hackbash

Look, I’m probably the last person in on this, but on the off-chance there’s someone still missing out: spEak You’re bRanes.
It’s a blog entirely built around comments left on the BBC’s Have Your Say website, where the public are invited to, you know, have their say, on topical matters.
No need to go into close detail [...]

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Just the other day I was singing the praises of the humble hyperlink, but today I’m reminded that perhaps not everyone gets it.
For example, I’m breaking the Top Gear website’s terms and conditions by including a link to them in this sentence. Why? Because they prohibit third-parties from linking to any part of the site [...]

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Just found this in my Facebook “news” feed; a sponsored poll asking whether the site’s users also use LinkedIn.
I’d love to know exactly who sponsored this particular sponsored poll. I’m guessing it wasn’t LinkedIn.
The survey sample is likely to be a bit skewed, being active Facebook users and all, but the results, as they [...]

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Wikipedia entries are case-sensitive.
Witness MIME, a discussion of all-round email encoding cleverness, versus mime…
…well, the picture says it all.

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A while back, the BBC caused a ripple of excitement (at least for this blogger) when it started to furnish stories with social bookmarking links.
Far more significantly, perhaps, BBC News has just embedded a YouTube video directly into an article.
I’m not a regular reader of the BBC’s entertainment stories, but this is the first time [...]

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For all my protestations that there’s no great secret to writing for an online audience, after a few months in the job I’m beginning to notice a couple of more subtle differences in the way that it’s possible to use language when writing for the internet.
One area where this keeps coming up is with hyperlinks [...]

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I love the BBC’s most emailed and most read lists, partly because they help you spot interesting stories you might have missed, but largely because they show you where its readers’ collective mind is at: in the gutter.
Every now and then, particularly prurient and snigger-worthy stories resurface as a new wave of people dig them [...]

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Now I’m as partial to the odd cheeky piece of optimisation as the next digital marketing agency-based journalist, but the lengths to which some news feeds are being stretched is hilarious. Kwik-Fit Insurance News for example, which a colleague alerted me to earlier this week.
So dogged is their determination to rank highly for ‘women’s car [...]

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I recently wrote this article for the Press Gazette; some basic SEO tips for journalists. It’s nice to think that I might be developing a reputation for knowing what I’m talking about, but in fact the deputy editor found me through this blog.
I find that hugely encouraging. It’s not often as a journalist that you [...]

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What got me thinking about Mac vs PC deathmatches was a weekend spent researching and writing a How it Works article on games consoles.
Though I worked in games, I’ve never had the opportunity to write about them (other than an annual pilgrimage to cycling management nirvana). Do enough research, though, and things begin to get [...]

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