Autumn 2010 is bearing a distinct resemblance to autumn 2009. It’s busy. But the excellent new PC Site website that we are just finishing off at work will be my last. After three years I’m going to try my hand at something a little different.

If you want to keep up with my writing work, then I’m blogging a little more regularly on my posterous blog.

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Photo of the Boris Bikes – full photograph on my Flickr

My Firefox Add Ons

This is a list for myself as much as anything. So, Peter. The next time that your computer breaks and is wiped clean by IT – then these are the main things that you need.

Delicious Bookmarks – Access your bookmarks wherever you go and keep them organised

Firebug – Web development tool

Fire FTP – An FTP client for Firefox – and a pretty good one at that

Fireshot – For screenshots of entire screens which can be edited and saved as JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP

Google Toolbar for Firefox – A bunch of Google Tools and the (in)famous green page rank bar

LinkDiagnosis – For examining link competition

NoDoFollow – Highlight links in a document and splits them between follow/do follow

SearchStatus – Displays the Google, Alexa, Compete and Linkscape rankings of a website

YSlow – measuring loading speeds – more important with the advent of Google Caffeine. It also contains Smush.it – a good free tool from Yahoo for optimising web images

And a couple of software packages

Jing – for screenshots

Traffic Travis – for keyword reporting and backlinks

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Image credit: Olaya B

We’re getting busier by the day at Net Media Planet. So busy, in fact, that we are currently recruiting for four new positions.

So, hopefully you’re looking for a job in digital media. Hopefully you’re bright and passionate and you know a lot (or a bit) about Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and you’d like to find out a bit more.

The Times has said that we’re the 16th fastest-growing private technology firm in the UK. We’ve won a truck load of awards in the search industry and digital publishing and we generated something like £80 million in revenue for a long list of clients last year.

So, if you’d like to work with us this is what you could be:

1. PPC Analyst:

What you’ll do:

We are looking for someone to join the team and take on the role of PPC Analyst, reporting directly to the Head of Search. You’ll manage campaigns for A-brand clients such as Dell, Adobe, McAfee and Singapore Airlines – becoming an expert in what Jason Calacanis has called the most important industry of the twenty first century.

What you’ll need:

A 2:1 degree in maths, statistics or another quantitative subject along with top analytical skills.

Read the full job spec here.

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2. Account Manager

What you’ll do:

You’ll report to the Operations Director and you’ll manage big client relationships with anyone from Apple to Microsoft. You’ll identify new business opportunities, prepare proposals and participate in pitches.

What you’ll need:

A couple of years experience working in a client facing role – preferably within the search industry. You’ll be analytical, with a great knowledge of PPC and you’ll have a deep-set interest in online marketing.

Read the full job spec here.

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3. Frontend developer

What you’ll do:

You’ll work with the Publishing and Projects team and you’ll be responsible for making sure that all of our top websites look good, work across all browsers and load up in super-quick time. You’ll have loads of scope to grow and you’ll have a lot of freedom – and what’s more you’ll be working with big clients.

What you’ll need:

You’ll need to have excellent CSS, HTML, Javascript, AJAX (JQuery) as standard. You’ll need to have experience working with big websites and you’ll be working with Facebook, WordPress and APIs – so experience there is beneficial too.

Read the full job spec here.

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4. Business Development Exec

What you’ll do:

You’ll work with the business  development manager searching for new business right across the affiliate industry and beyond. You’ll manage relationships with affiliate networks and merchants so the company can make the best of any emerging opportunity.

What you’ll need:

A couple of years in a sales-based role and/or previous experience in digital media.

Read the full job spec here.

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If you would like to apply for any of these roles – just send a CV over to peter at netmediaplanet . [com] and I’ll pass it on.

Image from Flickr

Image credit: My David Cameron

How to laugh at a politician

On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.

And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.

1. My David Cameron

A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.

The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.

2. #itsnicksfault

After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:

“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”

3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian

Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:

According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.

[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]

4. The Daily Mash

Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:

Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]

BNP launches aryan spread – [link]

Brown to be turned into glue – [link]

5. The election debates and social media

As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.

6. Matt on the General Election

A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.

7. Nope

Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.

Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.

UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.

8. The Peter Mandleson Experience

And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.

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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.

Search (or mathematics)

A friend who works for the Times once told me the following story. The digital department had spent many hours redeveloping their website. They had tinkered with the site architecture, the wireframe and page design, and they had experimented with different types of content: audio, visual and interactive.

Everything was ready to be demonstrated to the man from Google who was visiting their offices in Wapping as part of a tour of British publishers. He listened to everything that he was told, before politely enquiring, ‘How long does it take one of these pages to load?’

This is a useful story for people involved with developing websites. Google were, are, and will be for some time to come, a company of mathematicians. For the most part, their brains do not function in the same way that a publisher’s might. They deal in quantifiable data: in server calls, backlinks, IP addresses and – among a hundred other metrics – load speeds.

Google’s announcement on Friday that it is going to discriminate against slow-loading websites is not much of a surprise. Here is a basic list of three things that could slow website or blog down:

Three things that slow down a website

1. Too many images on a page (or too many unoptimised images). If you run a blog, you might want to consider cutting down the number of posts that are loaded on the home page. Do you really need to show 10? – If you have a large website, filled with many images, then you should have a spite map to cut down the number of server calls.
2. Too many analytics packages Many websites are stuffed with analytics packages that are designed to spy on the visitors like the Stasi spied on the East Germans for 30 years after the War. If you’ve got Clicktale, DC Storm, Google Analytics and Crazy Egg set up on one page, then you should really consider taking a few of them off.
3. Too much external embedded media If you link to Twitter, You Tube and Delicious from your blog or site, then you have to wait for each of these to respond every time you load up a page. Out of all of these, Twitter is the most likely to hold things up.

Tools

Obviously the speed that any webpage loads is determined by many different factors, not least the speed of a user’s Internet connection. Here are a couple of resources that you can use to test out loading time/speeds:

Web page analyzer – good for calculating page size, composition and download times

Yslow – From Yahoo – good for suggested improvements

Web Page Test (org) – full of charts, graphs, datawaterfalls and other good things

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Image credit: miss blackbutterfly on flickr

Spring cleaning

With a few afternoon hours on a public holiday to spare, I thought it would be a fine thing to give My Digital Notebook’s design a bit of a shake up. And with bigger pictures, videos and slideshows, I think that this theme works rather nicely.

For the last five weekends I have been back at my parents’ home in Staffordshire having a bit of a break, doing a little writing and some reading. And this photo of the fields above Dovedale (about 20 miles away) is going into this blog to remind me just how much I enjoy going home.

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Image credit: UGArdener