hackbash

I’ve come to a mini-realisation. There is no getting away from IT.
Let me fill you in - I used to work in tech support, which was OK, but there’s only so many progress meters a man can take. If you laid mine end to end they’d probably reach Belgium.
My plan was to begin my career [...]

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OK, let’s see if you can spot the flaw in this particular child-protection idea simply by reading the following standfirst:
Sex offenders’ e-mail addresses are to be passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children.
Any inkling why that might not work?
Frankly, I find it astounding that anyone could even write [...]

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I’m particularly bleary-eyed this morning, so I’d read half a story before I noticed, but the BBC seems to have changed the layout of its stories. Interestingly, they haven’t changed the front page (yet?), so the two don’t match particularly well.

UPDATE:
Ah, must have caught them mid-change, here’s the new front page. I like it - [...]

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Love this find from Tamsin M - a top piece of SEO-jiggy news, to rival the stuff we’ve seen before.
New and used car drivers ‘paying more than ever for fuel’
To be clear, the story is that drivers - all drivers - are paying more. But ‘used car’ is the host site’s desired ranking term, [...]

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I have no idea whether Unite’s claims about M&S are true. Neither do I wish to be glib about the serious subject matter of workers’ conditions.
But I suspect that the union is selling its campaign very short with this sorry press release.
Apparently the union has launched “a virtual and actual campaign”. I beg your pardon? [...]

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Right at the beginning of this year we became a two-Tamsin family, as Charlie, me and copywriter Tamsin Mac were joined by Tamsin H, our new content strategist.
Since then, things have evolved much faster and better, and in more ways than we’d have managed on our own. We’ve even hired two new journalists, which is [...]

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Kind of a note-to-self: editorial process is a Good Thing. And although blogging is all conversational and flexible and 2.0, it’s sometimes handy to ask a friend (or, what the hell, journalistic colleague) to cast their eagle eye over your draft. Especially when you’re planning to post at the end of the day.
So, Handolio: if [...]

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I’m still not using BigNews, are you?
If the answer is “What?” you’re probably not alone. BigNews is Ask.com’s answer to Google or Yahoo’s news services, launched earlier this month. I wrote about the launch for iCrossing, observing at the time that an Ask search for “BigNews” didn’t return a link to the site.
Still doesn’t.
The service [...]

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Nobody’s perfect, and I’m quick enough to point out other people’s mistakes, so here’s one of mine. It’s in this news story on Spannerworks’ own website:
Those who reported problemsdid estimated that more than a quarter of the work…
The nicely munched up construction comes from Charlie having fixed my awkward original, and me subsequently forgetting to [...]

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Christmas. Always a busy time of year for journalists. If you’re on a monthly you get to go mental until the office closes for the Christmas week, and if you’re on almost anything else you’ll be brushing mince pie crumbs from your cardigan and heading into the office on 27th December. If you’re short-staffed you’ll [...]

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