Author Archives: Edmund von der Burg

PPC Advertising costs

Using Pay Per Click ads is becoming less and less financially viable. This is mainly because they are an auction so if you win you’ll always be paying more that others thought the traffic was worth. Also they are very … Continue reading

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GrotSpot.com launched

Are cities inherently grotty? Are there little oases of niceness surrounded by grottiness? Can a really nice street run parallel to a really grotty one? How good are you at guessing where somewhere is in a city you know? Enter … Continue reading

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YourNextMP and India trip discussion on YAPC Radio

For the UK general election I ran a project to list all of the candidates and gather their contact details: YourNextMP. It was a success and as a result I was invited to join the Prime Minister on the recent … Continue reading

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Writing a Facebook privacy policy

As part of creating a Facebook app you have to come up with a Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy. Facebook insist – although a fair few apps don’t seem to have them. The privacy policy says what data … Continue reading

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Send-a-Test Launched

I’ve just launched http://www.send-a-test.com/. This is a site that should make sending out pre-interview tests much easier. It takes care of getting the test to the candidate, timing them whilst they do it and then storing their answers when they … Continue reading

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Know your market

Right – I’m sitting on the bus in traffic and to my right is a father and his three young children. As a bus in traffic is deadly dull they are playing a game where one person says a list … Continue reading

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Build code like you would pack a garage

At my current job I am frustrated at how the code is being built. In order to explain it I came up with this analogy about packing a garage: Say you have a big pile of stuff that you need … Continue reading

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Business and Technical Clash

There is an impedance mismatch in most software based companies. The business side (the ‘suits’) want to build up financial capital, getting sales and putting more money in the bank. The technical side (the ‘coders’) want to build up technical … Continue reading

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DNS Entry that points to localhost

One of the difficulties that having sub-domains is that you need to have lots of DNS entries for them. This is particularly annoying if you want to run the site on your development machine – ie 127.0.0.1. That is why … Continue reading

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My language can do that!

Joel Spolsky had some fun with stuff you can do in JavaScript – I’ve done something similar with Perl. Can your language do this? This is one of the nicer introductions to anonymous subroutines that I’ve seen, as well as … Continue reading

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