Coding In The Darkness

It’s easy to get complacent in life, you make a minor achievement and rather than push on with other goals that you want to accomplish you get happy with where you are and become lazy about chasing those goals.

After some general searching around the web at other sites, people, blogs i decided that i never really achieved what i had set out to do with my own site and blog, which was to create a site that would give me a personal area on the web to own, play with and enjoy using and hopefully people would enjoy reading, viewing or whatever.

All my big plans to learn this, create that sort of hit the back burner, so…. Here is my 2010 ToDo list.
I have until the 23:59 – 31st of December 2010 to complete the following below.

1. Redesign site
2. Redesign Blog – My own template
3. Learn basic PHP
4. Learn objective C and create an iPhone app
5. Add 2-3 sites to my portfolio

That’s it, if i can complete all of those tasks this year I will be very happy.

This decade will be the decade that i step up and become a complete finisher rather than a ideas man / team worker, kudos if you know where knows terms come from.

Lets hope I don’t make an idiot out of my self by Jan 1st 2011!

Wow 2010 is here already.

Looking back i don’t think any decade will be so jam packed with so many events in my life!

• I finished School, College & Uni all in the last decade
• Saw in the start to a new millennium
• Had 2 part time jobs, 2 full time jobs and 1 graduate placement
• Found my girlfriend, got engaged and had my first child
• Had multiple ideas about what career I wanted to pursue from (laugh now) F1 Race driver, Computer repair guy, Games Programmer, Web Designer, Teacher, Online Marketer to name a modest few
• Finally meet some really amazing people, made some great friends, shared some wonderful experiences and lost touch with too many faces, sadly

Looking back I don’t think I will ever cram so much into another 10 year period, I probably don’t want to either.

2009 also being the bad year it was for me I’m glad to see it gone, a year that I’ll remember due to losing my job with BT due to contractor cuts, the passing of some legendary people and the personal losses in my own family, especially my very dear Nan Win.

One thing i would like to do for the next year any way is at least once a week just write up what I have learned each week. We learn so much random stuff everyday it would be cool just to collect all that info and summarise in early 2011.

Well that’s it for my first post in the new decade, I’ll leave you now with one of my favourite photos,

It's very blurry but brings back some great memories

Its been over a month since my last post, incredible really, i have had much to say but so little time.

Ben's trips to the Job center didn't last long!

I will post an update my Social Media Experiment this week, although i can’t say i expect a massive improvement as i haven’t been dedicating much time to it. Thanks to the recent leaving then rejoining BT / Dialogics and finally leaving again i found myself without work, for 1 day!

So my current role if you haven’t checked my LinkedIn Profile is with a very new online retailer called shop.co.uk, they are a UK only online retailer and they / we are looking to join the likes of Play.com and Amazon in the online retailer environment. So my current role is “Online Marketing Executive” which basically means i optimise content pages, promote pages, help devise PPC campaigns, generate inbound links, create good content and lots more techniques i haven’t started yet (All white hat SEO techniques of course!)

i have also been spreading the word via the old fashioned word of mouth with my friends as Shop.co.uk sell many items very cheaply including two of the products i have been working on Sim Free Mobile Phone Handsets & Discount Perfumes, Discount Colognes / Aftershaves & Discount Beauty Products.

My role is with Shop.co.uk

I’m hoping i gain some great SEO experience form this role, it’s very fast paced and a definitely different environment from my last role. Lets hope it turns into something really great.
Oh i also wrote an online buying guide for mobile phones, it may be worth a look maybe you know someone who could use it? Either way here it is Mobile Phone Buying Guide.

Over the last two months i have also been doing some freelance work for friends and I’ll add links here as well as my online portfolio as soon as it all finished. One is for a friend who is a recent Dance graduate who is starting her own Dance class business called Rhythms, if you live near Southend i suggest you take a look.
The other piece of work is for my ex managers husband Anthony Bailey who is a Cambridge & Chelsea based Counsellor. He needed some SEO advice and we done some basic SEO techniques to help him get higher ranked in Google which proved quite successful. For his four main targeted keywords he now has 4 top 100 results including a #1 and a number #3. You can view Anthony’s site here Chelsea & Cambridge Counsellor.

Well that’s it for my brief update, i had more interesting stuff to talk about like the decline of MySpace & Bebo, where i think Twitter, Facebook & social networking is going in general with the mobile arena, plus other bits and bobs but another time perhaps?

Stay Classy

Ben Scowen