I’ve never had to worry much about page ranking, search engine listings and other SEO terms and techniques.  This was mainly because I’d either developed intranet applications that remain unseen to the web, or for other reasons like private web applications or the owner really just wasn’t concerned.  It wasn’t until the last few months when I experienced the Digg effect (on a very small scale, mind you), and subsequently being site linked to another page that I really got to thinking about how Pagerank actually works and how to go about increasing it.

We had two companies come in for meetings this week in regards to SEO and web marketing, and it was a definite eye opener.  I’ll be truthful here and say that I’ve always scoffed at the amounts these company’s expect for the work they do, and whilst I still believe its not worth as much as they ask, they definitely now what they”re talking about.  Luckily, the site we’re working on I Can Have It, wasn’t too bad and shouldn’t require much work (on our side) in the coding, content placement, keyword and back end areas.  Most of them are superficial changes which wouldn’t take any longer than half a day t implement which is good.  Of course there’s a lot of work over the coming months thats going to be put into Ad placement, Search keyword/Pagerank inflation and the like, so it’ll be interesting to see how much we get from our £x,000 bill.

I’ve also been watching this site, and its related reports on Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, and have been blown away by how many weeks I’ve been ranked #1 for weird search terms such as double plugger, weird thong, ‘Love all the pain away’ and the sheer amount of hits I’m still getting with the terms Perth Mall, Murray St Mall Webcam, Perth Webcam and many more.

So eventually when Shanco comes online and it’s wares are launched (when this happens, you’ll be the first to know), I’ll be paying close attention to SEO, Search engine friendly URL’s, link placement and affiliate programs/cross promotion.  Hopefully the bits I’ve learnt so far with HD911 will help with this.

I got a nice surprise in my inbox this afternoon, a quick message from the staff at Google Offices in the UK wanting to talk about a possible job offer and relocation in the Sydney Office in Google.  I can’t even remember when I sent my resume in to Google (I think it was just after I got to the UK), but it was nice to get a message anyway.  If I had have been in Perth, I would have jumped at the chance, but I’m not even going to think about relocating back to Australia, as we all know, I’m enjoying the UK too damn much.

I might give them a phone call tomorrow and see if they have any positions for work going in London, as I’d imagine out of all the companies there are to choose from, for the work I’m doing, that would have to be an awesome oppurtunity.  Time will tell!

Here I sit, broken hearted, tried to….

Well actually, I’m not by any means broken hearted and I havent tried to do anything yet, although I might go home a couple of hours and try to get horrendously drunk so I can bring in the new year on a high note.  But for now, here I sit, not broken hearted, but bored and starting to feel slightly insane as the only thing I’ve heard in the last 4 hours has been the drone of the server behind me and the bright downlights of the office are flickering in peripheral vision like stars in the sky.

Yes, its New Years Eve, and I’m in the office, and apart from the doorman upstairs I haven’t seen/heard anything all morning.  Looking up into the street outside seems to be the same story… Noones here, they’re all sleeping in, or commencing drinking to bring in the new year.  Or perhaps they’re playing Scrabble with a monkey, at least that’s what I should be doing.

But I made a decision this morning, and that was to get out of bed at 6:30AM to venture in to the city as I assumed everyone would be back after the christmas break.  If I hadn’t just paid £11.20 (yes, thats almost $30AUD) for a return ticket to get here and back, I probably would have gone straight home again.  But I did, so I won’t.

I thought I should take this oppurtunity to say Happy New Year all, as the people on the East Coast of Australia are merely minutes away from the moment, and those in Perth are not (surprisingly) far behind.

I’ve never been one for New Years Resolutions as I know I’ll break them, but due to recent changes in attitude toward a few things maybe I’ll give it a try this year.  So here goes:

1. In the eternal quest for money, and much more of it, launch ShanCo (or similar, better name) and start working to produce side income
2. Stop fart arsing around, believing that eating soup for lunch and walking to and from the train station is enough healthy food and exercise to become fit and lose weight, even though I work in a job all day that requires sitting, food and alcohol consumption (although I do occasionally use a computer too)
3. Get these Christmas presents sent home, somehow Christmas presents in February doesn’t cut the mustard, it’ll have to do anyway though.
4. Definitely don’t extend this contract as much as you want to, you have to get out and get some more experience elsewhere.
5. Think about drinking less, then trick yourself by storing beer in Orange Juice bottles in the fridge
6. Continue the proud Guiness Thursday tradition, but think of ways to improve on the concept
7. Travel?

Just a small rant today (nothing new), I’ve been top shelved today by certain management types in Marketing. It was our go-live day for my project at work, and a few of the things that were working perfectly in my testing have subsequently broken when introduced in the live environment, which in itself is not the most uncommon occurance.

The thing that got me about the whole process was that due to a couple of unforseen errors with our payment merchant (who handles all the incoming money from client credit cards), we had to remove a few of our protections to make sure we could still release before Christmas. The worst thing is, we’re now not covered by illegal/fraudulent credit card use, even though that was the one goal since the start of the project.

