9 November 2015

Redcar doesn’t want to lose jobs - but neither does China

Blog for The TaxPayers' Alliance! I've copied the first part here but you can find the full blog here and it was also published in the Yorkshire post here!

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First Redcar and then Tata Steel announced further job cuts in the steel industry. Exactly what is going on and is there a case for the government to intervene using taxpayer cash to prop up the current price of steel or bail out the suffering plants to protect British jobs?

The Steel Industry in the UK

A large motivating factor in the outcry is that the jobs under threat are of national historic importance to the country. During the industrial revolution producing steel was of national importance in order to grow the railways, build machinery and expand.

By 1870 Britain produced 60 times more steel than it had in 1800 and in 1875 Britain produced 40 per cent of the world’s steel. But by 1896, only 20 years later, Britain’s share in the world steel market dropped to 20 per cent. The industrial expansion slowed and so did production of steel.

Then in the post war period the steel industry went through a lot of uncertainty as successive governments nationalised, privatised and re-nationalised the industry. Conflicted objectives and a lack of innovation meant the industry wasn’t free to develop and grow as it liked due to the uncertain climate.

Steel production volume continued to fall and so did exports. Currently Germany ranks 7th in the world for total output, making it the biggest producer in the EU, with Britain ranking as 18th.


2 July 2015

Writing a blog post


So, here's another very quick guide that I wrote for the TPA to accompany my SEO one. Again, I'm not actually an expert by any stretch of the imagination so if you actually want to learn about these things I suggest you use Google. However, here's some basic things that you should keep in mind when writing a blog.

Hey guys, a lot of you seem unsure about how to write a blog? Or your blogs seem more like essays than blogs so here are some general things to keep in mind

Writing a blog with Yui from K-On!


Audience and purpose: Always keep your audience in mind. How much do they know about the subject? If you're unsure, assume an intelligent reader with no prior knowledge of the subject at hand. That means explaining any acronyms, using shorter, clearer sentences and telling a story rather than presenting an argument.

Tone: Conversational and simple. As if you were explaining a concept to a friend of a friend.

Content: Again, keep it simple but interesting. Don't get bogged down by the nuances of the story. Link to a source on another site if you need to. As a guideline length should be around 500 -750 words.

Images: Only use them if they contribute something to the experience of the reader rather than from decoration. In this case centre them on a new line rather than wrapping the text around the image. Make sure you give a detailed descriptions in the image tag.

Example: I quite like Mana's blogs Manchester's £3.5 million black blob of glass and Taxpayers to pay hundreds... so Councillors can learn how to run the Council.

30 May 2015

Cool things I found this month

Unfortunately, I feel like I haven't improved over the past month.... So here are some cool things that I learnt and links that I found instead.

How to commit electoral fraud

I voted in the election this month but I didn't have my polling card and they didn't ask for any ID either. When my mother went to vote with hers they said she had already voted but I hadn't. So there you are, if you want to commit electoral fraud at any point in your life it's very, very simple. You can also just take someone else's polling card and use that. Again, you don't need ID.

Various links

The Snoopers Charter

(Source)

Video: secure messaging and credible news




If you worry about the security of your messages, try Bleep. It even gets around how people can just screen grab the conversation. You don't need to sign up with an e-mail and the chat is secured. Seriously! It's pretty cool!


Did you know that eating chocolate helps you loose weight? Thank's to a study in Germany we can now eat chocolate and stay healthy! Or can we? As this long article details you can't trust every new study that comes out. I like to think of this as the next dihydrogen monoxide scandal. I bet you'll see people quoting this study for years to come. Thankfully, the internet is forcing us to be sceptical about what we see online and the iO9 article notes that many of those that commented on these 'news stories' asked the questions that the journalists in question should have asked themselves.

The video above is kinda related, it was commissioned by a Brazilian news company to demonstrate why you should get your news from a reputable source. Interesting video and great artwork.

Inspired by the... Sky?

I took some photos of the sky! My finance got in the way. He's pretty cool though so it's okay.



28 May 2015

Jordan's really short guide to blog optimisation

This is literally an email I sent around a while ago which I have since forwarded to so many people that I'm preserving it for reference. What follows is a copy and paste dump that has only been edited very slightly.

This also only pertains to writing. If you're writing your own blog then you'll need to think about many other things. Here's a good short guide from Moz on those other things.


Here's a quick guide to why it's nearly perfect. Don't worry about this for short blogs, but if you're writing something substantial you might want to keep these in mind.


Reasons why it's perfect / Jordan's quick guide to blog optimisation:

Long form: Over 1000 words means its less likely to be ranked as spam

Keywords: E.g Tax, Spending Plan are repeated

Related words: (If you're writing well, you shouldn't have to think about this) You can't just write keywords like tax, tax, tax in every sentence. Google and Bing now use 'context words'. It differentiates between people complaining about high taxes and accountancy websites by checking for context. If this blog also contained words such as 'efficiency' 'accounts' 'money' 'future' it would rank poorly for a someone googling 'conservative government tax policy' for example.

