What happens in 60 seconds online.

Pause for a moment and think about this; it’s 2013. The Sydney olympics were 13 years ago, we have a female Prime Minister (for now) and we still don’t know what to call this decade (The thousands?) We may not have hoverboards and space travel yet as previous generations had promised, but we do have a pretty awesome thing called the internet. It has come a long way in the last few years, but this year will be a pretty big one in terms of what will become popular and possible in web design and development.

To illustrate the volume of information flying around, the lovely folks at Intel have created this infographic to visualise an Internet Minute. Have a look for yourself and prepare to have your mind blown (We particularly like the 135 botnet infections per minute stat!)

Dumb ways to die

Dumb ways to die is a successful viral public safety campaign.  Some nice coverage on ABC with the people behind it.

Update:  Econsultancy have coverage now too.

SEO like a human

I’m a big fan of ‘natural’ SEO. Nice to see an article from Econsultancy covering why good SEOs should look like they don’t exist.

Some key points:

• Don’t chase the algorithm!
• Get your SEO basics and fundamentals in place – title tags and headings should use key phrases.
• Get your website architecture and URL right – focus on how users interact with your site more than keywords. Use sensible and natural language to describe your content.
• Focus on content, not links – engaging content will attract links and the links which matter will be the ones you earn naturally.
• Consider user generated content – it’s fresh, it’s relevant, it’s customer language and of course, beyond SEO benefits, it’s credible and engaging for users.

Check out the full article here.

Python packages used at Ionata

We’re getting excited about PyCon. Only 2 more sleeps!

As part of sponsoring PyCon we’re busily preparing some promotional materials to give to attendees.

Here’s one talking point we came up with, a word cloud showing all the python packages we use in our software projects. It’s based on the requirements.txt files from some of our more recent python projects.

Really curious to see what comments we get from python developers. What’s missing? What would you switch out for another package?

The test of the machine

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values