The Brains Behind New York

The AdSense Referrals programme is being retired

2008-07-01T02:46:00.000-07:00

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals programme. We
will be retiring the AdSense Referrals programme during the last
week of August. After that time, AdSense Referrals code will no
longer display ads.

If you currently use referrals, either to promote Google products
or offerings from AdWords advertisers, we encourage that you take
the following steps before the product is retired:

* Remove all referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so that you can continue to effectively monetise
your ad space.
* Replace your referral ads with AdSense for content ads: If
you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page,
we recommend replacing referral ad units with standard AFC ad
units. This will minimise the risk of decreased AdSense earnings
when the Referrals programme is retired.
* Run and save all referrals reports to your desktop: All
Referrals reports will no longer be available at the end of
October

Why is my Gmail (Google Mail) Account in Russian?

2008-01-10T05:44:00.000-08:00

Why is my Gmail (Google Mail) Account in Russian?

email from tom yorke

2007-12-15T08:44:00.001-08:00

ThIs is not stricTly junk.

this
is a quick notE to Let YoU know thAT there will be shorttlY be a bunch of rmxs
of some of the songs from the ERAser album made available to download from boomkat.com.

on the 17th of Dec a BURIAL rmx of anditrainedallNight
a ModeSeleKtOR rmx of skipdivideD
& a VAriouS rmx of aNaLYse

on the 18th of Dec a FoURtet rmx of AtoMS for PEace
& two Christian Vogel rmxs of 'Black sWAn'

on the 19th of Dec the SuRGEon rmx of the CLock
a rmx of HarrOWdown HiLL by THE buG
& a rmx of Cymbal RUsh by The FIEld

that's it. apoloGIes for the disturbanCE. check themm out if you get amoment.

i Hope yours is a pEaceful CHRistmas.

>

thom yorke.

windows push on IE7

2007-11-02T08:36:00.000-07:00

Seems that Microsoft have begun their push on the IE 7 Browser upgrade

Scottish Marketing Association

2007-11-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

I have added a link to a directory of the members of the Scottish Marketing Association in case anybody would find that useful, you can find it here: Scottish Marketing Association

Google PageRank and Google Sitelinks

2007-10-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

Google have pushed out a new batch of PageRank and Sitelinks, from which I received my Google Page Rank of #1 and no sitelinks. I imagine you need an awful lot of traffic to be able to merit getting sitelinks but for the moment I will keep plugging away at the web design edinburgh keyword and see how we get on. Strangely, enough this blog got a Google PageRank of #2, higher than the website?

Google Analytics in Edinburgh - stat chat that went flat

2007-10-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

On Thursday evening I attended the Google Analytics chat in Edinburgh in an audience split down the middle between scruffy developers and smart suited managers, a talk been given by three smart suited speakers. It started off as it meant to go on, the speakers reading the lines off the power point presentation and the audience beginning to drift as the speakers very quickly descended into a thinly disguised buy my product/buy my service pitch. But Google Analytics is free!! But it was custom built for Adsense and Adwords users.
The best question of the night was on whether the hits coming out of China were being clipped by the great firewall of china, the answer to which is no, another Google contra deal I suppose.
In the end, everybody got to see a side of Google which was not all geek-chic, but a guy in a smart shirt in front of a power point presentation talking to men in smart shirts about how to make more money.
Bounce Rate: Extremely High!!

Edinburgh Groups in Facebook

2007-10-21T04:42:00.000-07:00

I don't know if any Edinburgh users of Facebook have noticed that the majority of groups in and around the topic of Edinburgh are being used by three main groups - students (the alumni army), visitors (see a photo of me outside a mounment) and advertisers (look at the nice image it says buy me). Where are have all the Edinburgh bloggers gone? Where have all the Edinburgh people gone?

It should be noted that a third of Scotland is without Broadband!!

engage in edinburgh - bored stiff at dynamic earth

2007-09-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

Last week me and some of my work mates went to the 'Engage in Edinburgh' run by the IAB at the Dynamic Earth center and if this was 2002 I would have really enjoyed it. What a waste of time. A whole day of sitting there listening to the majority of speakers with very little to new to say on a wide range of topics with every speech ending on the stony silence of question time. Any member of the audience could have gleamed from Google the vast majority of this information moments before and even found the 'witty' mp3's and youtube clips that speakers embedded in their powerpoint slides to be 'wacky'.
At the end of the day we were all invited down to London where we were promised speakers from Google and Facebook, as opposed to what we got, sales pitches from past it powerpoint peddlers

My final thoughts on the conference:
There was no wifi available at the internet conference and 30% of the people who went to the conference turned up with laptops. I lost a days work due to this.

web design skills added to homepage

2007-09-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

I am a little doubtful about my addition to the homepage of my website, now that I have added an image of some of my web design skills. I will as usual leave it up for a while and then see how I feel about it later on.

web skills

2007-09-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

I have created a loose skills page which will begin to list my web skills: php, mysql, perl, postgres etc. These can then link into examples and lists of the software that I have used.

homepage review - the brains behind new york

2007-09-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have started a monthly review of the homepage and seeing what I could do to add to it and if there is anything that needs to be removed. At present, it seems ok, but for the site in general I think it needs a lot more content. In my opinion it needs about 100 pages of content and at present I think it has about 10. So it is time to put my SEO and Web Design hat on and start looking at what can and can't be done online. Page 13 and counting

Andy Warhol in Edinburgh - pop art in Princes' Street

2007-08-02T05:41:00.000-07:00

There is a major exhibition of the work of American pop artist Andy Warhol on in Edinburgh at the moment. A good selection of his work on the theme of life and death is on display and it is a good opportunity to get to know some of his less seen work.