Headings: Like in essays, used to break up text (good for readers) and the words in headers are given more 'weight' by search engines. Here we have headings with keywords in them double points.

Links: Make sure your 'anchor text' (ie the text attached to the link) is attached to keywords or descriptive words. "Click this link" "You can find the full article here" and "For example" are all examples of bad anchor text.

Bold: Bold your key words and phrases. Someone should be able to read only the bolded parts of the article and understand the key points of an article.

Pictures: People like pictures. Google likes pictures with long titles. Graphs count as pictures by the way.

3 May 2015

May: What I've been learning


I posted last month about learning jQuery in order to create the cool little application you can see on The TaxPayers' Alliance Spending Plan page.

Since then there's also been and April Fools Quiz and a VAT Quiz, both with jQuery and both based on the Spending Plan code. I get a really happy feeling seeing my progress like that, which got me thinking about other things I should be learning and what I should be learning.

My role at work has changed so I've been learning about SEO and Social Media optimisation. I'm finally getting the hang of Twitter and YouTube I think. I want to get comfortable at it and then build up to a whole campaign, I'm looking forward to getting better and reading more about the subject so that I can feel that I really know what I'm doing.

At the I'm testing new strategies and then analysing the results to find the right questions I need to ask Google. I really enjoy learning through this method because rather than aimlessly reading as much information I can get my hands on and then applying it. For example, I realised that most people are only on Twitter for a short period of time and that I should really be reposting tweets. So I tried it, found which types of tweet do best when reposted and then asked Google for the answer to see if my findings matched up to others. It's a lot of fun and I feel like I'm progressing.

There's a lot of things I want to learn at the same time, lots of ways in which I'm lacking, so I'm finding it difficult to stick to one topic of study.

Last month I also posted my first post to JaK Wave entitled "Let's Travel Japan! The Ghibli Japan Tour" as part of a "Let's Travel Japan!" series which I was very excited about as I've been meaning to blog more about Japan and my trip, what I learnt etc.

To be honest it was difficult to write and although I put a lot of effort in and tried to promote it I didn't get any engagement, so it's been over a month and I've yet to post what I thought would be a follow up. I do still want to write it (it's almost done -- it just needs images adding) but I'm just not as excited as I was before!

This is a rambling post but I'm hoping it will kick-start regular posting again.

This seems to be a self improvement post, hopefully next time I post I'll be able to say that I've improved once again.

11 March 2015

I can use jQuery?

So I've been back in England for over a month and back at my job at the amazing TaxPayers' Alliance since last Monday. Since then I was asked to create something for our new research, published today called 'The Spending Plan'.

This research is our answer to the question 'How to cut the Deficit' that all the political parties seem to be dodging right now. Well, even if you don't agree with everything this is how we would do it and if you don't like one of our proposals the question is 'What would you cut instead?'

So. I spent a lot of time on Stack Overflow, W3 schools and JSFiddle and I was finally able to produce this cool interactive thing that you can use to look at our proposals.

If I had more time I would like to figure out how to do a 'share your score' feature which you would think Twitter / Facebook would make easy to integrate but no (surprisingly G+ does allow this) and add accounting.js so that we can get commas where they should be etc.

Despite that, I'm really proud I managed to finish in time so please go and take a look over at:



8 January 2015

Japan Weeks 7 - 9 (Sapporo)

Hello, hello. It's been a while since I did a blog post like this. My excuse is that I really haven't been doing much over the past few weeks. I've been in Sapporo enjoying being lazy over Christmas. We didn't feel like doing much in the run up to Christmas and Japan kinda shut down in the few days after New Years. So here's everything that I've posted to G+ in that time!


(19/12) There are some photos from our flight and the fields on the way from the Airport to Sapporo.


Then there are some photos of the Esta building floor 10 which has been modelled to look oldy-worldy and is filled with Ramen Restaurants. In the end we just picked one at random because there were so many to choose from.



After lunch we went to the JR Tower which is the second tallest building in Sapporo and is used as a viewing platform. The guidebook said that you have to use the men's toilets because the urinals let you pee into the sky. I made Boyfriend go for me :) He took a picture because there was nobody in there and it wasn't as cool as I'd been led to believe....



In the Esta Building / JR Tower and the other 3/4 connecting malls every 500 yen you spend gets you a lottery ticket. From Christmas shopping and JR Tower we managed 14 tickets. For 12 we had 2 chances to play the lottery. I only managed to get tissues (but they're nice tissues right?) but Boyfriend managed a 200 Yen voucher. The 6 tickets he used to win the voucher would have been 3,000 yen so it's not even 10% back...



