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Ever get that? When you really want to do something which you feel you would be great at but when the opportunity comes around the timing just ain’t right? What am I waffling on about you may ask? Well during the week I turned down pretty much my dream job which was offered to me on a plate. The chap that offered me the job (over the phone) was the managing director of a small company specialising in SEO and Internet marketing services with an Irish (obviously) and a UK presense. I had meet him before and we had talked over the phone about various issues on a couple of different occasions. I had mentioned to him that I noticed his company was advertising for a vacant position (which he told me had actually been filled), it was definitely more ‘banter’ than a formal application but anyhow he obviously had remembered what I had said when the position became free again.

The job itself was essentially a combined web development and SEO/Internet marketing role, which is basically the perfect job for me as I have a strong passion for both (SEO/Internet marketing more so though). My understanding of the role was that it would have involved developing APIs, tools and applications for use inhouse and on client websites as well as performing organic search engine optimisation, PPC based search engine marketing, conversion improvement etc. for the company itself and for their clients too of course. The direct salary that was on offer was a bit better than what I’m on now I must admit but the overall package wasn’t close. For example my current employer pays an amount equivalent to 8% of my wages into my pension fund every week, I also have a semi defined (I roughly know what I’ll be getting each year) bonus written into my contract, additionally I get approximately 50% of my electricity bill paid all as part of the overall package included by my current employer, none of this (or similar) was on offer for this new job.

I would of course want to be rewarded well to change jobs, but in saying that the ‘package’ wasn’t the main reason I didn’t accept the offer. I probabely would have taken a ‘hit’ (compared to my current job) on any overall package due to the increased job satisfaction I most likely would have gotten from the actual role itself. Additionally I liked the idea of being able to play a big part in helping a small company grow, rather than just being another face in a large company as is the case with my current job setup.

Infact the main reason I turned the offer down was due to bad timing, perhaps if the offer had come 3/4 months later I would have at least furthered my interest and possibly tried to bargin for more benefits (not necessarily monetary) before finally accepting or rejecting, but due to the fact that my yearly XMAS bonus (which you don’t get if your leaving) was on the way, I was due a raise in January and also the fact that I have just rejoined the gym (paying for a year upfront) close to my current job meant that the timing was just not right for such a big change. Some people of course will say that the timing is always right for your dream job. Oh well I’ve made my bed and now I’m lying in it.

Short post today folks, by the way is it ‘webtraffic’ or ‘web traffic’? Seems like a lot of web specific words/phrases get joined together. Anyhow today is the 1st of November and for the 5th month in a row my traffic went up from the figure from the previous month. The line chart for daily visitors when in year view on Google Analytics shows a small but seemingly steady movement towards a Northeast direction, the particular figure for October passed what could be called a ‘milestone’ (for the relaunched site anyhow, it didn’t pass some of the crazy milestones of 2002 and 2003) thus I must be doing something right. The question is though how do I maintain this and keep these increases going indefinitely? What would you do?

Is it a no brainer to just continue to concentrate on writing quality content for the site and then a ‘write it and they will come’ type of situation will occur? Is it the case that I should increase my networking in related external blogs, forums and newsgroups? Or should I attempt to juice up my SERPS with another active links campaign, reciprocal or otherwise? Perhaps I should set aside a budget for pay per inclusion directories?

More than likely my strategy will be a combination of a couple of different approaches, including some (or all) of the above. The one thing I am sure of though is that in terms of website promotion one cannot rely on the status quo to get them by, I mean if I was to simply leave the site the way it was and not add new content or not get more links, sooner or later traffic would start to dip and fizzle away, nobody can say that this would not be the case. Of course utimately I will be making the end decisions about this sites marketing efforts but of course your opinions are always welcome, so please do share them.

OK so we probably all know about AOLs recent boo-boo when they inadvertently released search data pertaining to over 650,000 users. Just how serious is this though? What potential problems or embarressments may it cause for any users which might have searched for their personal names, addresses, social security number or other private information which might cause them to be identified? TJ McIntyre is a lecturer in the School of Law in UCD (University College Dublin) and has authored three very interesting posts on this very high profile incident on his blog ‘IT Law in Ireland’ which is located at http://www.tjmcintyre.com/.

In one of his posts TJ refers to the NY Times which ran a story about 62 year old Thelma Arnold who was ‘traced’ because of her detailed search queries. “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” she said. “I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.” Thelma Arnold though wasn’t searching for anything too strange, things like ‘60 single men’ and ‘dog that urinates on everything’ where among her somewhat embarrassing searches. If others are indentified their searches may not be so harmless as queries such as ‘how to secretly poison your ex’ and ‘how to kill a wife’ are to be found among the massive 2GB of data which was released.