My favourite bit of trivia about Warhol was how he used to go to mass in the morning to pray that his work wouldn't go for less than a million and his prayers were answered.

meta description and just what does it describe?

2007-08-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

I have changed the meta description of my homepage as I realised firstly that it was not unique and secondly that it did not mention the name of the site that I was hoping to improve the rankings for. So i have changed it to mention the name of my website twice and see how that affects the rankings.

first homepage I am happy with

2007-07-31T06:42:00.000-07:00

Here is the first layout of the homepage that I like, it features an image i took from a photo I took years ago in Madrid. It is from the tiles on the wall of an old tapas bar.

if content is king then it has left the building

2007-07-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

I have begun stripping down the content of my site, the brains behind new york, so I can focus on the design more. This was not difficult as there was not much content to begin with but I figure it will be easier to build up the content in the right format rather than to continue adding it on in an ad hoc manner. So if content is king, like elvis the king has left the building.

how long to you have to wait for a link to be counted

2007-07-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

I submitted my website, the brains behind new york, to over a 100 free directories that I felt were not covered in spam and had a good enough level of Google PR, and I am starting to wonder how long it will take before this begins to take affect?

I have had a look at these directories and the majority of them have yet to review my link or have reviewed my link and binned it, but there are some who have accepted and displayed the listing in their directory. I am looking at the links listed in the Google webmaster tools and they have yet to grow, so I am wondering how long will I have to wait

uploaded sitemap.xml to Google and ranking went down

2007-07-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

I created and uploaded a sitemap.xml for Google and my search engine listing on Google for the term 'the brains behind new york' went down!!
I moved from number 85 to 93.

mood board - source of web design

2007-07-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

I have decided to create a mood board for my source of design ideas for my website and the first tear sheet I want to use is this photo of syd barrett which I keep coming back to. I think it not only manages to tell the story of his downward spiral but still managed to look amazing in an anton corbjin way. Maybe it is justed the muted grey.

new results and web design footer links

2007-07-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

I have just noticed that I have moved up on my brand search and also up on my keyword search:
brand: 87 (up 8)
keyword: 521 (down 3)

More importantly I have started to list the edinburgh web design companies that use the webs ite of their client as SEO back links to their own websites, edinburgh web design companies who have back links of their client websites

google count - where it counts

2007-07-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

I am starting to track my brand search 'the brains behind new york' and my keyword search 'web design edinburgh' and here are the results:
brand: 95
keyword: 518
Yes, that is me coming up link number 95 for a website that has the same name as the keywords and that is me coming up number 518 for the term 'web design edinburgh'.

how to design the name for a web design website

2007-07-12T05:32:00.001-07:00

When I came to register the name of my website, the brains behind new york, I was faced with the daunting task of designing a name which would reflect the type of design that I was interested in promoting. So after much research and more than a little writers block I came up with a list of possible names. I was working of the theory that the first ten names that I came up with were going t be a little to obvious and so I drew a line through them right away.

The remaining names I began to strip away due to association, testing to see if there was any negative connotations with the title, any reason why somebody would be put off. I thought in my head that if websites exist in verticals what vertical would my website go in purely on the name alone.

I then began to look at keywords, did I want to call the website 'edinburgh web design' and try and get traffic that way but what kind of effect would that have on the perception of the site by the outside world? How high design would that be?

In the end I went for the name I have because I liked what it drew up in your mind

web design edinburgh - the brains behind new york #314

2007-07-11T14:11:00.001-07:00

my website has now entered the Google search results for the term 'web design edinburgh' and am currently coming up 314 place in the search results. I hope to keep this going and mark my rise and fall in the search engines to see how I fair.

about us - the brains behind new york

2007-07-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

I have added the all important 'about us' page to my website and remembered to use the term 'us' and 'we' in the description rather than just 'i'. I think all sites should have some form of about us page and maybe even sticking to the page name 'about us' as it is such an established web convention. I filled my about us page with a brief description of who we are and what we do.

wait a minute, i managed to get a title!!!

2007-07-10T06:25:00.000-07:00

blogger post title still not working, is this still not working?

After reading this post from blogger:
http://blogger-status.blogspot.com/2007/07/some-users-are-reporting-that-they-are.html

2007-07-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

am unable to create a title for my post? is anyone else having this problem with blogger?