Thankyou Initech, with your wonderful customer service and documentation.

* Initech is the company from the move Office Space, but the sentiment still stays.

I’m used to copping a fair amount of flack as a contractor at work, as I’m the youngest in the office, and as a result of this get paid far too much for doing far too little, in my bosses mind anyway. In fact, his exact words are (on a daily basis), “…, but you’re just a lowly contractor”. It’s funny though, like an extension of the Pom/Aussie tradition of ripping the shit out of each other for, well pretty much anything, it adds another layer to the whole office rivalry thing.

Now, being the lowly contractor that I am, I don’t expect much, I don’t get holidays, I don’t get sick pay, I don’t get a christmas bonus and I don’t have the same job security an full timer may have come to expect. This is a good and a bad thing, bad for the obvious reasons, good for the fact I have pretty much no responsibility and get paid more (apparently). The last thing I expected to be doing was giving and sitting in on job interviews. Yes, this contractor come contract-er is going to have a fun week.

I guess its good experience, and I should hardly complain, but it seems weird none the less. Least I’m not like the PHP guys, having to give interviews for over 50 people, I’ve only got to do two.

This may have helped

This got me thinking back to a job interview I had a while ago back home at a mining/oil company in Nedlands, Perth. The interview was going great, and I was clearly fit for the job, and I was asked:

Them: “What’s a word you would use to describe a good thing about yourself?”
Me: “Thorough, I need to make sure the job is done” (or something to that effect)
Them: “Now, whats a word you would use to describe a bad thing about yourself?”

Ah, the age old “bad” thing question, always going to catch the unprepared out. Like the scene with the bad thing from Peep Show, Jeremy couldn’t remember what the bad thing was, unlike Peep Show, my bad thing did not involve a blow job. But I was stuck…

Me: “Well, I can be lazy”

(deafening silence, with an odd look on smug interviewer’s face)…

I bet they’re still laughing at my expense. “Remember that lazy guy? That was the best interview I’ve done so far”. Well keep laughing, I would.

Had I have the above book, maybe I would have been able to answer the question. Maybe I would have said, I just try too damn hard, or work is an obsession, but thats not me. Lazy is. I love honesty.

- the HR/IT guy.

Things appear to be going well so far, slowly, but in a solid direction.  Since speaking the last time, I’m just starting two freelance lots of work, boosting up my personal work and starting on a joint venture with a mate from back home.  One of the freelance jobs is making simple front end changes on a photography webiste for approximately 10-30 hours, and the other is an going data access/manipulation wrapper for an accounting application but should be a nice chunk of cash in a couple of months or so.

The venture with Rusty is for a project/website or group of sites comprising of tech related goodness.  I can’t say much now as its still most definately in its infancy, but if all goes to plan could quite possibly be a good startup, as I’m 90% sure it hasn’t been done quite the way we want to do it before.  It all comes back to that old notion that if you can’t think of something to do, take a previous idea, build on its weaknesses and make it better, much better.  And that’s the plan.   It should be great to have a partner for once, as this should provide motivation to get more and more done and slowly but gradually fill it with content.

I’m sure (hoping) everything will click into place, and in a year from now I can look back and see what kind of changes have been made, its not even necessarily about the money, just the name and satisfaction from doing something properly.

So the first part of the Out with the Old  initiative is well on its way, not that I’ve actually accomplished anything yet, but the groundwork has been laid and between Beer, Red Wine and Irish Coffee its about all I can think about.

Well Monday morning I was greeted at the front door of the office by my manager, only to be directed straight to other office (the snazzy above ground office about 500m away just near St James Palace) for an urgent heads up meeting regarding recent project work.  This was no issue, as rather unusually for a Monday morning I was feeling especially spritely, so I went along and sat down in the board room.

I should provide a little more information here about just how nice the other office is compared to the one the plebs (IT) work in.  Our office is an open plan with no offices or cubicles, its below ground with very little natural light apart from that which gets in from the street above and its incredibly noisy due to the mass of computer equipment in a rack about 10 metres behind where I sit.  It (thankfully) is carpeted, and there is no dress code, which is of course a good thing.  The other office is set out like a ritzy 5-star hotel with a large lobby area with waiting couches and a snazzy desk.  Everyone dresses up really nice, and its eerily quiet, and upon my first visit I was shown around each of about five board rooms with a £10,000-£20,000 table and 5-20 £1,000 leather chairs.  Naturally, I feel rather out of place at an office like this, in my nikes, worn blue jeans and Jack Daniels t-shirt (everything except for the t-shirt is true).

So back to the meeting, I sat down spoke my mind for an hour, gave some insightful commentary and told management and marketing everything they wanted/needed to hear and went on my merry way two hours later.  During the meeting, I noticed a couple of weird glances and odd looks, and although it was off-putting, I assumed they were admiring the manly adonis sitting at the head of the table, that being me.

