All good digital content has purpose. If you sell ads on your website, the purpose may be to attract traffic and increase page views. If you run a museum website, it may be to educate the reader, or to attract visitors. If you’re a freelance consultant, it may be tweets or other social media...
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What’s the Value of Great Content?
Our new project: Contentini – Content Strategy

In between all the other thousands of things I have on at the moment (including: writing my book and keeping up with blog posts for Amorphous Blog and The Januarist), we’ve been setting up a website for our new Content Strategy consultancy: Contentini. Great web content is something that both Amy and I feel...
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Please Update Your RSS for My Blog
If you subscribe to this blog via RSS, please, please update the RSS URL to point to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/danzambonini At some point in the next couple of months, I’ll be moving my blog from hosted-Tumblr to self-hosted WordPress, because I believe Tumblr is pretty bad for SEO (based on my experience ofrunning 5 or 6...
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Collecting Test Content to Aid with Web/Software Testing
Whenever I need to test some new code or interface I’ve written, it always surprises me how difficult it is to easily find a variety of test content; for example, trying to easily find a selection of video files, of different sizes (resolutions and filesizes) and codecs. So we’ve started to put together a...
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Transmutable Hardware Input Device

Does something like this exist? It seems a bit bonkers to me that everyday objects like mobile/cell phones have little keyboards that work well in certain contexts (dialing a number), but often not in others (sending a text message, playing a game). Similarly for games consoles – if you want to play a ‘beat...
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AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator
I know there are quite a few out there, but when I tried to use them to generate potential keyword lists for Box UK’s User Experience Services, I found them all a little clunky (Why post back to the server? Do it in Javascript!). So I decided to very quickly create my own AdWord...
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Creating 100 Megan Foxii
A couple of people have asked me how I created the image of 100 Megan Foxii (100 images of Megan Fox superimposed). It’s actually really simple, using PHP. In fact, it only took about 20 lines of code: <?php // Get list of all photos$aImg = array_diff(scandir('./photos/'), array('.','..')); // Create blank white canvas$im   =...
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Amorphous Blog. Or: “Spreading Myself Too Thinly”
The success of blog posts fascinates me. Sometimes you can post something that you are sure will grab attention, and it fizzles quickly into obscurity. Other times, you can knock out something vapid and it spreads like wildfire. Last June I wrote a post called Analyzing the Design of Websites: Apple, Microsoft & 37...
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The RSS Reader Model is Wrong

In the physical world, I buy Private Eye but skip the ‘funny’ comic section. I buy newspapers, but skip the TV and Sports sections. I’ll also infrequently buy other magazines like Wired, The Economist or Monocle and selective scan/read through them. I certainly don’t read everything in each magazine, but am not frustrated that...
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You Can’t Emulate A Successful Strategy By Emulating The Tactics
The main UK political parties boggle my mind. With access to the brightest minds, and with big wallets, they still seem to think that their future depends on copying as much of President Barack Obama’s winning strategy as possible. But it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just start emphasising the word ‘Change’, or mimic...
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