We have 2 left over! So when we spend another 2,000 yen we can play again! (There's about 6 malls involved in this campaign so I'm sure one of them will have things that we need....)














(20/12) Brag post!

 You can now Donate on the TPA website via PayPal!

 I spent quite a while on this fiddling around first with NationBuilder which lets you have a page to donate via PayPal but ONLY via PayPal, then with the PayPal button tool which lets you use an image and then sets the link to the image and then I gave up and created my own button using this tutorial.

 I thought that PayPal would know the best way to embed its own content but in the end that meant the image of the button had a weird grey background instead of being transparent and I couldn't get the hover thing to work.

 Not really much to brag about but I had fun and learnt some things so I'm happy!

(21/12) Yesterday we went to see the new Youkai Watch movie. The tickets were a little expensive but the popcorn and drinks were really cheap!

They also had tie ins with various movies so Matthew got an 'Attack on Titan Original Combo Box' and for some reason I got the Youkai Watch Popcorn box which came with a special collectable card to.

It's useful at the moment but I don't know what I'm going to do with this... I already have Modge....

You can see a picture of the crowds too. We were about halfway through the line at this point. It was a pretty large cinema, I think they were screening the movie every 3 hours on 2 dedicated screens. It was super popular, there were so many little people!

Big Hero 6 also came out yesterday. Bad move on Disney's part because Youkai Watch fever is at an all time high with the newest game (which came out last week) sold out everywhere that I've looked and merchandise everywhere.

Although I think from what I've heard BH6 has a slightly older age demographic? I think most kids playing Youkai Watch are < 14 years.



(24/12) Yesterday we went to do some sightseeing because there was less snow! We went to the Christmas market and to see the clock tower.


There was a huge tree in the Sapporo Factory building. We're going out now to see it when it's lit up. The building also had the beer factory and a shop that had a cute Studio Ghibli display! 



Super Christmasy day! 








(24/12) Happy Christmas Eve!

Today we went out to the supermarket to get Christmas food! The supermarket had all there boxes of wrapped goods like beer and fruit that you could gift to someone. I was really impressed! I took a picture of our "food haul" before we refrigerated/ate half of the stuff in the picture. 
Then when it got dark we went to mass and to see the illuminations by the Christmas Market and the tree all lit up at the Factory Mall. 

On our way back we found a photo booth. We tried to make it Christmas themed? In Japan Christmas is more romantic holiday so the restaurant we planned to eat at was fully booked out and 8/10 people we passed were holding hands with someone else. 

Merry Christmas!









It's now 14:03 on 01/01/2015! Happy New Year!

I had a lot of fun last night finally fulfilling my dream of watching the NHK Red vs White song contest which was just as fun as I thought it would be!

I haven't been updating much at all because of a combination of not really doing anything and laziness! I really should do a compilation blog post again but there's not really doing to be anything in it so I'll leave it for another week.

Have a fun 2015!


I meant to upload these sooner but Google has stopped telling me when it backs up my photos... 

These are photos from the last few days. There are pictures od Sam, the ambiguously gendered snow person, with myself, Matthew and Loretta. 

There's a desk uploaded because it reminded me of my mother. A buffet deserts cafe that was awesome with tiny cakes and tea, the view of the ferris wheel lit up at night, the view over the bridge at night and a photo of Sapporo cathedral.

Yes, the official name for that building is Sapporo Cathedral. (There's a photo of the alter because I really like that flower arrangement!) 

Finally, there's Matthew in my beret. 
















(05/01) I found strawberry Frosties in the supermarket today in collaboration with Hello Kitty! I like her outfit!

Here's a Google Auto-Awesome-d picture of the Church / Cathedral


(06/01) Today we went to Asahikawa Zoo! Here are some photos I took. Boyfriend took some better ones which I will upload in a moment!

More photos from the day including one of me from earlier this week and another from the pancake place we went to for dessert today!
















(07/01) Yesterday I went to an exhibit at Sapporo Art Museum. You weren't allowed to take pictures in the exhibit but the exhibit is comprised of works by Seiji Fujishiro who uses light and shadow to great effect. I've added some images I found on the internet but really you need to see them displayed in a light box. I really like the number of colours and the slightly gothic way the 'sprites' are portrayed!


The other images were a display in the subway system that depicts a the platform on the North - South line at Sapporo station. I thought the idea was pretty cute!
Cats and the Blanket


Sprites in the Wood


Christmas Bells

Moonlight Echo

Exhibit Opening Sketch



That's it! That's all my pictures from the last few weeks! I stopped captioning lots of them because I had stopped updating so I just wanted to get them out there. We're in Sapporo until 12/01 and then we go to Narita for 2 weeks farming and then back to Rika's farm that we began this trip at for another 2 weeks and then we're in Tokyo for a week! I think that will make up 3 blog posts over 5 weeks? As always if you'd rather be updated sooner please follow me on G+!