Coochi

We have a new baby in our house. Well, she's nearly one now...but it seems just five minutes ago that the tears were welling up in my eyes as I saw her for the first time as she was delivered screaming into this world.

She's our 4th daughter (and, yes, our last!) so we're pretty au-fait with babies. We thought we had all the baby gumph that we'd ever need, but recently came across this really cool baby bathing apron from Coochi. It's a wearable towelling apron that you put on before you bath the baby, and when you get them out of the bath, it un-poppers so you can immediately wrap it around them in one smooth move without fear of them slipping through your fingers. If only we'd had one for our other 3 girls!

OK, so I'm a tech-geek

My online addiction might, I suppose, have something to do with my career. I spend my life online, thanks in the main, to my 'real' job as technology geek for a marketing agency. So once in a while this blog will contain tech stuff. Like now.

I found this awesome site the other day - miniajax.com has some brilliant examples of how the web can be - giving users an interactive experience that's as good as using a client, non-web, application.

My personal favourites have to be:

• ClickHeat website heatmaps
• Instant image reflections with Javascript
• Really easy field validation
  
• Edit-in-place AJAX editing

Some fantastic stuff there for all you AJAX lovers.

Earning a crust

Some time ago I stumbled across CafePress and loved what they do. It’s a great business. They print stuff on all sorts of products from T-shirts to mugs, mousepads to CDs. They sign up shopkeepers who earn money by selling their own designs on CafePress’s products using an e-commerce system provided by CafePress. You can get started for free with a basic store or pay $6.95 per month for a fully customizable store. CafePress handle everything from ordering, printing, stock control, customer service, returns - the lot! So all you have to worry about is the creativity of your designs…and the marketing of your store.

So I signed up, uploaded a few designs and now I get a regular (3 figure) income every month. It’s not going to pay the mortgage, but it’s something. It’s a start. They also have an affiliate programme that is managed by Commission Junction, so you can earn 15% on sales that you refer - this also brings in a small amount every month for me.

If you’re a budding artist…or even if you can string something funny together to go on a T-shirt or two, I’d urge you to sign up. And it’s fun to know people out there are wearing your designs!

Nice API - Yahoo! term extraction

Tag clouds abound these days - and are, I think, a nice way for users to discover deeply embedded content within a site. Useful tag clouds are built on the idea of extracting useful keywords from content. So how do you go about doing that without extracting all the noise - after all, the word ‘the’ probably appears frequently in your content, but you sure don’t want to display that in your tag cloud.

One nice way might be to use the Yahoo! term extraction API. In short, bung it some content and it’ll return you a list of relevant / related tags. It uses the Yahoo! search technology and will filter out all the chaff for you. So you could, for example, display a post on a forum and use this API to provide the user with a list of significant and related keywords to search (eg) blogs, technorati or wherever.

Further reading can be found here and here with the official documentation in the Yahoo! developer network.

It is just me?

Its around this time of year that my blood pressure rises above its normal stressed level. But the release is nigh...in fact, in just over 3 weeks the kids will have broken up from school and there'll be the relief of summer holidays at last. No more worrying about the school run, getting them to ballet lessons on time (twice a week), music practice, school play rehearsals (seemingly endless at the moment), parents evenings and more.

And to increase the pressure that little bit more, work is manic too.

It can't just be me feeling this...but is this how life is supposed to be? When do we (my beautiful wife ane I) get time for us. How is it that we're both so shattered in the evenings when we finally stop organising the house, getting the kids to bed, finishing that last document for work...

So I've taken to blogging as an outlet. A way of just offloading. Of recording mood and feelings. And somewhere to record loads of (possibly fairly random) stuff that I find online on my daily journey along the hyper-inter-web-thingy...because I'm a web addict too. What did I ever do without it? But will it solve my stress problems? Hmmm...

Of course, this blog is part of an experiment too - so I might try to make a few dollars here. And therefore please be aware that links you see on this blog may have affiliate referral codes within them.

About me

Hi, my name is Matt Hardy (aka mcrilf) and I'm the guy behind this Its an Online World blog.

I'm 39, married with 4 daughters (yep, you read that right!), I live in the UK and work full time as technology director for a successful marketing agency. I've been involved in the internet marketing business for over 10 years now, so this blog is a culmination of years of experience - learning from successes as well as mistakes.

I have a special interest in SEO and blogging so this blog is aimed at those topics. I will, however, post on general industry news from time to time...it all helps to keep me (and hopefully you readers) up to date on what's happening in this online world of ours.

When I'm not entertaining the kids, working or blogging, I run a couple of other sites: one selling cool baby t-shirts, one selling adult t-shirts and a search engine enabling people to find unique gifts designed by thousands of independent designers. It is the learnings I've picked up from optimising these sites that has fuelled my interest in SEO and added to the experiences recorded on this blog.

I hope you'll get involved in the discussions raised here - subscribe to my feed and please let me know your thoughts by leaving comments where appropriate.

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