Trip To Glasgow – March 2013

Recently I visited Glasgow for a long weekend. Really the reason was to watch Wales play Scotland in Hampden Park, but as it is a city I’ve never been before, I took some time out to visit the city.

All in all, I had a great time, Glasgow is a great city, people were dead friendly, and we were even allowed in The Iron Horse, the Tartan Army pub. So many memories and happy thoughts such as the spine tingling rendition of “Caledonia” on karaoke on Thursday night by some amazing singer, an American stumbling into The Iron Horse with not a clue with what’s going on (even going so far as to wearing an Irish jumper!), eating horrible food and not giving a damn, stumbling upon a great hotel full of Welsh people. Kippers for breakfast (a relevation!), a solid Wales performance. Ashton Lane in Glasgow for pints, and Partick Thistle. Especially Partick Thistle.

Anyway here are my “cultural” photos. The matches I went to see will be covered on You’re Supposed to be at Home, with the Wales match up first!

A proper post is on the way soon!

As an aside, and here’s a Social Media Tip you’ll never hear at conferences:-

If you ever want to get a lot of retweets, followers and replies, talk about Partick Thistle. They love their club being mentioned. Seriously. Work it into your digital marketing strategy today.

Google Reader To Shut Down: My Thoughts

So yes, I woke up to the news that Google Reader is To Shut Down.

Usually I am rather flippant when Google services shut down (remember Google Wave?), and I am usually that dickish mate who responds to my less intelligent mates who whinge about Facebook changing it’s layout with “If you don’t like it, ask for a refund.”.

But gah I am annoyed with this move.

Where's the "I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS" button?
Where’s the “I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS” button?

You see I use RSS in 3 ways. Despite the usual way of keeping up with news, I also use it to provide basic content to my Twitter feed quickly and easily, using a combination of Buffer (which is amazing, use it), and IFTTT (which is amazing, use it). It helps keep me relevant and useful even when rushed off my feet.

The second is that, at least with this here blog, RSS is the fourth biggest source of traffic, and has the biggest engagement. I assume many of these people come from Google Reader, so to lose that source is really frustrating.

I have signed the petition on change.org with the unbelievably vain hope the behemoth that is Google listens, but I doubt they will. I am looking at alternatives as we speak (suggestions welcome! Especially those that have recipes already in IFTTT), but I guess this is a timely reminder that you should always always build your services and legacy on your own domain and hosting, and obtain email addresses when marketing. Whilst not 100% secure, it is more secure than building on services that are open to the whims of large organisations.

What are your thoughts on Google Reader Closing?

P.S. Even with this move, RSS isn’t dead. I think WordPress would have to stop offering RSS feeds, and this doesn’t look likely, at least for WordPress 3.6. Feedburner users should be worried, though.

February Challenge Update & March Goal

Apologies for the small delay in the blog post. I completely missed a blog post last week, which is practically inexcusable, as I do have posts to post. I celebrated my 29th birthday last Monday (Happy Birthday to Me!) and generally spent most of the week either celebrating or recovering.

I have also have some amazing news on the horizon on the next couple of months, which may take quite a bit of my time, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend on this site for the next couple of months. Next months’ goal for example is “fucking finish what is causing the amazing news”, so that’s all sorted! But onto this month’s goal & last month’s.

February’s Goal – Decluttering: Complete! (ish)

Yes! I managed to declutter a fair bit from my room and domain portfolio, making about £100 in the process. Money which is appreciated as in under two weeks I am heading to Glasgow to watch Wales play Scotland in the footy (as well as the bonus attraction of Glasgow Rangers vs Stirling Albion the next day – Scottish Division 3 doesn’t get the International break that higher leagues do). It wasn’t without it’s faults, here were a few things that could’ve scuppered me:-

ebay-request

eBay  Throttling My Listings

I talked about this briefly in another one of my other posts, but something I didn’t realise was eBay would only allow 10 items (or £500 value items) for new sellers. As somebody who rarely dabbles in eBay, this was frustrating as I had to split my listings up over two days, nearly missing the February deadline.

Bad/Late Payers

So I had two auctions won, however at the time of writing I’ve still to receive payments for. They were also fairly high selling items, so I’m a bit gutted to not get the cash in my back pocket yet. I’ve chased and chased, and not sure what to do if I’m honest. eBay don’t exactly support sellers over buyers, so I’m thinking I may have to suck it up and relist. Boo hoo.