It wasn’t until I got back to the office and went to the toilet a little later on, that I noticed (whilst admiring said adonis in the mirror) that I had a rather odd looking and very noticeable milk stain  all the way down the front of my grey t-shirt.  Grubby bastard strikes again!

And then came more shabbiness, not nearly as much my fault this time though.

My recruitment company (the hawks that they are), scheduled a meet and greet a few weeks ago, where they were going to come to the office and take myself and my manager out to lunch under the guise of finally putting a face to the voice on the end of the phone after such a long period.  I say this because really it had nothing to do with meeting me, or my boss, but securing a lucrative contract out of the company where at slightly lower cost they would provide us with all contractors/workers in a way that we could now exclusively use them.

Anyway, I’m sure they said it would be a quick meal at the pub with a couple of drinks so turned up in my usual IT getup.  Upon arriving at said pub, it was a very upmarket, and snooty restaurant.  Once again, I was very out of place, like a morman at a sex show.  Yes, just like that.

I might find a cupboard here at the office and keep a suit in there for these “special” occasions.

Just a quick one tonight, but I’ve been considering expanding on my blogging at HD911 by starting a new blog with just work, career and tech stuff to go along with my recent push toward doing more personal work to try and build a name for myself. Obviously, I can’t let anything happen to Curious Perversions in the UK, what with the rave reviews from the BBC’s Mashed, Independant reader reviews at wordpress.com and the recent surge in activity and traffic from Digg, so I’ll endeavour to keep this level of brain fart up and possibly improve on both the quality and frequency of future posts.

Obviously, the idea with this is to seperate the serious content from the joke/satire/bulls**t, we’ll see how it turns out eventually anyway..

Not often does such genius strike a person on the midst of a Wednesday afternoon, I might even say it may have been my Eureka moment. I invented Guiness Thursday, a day that exceeds all other named days, including Good Friday, Easter Monday and others such as Ash Wednesday, which until today I believed was named because of the bushfires that spread accross Victoria, Australia on Wednesday, Feb 16^th 1983. What irony.

I must jump back in time for a bit, to Wednesday night, as I excitedly rushed home after my moment of revelation, to make sure said idea was indeed as original and ingenious as I thought it was. A quick google search, left me slightly shattered, as it returned four results, but I was happy to discover that whilst the term had been phrased before, it definitely didn’t appear to be in common usage. And everyone knows the first and foremost rule of just about anything, and thats if you like an idea, copy it and make it ten times better. So I did, and on we go.

Guiness Thursday is a momentous occasion, as it doesn’t attempt to rival any of these religious holidays for importance, but attempts to enrich them, forming a union in which pleasure time can be enhanced by grouping said days together, whereever possible. Every Thursday, I will endevour to enforce a strict Guiness policy for myself and my collegues and anyone else who’ll join.

This shall bring enjoyment for all who believe in the new way. And certain times of the year we will benefit greatly from its creation. Take Easter Week for instance, usually we have Good Friday thru Easter Monday off work. With Guiness Thursday, we’ll have an even better Easter Weekend, with a classy lead up to the festive period with a Thursday afternoon of several pints of Ireland’s finest. In fact, and I don’t mean to offend anyone here, in a few hundred years the meaning of the Easter weekend may well just change, in that Good Friday is good for the fact we enjoyed Guiness Thursday so much.

You see, Guiness Thursday is not just a childish notion, nor is it a passing phase. It’s an ideal, and aims to make everyones Post-humpday just that much better, for the improvement of man-kind.

Please, join me, and post stories of your Guiness Thursday exploits. I’m interested in feedback of all kinds.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYMoz0zdag[/youtube]

Or should I say, Full Steam Ahead at Home, Two Mighty Steps Back, at Work….

On one hand I’m happy as hell, I’m making huge progress on one of my home projects which is great for a few reasons.  Firstly, I’m actually getting some personal work done, which is good as I’m creating a hobby, as opposed to the endless nights spent downloading new TV shows to watch while drowning myself in wine (and cognac).  Secondly, I can just feel already, this last week or so of doing approximately two hours work a night has already started in the process, improving my self motivation to do these things that I really want to do, but never get around to it.

Building on from my previous post where I spoke about doing extra work at home (both personal, and freelance), I’m hoping to eventually establish myself, and in doing so, get my name out, make some more money and hopefully generate some passive income on the side.  That’s the plan anyway, now I just need to put these thoughts into fruition and get it out to a point where I can provide a service for others.

Unfortunately, the workload at the office has dried up slightly for a week or so, so I’ve taken (what I consider) a step back and am working on a PHP application.  This is marginally annoying, as I haven’t done any PHP work for what must be approximately five years now, and also because I didn’t particularly like it in the first place.  But like all things, I’ll use it as a bit of good experience, and may even enjoy myself too.  A chance to branch out slightly, perhaps, and should definitely kill the inevitable boredom of doing the same work day in, day out.