TLDR: Originally a blog to share with friends, this site indulged my passion for tech. It is now more of an online playground for me to continue to discover and apply new technologies and develop transferable knowledge and skills that are valuable professionally . As the traffic increased I added some adds and referral links to make it pay for itself.
The full story:
I started blogging around 2002 as I wanted my own space on the web to host, well, an online-log: sharing photos, travel notes, opinion, reviews. I didn’t want to rely on an existing platform, such as myspace, flickr or fotki that didn’t really fit the bill (this was before social networks were really a thing).
It was a project that would get me in to writing code which, if I’m honest, was 50% of the motivation to do it. So, at that point it was all hand coded by me. (I need to say thanks to Luke at this point, who gave me some initial steers on HTML and CSS).
It’s progressed over the years with a few different content management systems, widgets, galleries, video hosting tools and more. The knowledge learned from it has contributed significantly to the direction of my career. Over that time the site and my reasons for posting the seemingly random collection of content topics has evolved somewhat.
Nowadays the site is built on myriad technologies that can be freely obtained across the entire tech-stack and has evolved with my career in marketing. It resides on Google Cloud Platform and uses Cloudflare CDN.
As for the content – search marketing has evolved from a world of black-hat Vs white-hat, to a mysterious art form, and then on to a grown-up, data-led disciplin (but it’s still a science where the rules are constantly tweaked by a higher power). It’s not the only aspect of the Marketing field where technology is constantly and rapidly evolving to deliver either improved performance, open up new channels or improve customer experiences.
So while the original reasons for this site remain true, there are now more reasons for keeping my hand in. Nowadays the content published here results from an overlap of ad-hoc problem solving, personal interests and projects that then create further opportunities to play with and learn new technologies; run experiments in content and search, and; to learn about the levers that affect search performance. For example: if I’m working on a problem and it isn’t easy to find an answer – then that means I’ve spotted a gap. It then becomes a game to create new content to fill that gap (and get it to the top of Google). Many of the posts on here have at some point, or continue to be, ranked 1st in Google for sizeable number of keywords. Be it car stereo installations, tech reviews, or keyboard shortcuts for a new version of Office for Mac. And it’s a good way of earning some extra cash by monetising it all with ads.
Along the way I’ve learned a huge amount about writing, content production and consumer behaviour (think satisfying consumer needs), but also a wide array of digital skills: coding languages (HTML, PHP, client and server-side JavaScript, PHP, MySQL & Python) server-side technologies (like caching and edge-networks), compression algorithms and image formats, through to optimising user experience and site speed through better design, client-side code and javascript performance. Lately it’s allowed me to use what I have learned about REST and JSON to take advantage of the massive range of APIs that are popping up left, right and centre in every area – from OS extensions, cloud services, enhancing software functionality, notifications, SaaS apps and most recently home automation.
Data, and the tools for managing and leveraging it, are not just a core part of Marketing and Sales processes in the modern organisation, but they enable strategic performance across the entire business. The clearest example of this is organisations running older, legacy systems and how they are held back: they lack agility, restrict strategic innovation and prevent the implementation of business model change / new business models.
So whilst some of the topics found within this site are quite random and varied, quite a few of them have been written with an ulterior motive.
This journey started because I wanted a platform and I needed to build it. My final thought: Today’s web platforms provide a way for the next generation to create and consume what ever content they want with relative simplicity. I see real risk in the next generation, having growing up on these digital platforms without getting their hands dirty, failing to learn to understand and use the underlying technologies.
The reach of social networks, loss of control of our data, AI and the growth of servitisation is a considerable threat to freedoms, the empowerment of individuals, a functional society and, well, free and just democracy. Only through taking back control of our data by building a web that isn’t designed to commoditise data and sell eyeballs on screens will we be able to deliver a more democratic web that starts to mitigate these threats.
Oh… for legal reasons I need to declare: “As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases”.
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