Godaddy

What a bunch of monumental weapons. You see, I snapped up a domain on backorder a few years ago, and it came with a “free domain monitoring service” which automatically links me with the domain. However, after realising I had fuck all to write about Belgium I sold it to a friend of mine. Said friend has let it lapse, Godaddy paced it into auction and because I have the “free domain monitoring service” still on my account they very kindly put in a bid for the domain. A bid that wasn’t matched, and I now once again own  said domain.

I’m not happy. It’s not expensive, but frustrating as GoDaddy have been as helpful as a chocolate teapot, often throwing answers in legalese to me. In this one dickish move, they are losing me as a customer. Sucks to be you, Godaddy.

March’s Goal – Launch a Website

And so onto March’s goal – it is to get a website out of the door. I’ve been sitting on a domain for about 3 or 4 months for an idea that I’ve never even started, so decided to launch a website by March 31st.

I’ve bought the domain name, secure the Twitter & Facebook accounts for it and invested a little bit of money for advertising. The domain however is going to try and make money, and I have a plan for doing so. Wish me luck!

Buy My Stuff!

Don’t worry, this isn’t a post on me hawking WP Email Capture.

So yes, if you remember my goal for February is to declutter. It’s going well, a sober weekend saw me break the back of most of the work I needed to do, and have well and truly cleared my desk. I also went on an eBay splurge, and managed to clear a bunch of stuff and list it online. Hurrah!

clutter3

Yes, that’s most of the stuff I’ve listed online. But not all. You see, for some reason eBay in their infinite wisdom have put limits as to what you can sell in a month. You see, I should’ve sold about 15 items, I’m only allowed to sell 10 a month.

ebay-request
Curses! When did this happen?

Anyway, as a few of you asked, the items I am selling are below. Bid high, bid often, bid aggressively. Thank you.

(PS. Want a feed like this? Download my eBay Feeds For WordPress Plugin!)

(PPS. Snowed under with a few projects, back early next week with proper non shilly post)

My First Tweets….

In case you don’t spend as much time on Twitter as I do, Twitter have started offering archives of your Tweets to download and read through at your leisure. Basically, to save space, you cannot search through all your tweets (heavy users get about 2 weeks worth), but the links are obviously still there and live, so you can see them, just not find them once they are lost in the Internet.

Anyway, if you go to your settings page and click “Your Twitter Archive”, you can request it.

And. It’s. Brilliant.

A little history for you, I joined Twitter ages ago in July 2007, at the ripe old age of 23, and this was my first ever tweet:-

Don’t worry, 4 tweets in, I was already yelling at Han for some reason.

So this got me thinking! What was the first tweets I sent to various people that have become close friends now about? Well, thanks to a rather handy search feature, it’s easy to find out! First off, my 3 Door Digital colleagues Alex:-

and Anna:-

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree. It doesn’t get much better, here was my first message to Shane, discussing Movember:-

Carly‘s – which was discussing the latest troll that existed in the SEO-sphere (who was being SEOCockstars?):-

And Richard‘s:-

However, occasionally, very occasionally, the odd first message turns out to be brilliant. Take for example my first message to Matt. For a few years, I’ve been routinely mocked due to my lack of film knowledge. Many may argue that is completely justified, but – a year before we began working together at Manual Link Building – I can’t say I didn’t warn him.

But the best, and the most relevant to my career was my first message to Pete. It was when I was the SEO for Livetech, and I was whinging about the Google SERP’s for one of our clients, who wanted to rank for a particular localised phrase. Despite having reported the phrase to be #1, we still weren’t getting traffic, and then I realised, the localised listing for this phrase was for the place in the United States with the same name. I whinged on twitter, and Pete replied:-

Anyway, I remember the SERP now, it was “plumbers in Flint”.

It is still fucked.

The more things change in SEO, the more they stay the same.

Still, it got me thinking of how big a deal Twitter is. When twitter started I was living in Colwyn Bay, doing an okay job, but not really meeting many like minded geeks. I’m now living in Manchester, forming friendships with all the people who are listed above, and am enjoying life. It’s a long way since the days we were warned to not meet people off the Internet in case we were axe murderers or something, and Twitter is largely to thank for it.

Maybe it’s true what they say: Facebook is for people you went to school with, Twitter is for people you wish you went to school with.

Anyway, what were your first tweets? Anything interesting to anybody? I’d be keen to see them in the comments!