The World According to Tim Skipper

Have you ever wondered how many people there are out there sharing your name? I’m sure most regular Internet users have at one time or another Googled their name to see what comes back.

I thought it would be fun to collect a list of Tim Skippers and link to their web sites in a kind of new-age Tim Skipper Web Ring (remember web rings?). Maybe some of them will link back, or stop by my blog to leave a comment (probably something like “stop stalking me!”).

Here’s the list of Tim Skippers I’ve found so far:

• Tim Skipper Photography. Based in Dothan, AL, USA, this Tim Skipper has a photography business (a passion I share, although not to this quality). Nice pics Tim!
• House of Heroes. Tim Skipper is also the lead singer and guitarist (hey, I play guitar too!) of House of Heroes, a three piece band from Columbus, Ohio. I’ve not (yet) listened to any of thier music.
• First Counsel. This Tim Skipper is the founder of London based recruitment firm First Counsel, specialising in the recruitment of law firm professionals. I too worked in London for two years consulting in IT at a couple of major law firms - the similarities continue!
• Another Tim Skipper likes building Model Terrain, and I think might be the same Tim Skipper who has the photography site at the top of this list. Let me know Tim!
• Tim Skipper is also a mysterious actor, starring in the 2007 film Eight Days and Six Hours. Details of the SuperStar Tim Skipper are sketchy - can anyone fill them in? I wonder if I can make money selling Tim Skipper autographs… I was on the TV once, which is almost exactly the same thing.
• The Fresno State Bulldogs are also lucky to have a Tim Skipper as thier Assistant Coach.

From this list I think we’re all building a picture of who a typical Tim Skipper is. I shall comment no further!

Tags: Tim Skipper

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is often thought of as something of a Black Art. There are unscrupulous individuals and companies who will take your money in exchange for wild promises that you’ll soon be “ranked No.1 in Google for “Stuff”!” There are also a lot of perfectly genuine SEO services out there who don’t make such rash promises and do genuinely help you. Invariably though, these services do not come cheap.

So what can you do for yourself? DIY SEO is perfectly possible. In fact, it’s quite easy. Some simple changes can make a big difference to your visibility in search engines.

For example, on one of my businesses’ Good Time Products Adult Toys & Bondage Gear web site (warning: adult content) I made a simple change to the way pages were named in the catalogue, using the product name instead of a random stock code, which led to a 40-fold increase in the amount of traffic reaching my site from Google. Forty times!

Pay attention to your page titles. These are vitally important and often overlooked. Keep page titles under 70 characters and use your most important keywords in the page title. I bet you didn’t know all the major search algorithms place more weight on the page title than on other page content.

There are lots of really simple easy changes like this you can make to improve your search engine ranking. I’ve been reading Aaron Wall’s SEOBook of late, and I can’t recommend it high enough for learning about the tips and tricks of SEO. