabs covering connection with the outside world (my email), news stories of interest followed from the BBC news homepage and Twitter, an Earth Hour de-motivational poster (following on from a Guardian article about tourism in North Korea which I read at breakfast), identifying a song from some of its lyrics, Game Maker websites and pages about the security of JSP files and Social Networking (work!).

Working like this enables me to quickly switch from checking my emails, updating a blog, working, reading sites of interest and playing the occasional online game (a current favourite is dicewars based on the 2008 US election).  Provides a distraction from work – possibly.  But I like it.

Yesterday I set up a website for a friend on my Computer Science course – Joseph Gardiner.   He was surprised at how easy and cheap it was to setup (goDaddy are currently doing .infos at $1.18 for the first year).  In the past I have helped a few of my friends set up something similar but most let them expire after a year or so and don’t maintain them – and these are people who can easily get the .com of their name!

I think having a personal website is pretty important if you work in programming or some kind of creative computing industry as you can use it to showcase your portfolio of work, learn new skills and advertise yourself to potential employers and clients.  A simple WordPress blog is easily customisable and doesn’t require any particular skills to maintain.

I was pleasantly surprised.  The first half of the module is taken up with guest lectures from IT professionals.  So far we have had speakers from IBM and Fujitsu and some smaller companies as well as a very interesting talk on computer forensics from a former police officer turned forensic investigator.  A couple of talks were also given by someone from the careers department of the University about writing a CV and giving presentations.

The assessment part of the module comes 50% from an essay examining an area of computing – the title of mine is “Is the Internet good for Democracy?” and 40% from a 40 minute team presentation and 30 page report.  Our chosen subject is “How has the Internet changed social interaction”.  The remaining 10% is given for submitting a CV and covering letter applying for a job along with a job ad of your choice.  This got me searching for jobs adverts and there are a lot out there.  Think I will choose something like this at BestBuy or this at an unspecified eCommerce firm.  Online content/promotion without being too code based.

I am able to make the CV from a one I wrote about a year ago when I figured it would be useful to have one and from my LinkedIn page (really makes creating a CV simple!).  Hard to work out what stuff to include that isn’t official paid work though  - for example the websites I have created/run.  They certainly are experience but I need to decide which are relevant.  Perhaps more of a covering letter thing.

Looked over a covering letter belonging to a friend earlier today so that should give me some ideas of what to include.  There are plenty of resources available online to find out about what is expected in a CV/covering letter so fingers crossed it will not take too long to get the best part of 10% of the module done.

A return to daily blogging?  Probably not.

First decent credit crunch themed song – better than Dirtee Cash by one Mr Dizzee Rascal anyway…

Also notice that Mumford and Sons, described on Wikipedia as “folk rock”, have been getting a lot of airplay on Radio 1 and 2 this past week. In fact they are currently third in the “most played artists this week” table which sums up all the plays on BBC Radio and TV shows for thousands of artists.

Show of Hands  Spotify artist link
Mumford and Sons album Sigh No More (which you should of listened to long ago…)

It has been a busy year for me and for the most part I have neglected this site in favour of microblogging and maintaining my more successful sites. If you don’t already may I suggest that you follow me on Twitter. You may also be interested in following either of the other accounts I run, @gamemakerblog for news about YoYo Games’ Game Maker software, games and media releases and @cassioburypark for information about a park back home in Watford.

Work
Yesterday Will Critchlow from SEO company Distilled came to the University of Birmingham to talk about the work the company does for clients including several Fortune 500 companies as well as smaller businesses. It really got me thinking about my future as I have known for some time now that I do not want to become a programmer and I am very interested in creating web content. As several people I know have also been applying for (and some getting) work placements at large companies or in one case have received a job offer having not done particularly well towards the end of their time at school I really need to work something out. I think the majority of people on my course are probably in the same situation as me – perhaps I should start thinking about applying for some summer placements? I also know Will is not morally against against my sell-out links at the top of the blog homepage even if it not something he would use for his clients!

Sites
Google Analytics tells me that visits to GameMaker Blog are up 120.80% from last year. There have been over 13,000 uniques visitors in the past month and I accidentally launched a successful direct ad sales income stream for the site after a reader approached me to ask if it was possible to purchase a slot. Total CPM rates remain low though. When we next get a break in direct sales I think I will return AdSense to the site and attempt to raise CTRs by modifying its positioning. I think it is a tricky balance to maintain though as I don’t want to overwhelm readers with ads so that they will either leave or block them. The great thing about the direct sales is that I wrote my own php/mySQL system to serve and track them which means that they show for most people even if they have adblock. I dropped ProjectWonderful as I wasn’t doing too well with them even though I had several targeted direct purchases through them. Put it this way: In 2 years of PW I earned as much as I now do from 2 months direct sales in one slot.

Growth in the related affiliation/banner service has slowed and in fact the number of banners served has declined from an earlier peak. There are now only about half a million impressions a month (about 50% of the peak). This is one project I often tell myself I will rewrite with new features but have never got around to doing. I may try to seek a partner to run the service or commission someone to write a better script. Over the past six months I did add a few anti-fraud measures myself but it really needs a rewrite from scratch.