However, my site did enter the first 100 search results for the title of my website, so if you do a search for 'the brains behind new york' and go down ten pages in your Google search , my site will show up. I guess you have to start somewhere

start again

2007-07-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

I have taken down the start that I have made on the website and started again with the black outline of a white box. It will be a clear sign that I have started again with no design and will start a new approach to web design.

flickr for my website

2007-07-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

I am thinking about adding a flickr photo sharing account to my website, not sure how it will add to the design but I will try it out and see what happens

brand search and the name of my website

2007-07-04T06:44:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to realise that when you are doing a Google search for my website, the brains behind new york, you get millions of search results before mine. The majority of these results have to do with the two main keywords in the URL, 'brain' and 'new york', which are obviously major keywords. I then thought of BBNY as a URL but of course that is taken and then maybe tbbny but doesn't seem as approppriate. I will just have to continue to hammer away at the brains behind new york.

the brian behind new york - the anniversary of the death of brian jones

2007-07-03T04:59:00.000-07:00

Today is the anniversary of the death of Brian Jones, of the rock band the rolling stones, on 3rd July 1969. He always seemed to me the source of style for the band at the time, very much the trail blazer, as well as mick and keith. I would like to use this photo of Brian as a source of design as it seems a very populat look at the moment

myspace error

2007-07-02T11:53:00.001-07:00

i keep getting an error from my myspace account:
Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.

archive of logo design

2007-07-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

I am still playing around with the log for the website, which I think I will continue to do for a long time to come. Perhaps I am getting stuck on the idea of the brain and maybe the x-ray isn't the way to go about this. I have an idea to actually sketch out what I have in my mind rather than playing around in photoshop but at the moment I don't have the time.

I think I started off on the right foot when I tried to stick in SEO into the site before I had any content or reason for a web presence

directory of edinburgh web design websites

2007-06-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

I have added a directory of Edinburgh websites that are involved with web design so I can start building a list of everybody who is involved, you can have a look at it here, Edinburgh web design directory

I am also glad to announce that I am no longer supplemental in my Google results, whoo hoo!!
I can only imagine that Matt Cutts himself came down from on high to lift my site out of the first circle of hell. But, am sure it is simply to do with the fact that the googlebot cam back and spidered the site. I am thinking about keeping a record of when the google bot spiders my website and see if I can improve on the times. Just a thought

logo for the brains behind new york website

2007-06-28T06:30:00.001-07:00

I have been working on a logo for my website the brains behind new york and stated to play around with the world famous 'I love NY' image created by Milton Glaser and now a registered trademark. It is very much a quick fix but maybe an essential part of the link campaign as I have to get my site in some sort of shape before someone is willing to link to me.

The logo is still very rough and looks different across different browsers but it is a start and am sure the end product will look very different in the end

supplemental results in Google for the brains behind new york

2007-06-28T01:20:00.000-07:00

I have been reading up on supplemental results in Google and what this might mean for your web site, and according to Matt Cuts over at Google this is not a result of any penalty but rather a reflection on the pagerank of the site itself. So if pagerank is a result of backlinks then will all sites immediately go into supplemental results when they start off? Apparently the only way out of supplemental results is high-quality links to the site. This will push back the design of the site even further while I try and dig my way out of supplemental results by getting links and putting additional content onto the site.

the brains behind new york goes supplemental results

2007-06-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

My website, the brains behind new york has gone supplemental in the Google results!! It has been live about two weeks and has only been spidered once!! How did this happen?

web traffic on the brains behind new york

2007-06-13T06:28:00.000-07:00

I have added Google analytics to the homepage of the brains behind new york so I can start tracking who comes to the site for a look and how they got here. I have used Google Analytics before and always found it really useful and especially now with the new version which is even easier to use. Now I will just to worry about the design of the website.

list of web sites I like the design of

2007-06-06T05:25:00.000-07:00

I have started to list some of the websites that I link on my website, they are sites that I really like the design of and will maybe be inspired by for the eventual design of my own site

ian curtis design - love will tear us a party

2007-06-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Here is my first attempt at design, it is a picture of Ian curtis from Joy Division as if he was playing the maracas and the caption reads 'love will tear us a party' rather than love will tear us apart', banksy beware

Content First or Design First

2007-06-02T03:46:00.000-07:00

Am debatting whether I should but content first on the page and then begin to look at how to lay it out but I have in my head already what I want it to look so I might just start with a list of links to websites that I think have really good design. This list of sites will then give viewers a little background to where I would like the site to go and how I would like it to look. The bottom line being that I have still no idea what the website will do let

Getting into design - 40th years ago today...

2007-06-01T05:44:00.000-07:00

Today seems a good day to be getting into design with it being the 40th year anniversary of The Beatles release of Sgt. Pepper

The Brains Behind New York

2007-06-01T03:15:00.001-07:00

Have registered the domain and now have a holding page up for the site: The Brains Behind New York just to make sure that all is working correctly. Am getting more and more interested in web design as my background is in web development and have always left the design to the designers but now feel like giving it a shot

Idea behind the obscure title - 'The Brains Behind New York'

2007-05-31T02:20:00.000-07:00

The idea behind the title was based on a memory of reading the book by Noam Chomsky 'The Backroom Boys' and the mentality that it explored.

The Brains Behind New York

2007-05-30T08:32:00.001-07:00

The Brains Behind New York