A lot of people are extremely annoyed with AOL over this and thus calls for an AOL boycott are widespread. Anyhow check out these posts, I found them very interesting.

Hi folks, hope all my visitors from Ireland enjoyed the long weekend, I know I certainly did. Today I’m going to go through the steps which you need to do to have Google Analytics filter out and exclude all data from your own personal visits to your website even if you are on a dynamic IP. I visit this site a lot to check the blog and forums in particular so I do not want my visits artifically inflating my ‘real’ visitor data, if your site is generally static you will not have a need to visit it that often, so perhaps filtering out your own visits is not needed but only you can determine this.

Up until recently I did not know this could be done as since I’m an Esat/BT/IOL (or whatever they’re calling themselves thesedays) broadband customer I did not have a permanent static IP which I could use to identify my machine and thus exclude by IP, additionally I couldn’t filter by my network location which is ‘Ireland On-Line Broadband Customers’ as this would of course filter out visitor data for all IOL broadband customers.

The solution is then to use cookies as opposed to IP addresses, the overall idea is to set a cookie and then use the filter interface to instruct Google Analytics to filter out and ignore all assocated visit data from all machines which have this cookie set on them. To set the cookie you need to create a new page on your domain with the following code:

Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website. Next you need to visit this page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports, to set the cookie on each machine.

The final step is to actually create the filter via your Google Analytics account. For this you will need to create an exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie set. Follow the instructions at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27207&topic=2970 to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: no_report
Case Sensitive: No

That’s it, to verify this is working correctly I recommend creating and visiting (a couple of times) a temporary page (say temp1.html) which has the regular analytics tracking code on it before you visit the page which sets the cookie, the next day in the content reports section in Google Analytics you can locate the hits to this page (which must have come from you as no one else knows about the page). After this, visit the page which has the cookie set code and then revisit temp1.html a couple of times, you should find no new hits to temp1.html when you recheck your stats the following day.

If you use multiple browsers you will need to visit the set cookie page from all them as they all store cookies in different locations. Any questions let me know.

Yahoo UK & Ireland have launched another service which again has overlooked the Irish market. No matter who denies it the United Kingdom & the Republic of Ireland are extricably linked in culture, business, language, history etc. and therefore to ignore the Irish market is just plain idiocy. What makes it worse is that the site although on a co.uk is referred to as Yahoo UK & Ireland.

The service in particular is Yahoo local, have a look at the following sample search I performed on Yahoo local… says it all really. This information becomes particularly annoying when one combines it with the fact that Yahoo pay per click advertising is available for GEO targeting in 14 european countries but not Ireland, this dispite the fact that Yahoo have its european headquarters in Dublin. Is Ireland not a center of IT excellence? Do we not host major companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Dell, Intel and Oracle to name but a few? Have we not got Internet businesses to promote and market too? OK enough ranting from me.

Well folks, I’m told some of my blog posts contain too much information and I should save the really good stuff for articles as blogs are meant to be quick and to the point, I definitely see the logic to this point of view so perhaps in the future I will try to keep the posts shorter and literally go down the route of just jotting down my thoughts in a somewhat less formal way than before.  

Anyhow I just recently became a subscriber of .net magazine. It’s published in the UK but is available worldwide through http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/subscribe. It covers a wide ranging set of topics about the Internet and technology in general (emphasis on the word general - these is no UK focus) such as web design & accessibility, web hosting, PHP and web development, software reviews, product reviews, SEO & Internet marketing, gaming, digital photography, Google, Yahoo and MSN etc. Although the title of the mag (.net) might fool you into thinking it’s about the extremely powerful Microsoft development framework, actually .net development doesn’t get any more coverage than any of the other topics (unless of course there’s a special feature or something like that) mentioned above and hundreds of other little ‘baby’ topics in between.

The July issue has a big focus on web accessibility and in partcular talks about ‘PAS 78′, which is a set of guidelines which attempts to clarify what in practical terms needs to be done to make a website accessible. I’m not sure if anyone has read this mag but my view of it is that it’s like a lot of my favourite ezines/newsletters combined into one and it’s great to be able to give those strained eyes a break from the computer screen and read something like this offline. Great read, I’m looking forward to the next edition already, I would however like to see somewhat more SEO/Internet marketing stuff though as reading quality content about this offline would certainly be a novelty.