A related surprise has been the success of my domain GameMaker8.com. The single page website imports the GMB RSS feed for posts in the “Game Maker 8″ category yet gets 80% of the uniques of the fully developed and time consuming GMB. I can probably use this to my advantage by developing a mini site or links to relevant posts such as my interview with and review of Jerry Lee Ford’s Getting Started with Game Maker which contain my Amazon associate links. A sidepoint on this is that the site attracts an audience from around the world so whatever I do I will be loosing out on revenue from somewhere as I only have Associates accounts on .com (for the US) and .co.uk.

Local information site CassioburyPark.info is, as I’ve mentioned before, very seasonal. A Wordpressified version of the site should be coming soon as the existing design does not really suit the development of further pages on the site. Only problem is I don’t want to loose my 5 Google site links as 81% of visits come from Google searches. Ad revenue per visitor is considerably higher than on any of my other sites – I presume this is because it is locally targeted although normally I just see adverts for playground equipment. I contacted Nik Allen who runs the very nice local monthly magazine My Watford News (as well as 5 similar titles in neighbouring area) to see what they charged for advertising on their very under utilised website. Answer: £50 a month for a homepage banner that is rotated alongside other purchasers. I don’t know their traffic levels but their Alexa rank is worse than Cassiobury Park’s.

Thinking of local media I had some photos I took of the snowy park published in the Christmas Day edition (yes!) of the local paper Watford Observer and I think some are still on their website. They were taken with my parents terrible digital camera early on the first morning of real snow.

Domains such as AidyBoothroyd, BrendanRodgers and BetOnSwineFlu and this blog continue to tick over with no work spent on improving or promoting the sites. Pageviews do not normally exceed a thousand a month.

My newest creation is FlashPunked.com a news blog on the new Flash ActionScript 3 library set up for online friend Jack Brockley to run. It is essentially GMB for a different platform.

Just a quick post about the unexpected but not unpredictable stats one of my websites has been receiving recently.

The following graph shows the number of daily visits to CassioburyPark.info a website that has remained largely the same for a long period of time.  Recently I updated a page on the site with information about things to do with children in the park but the growth started before this.   I attribute this to improved Google rankings combined with the summer holidays.

A couple of days after I redid the children’s attractions page I decided to place a standard banner adsense block halfway down the page as this was proving to be the most popular page on the site.  It was a good move with that position so far achieving a click through rate of more than three times the homepage banner.

What I have been most surprised about is the number of people that go online looking for information about the park.  Yes it is a large and beautiful place which attracts large numbers of visitors but I never really considered that so many people would search online for details about it.

The interest must be there though as the average reader looks at 4.48 pages well ahead of the figures I have been getting elsewhere.

The hot weather may bring traffic to CassioburyPark.info but it also brings idiotic drivers, horn honkers, blarer-outers of extremely bad music and illegal-parkers outside our house all adding to the general chaos.  Living next to Watford’s biggest free attraction certainly has its downsides.

This blog appears high in searches for my name and has a PageRank of 2 which appears to have made advertising on this site an attractive proposition for some people.

Sadly “Gamble” also makes this site attractive for blog comment spam, although handily akismet weeds out about 99.75% of it perfectly well, the other 0.25% having to be rejected manually.

I hadn’t placed AdSense or any other kind of ads on here until recently as I really didn’t think the disruption would be worth a potential few cents a day. I haven’t exactly worked out how to make much from AdSense either.

Studying Computing at school has given me the opportunity to learn programming first-hand and has introduced me to the languages of Pascal, Delphi and Assembly Language. In addition to class and coursework, I have completed extra programs including a prime number generator and several simple games.

In year 11 I completed work experience at Casewise Systems Ltd, where I helped to test business modelling software in the days prior to its release. As all departments of the company were housed on a single floor this enabled me to gain an insight into the different stages of software design within a software development business.
Earlier this year I organised an additional week of work experience with Imagination Technologies where I helped test the performance of graphic chips which would be embedded into future mobile phones and other handheld devices when completed. This was of particular interest to me as it helped improve my awareness of the close relationships that must exist between hardware and software components of a computer system.

In 2004 I developed a web-based fantasy football league competition which I ran for two years. This led me to discover some of the more advanced capabilities of spreadsheets which I then used to automatically generate league updates. Organising the competition was also an opportunity I took advantage of to improve my HTML skills and showed that I could be relied upon to provide weekly updates. To enhance the site I gained experience of coding for websites using basic php and CSS.
For the past six months I have been a regular contributor to the “MarkUp” game development magazine (http://markup.gmking.org). This has helped improve the quality of my written work and communication skills whilst working on features and keeping in touch with other writers. My organisational and time-keeping skills have developed as I have been given responsibility to conduct interviews, research and then present news and review books on my own. I have used my initiative to ensure that articles are ready for publication on time and are of sufficient quality. In recent months I have also become more involved in editing the magazine, expressing my views to the Senior Editor about article content and layout and having an influence on the final look of the magazine.

At school I participated in the Young Enterprise scheme where I was a member of a successful ‘company’ which organised two discos and designed and produced souvenirs for a school song and dance performance. This gave me experience of working as part of a team to produce a final product; skills which I will be able apply to future projects.
Table tennis is a sport which I enjoy and play frequently and I have been skiing regularly since the age of 5 and am now a competent skier. I enjoy filming and use my computer skills to edit my creations.

I am looking forward to continuing my studies in a subject that I have a real enthusiasm for.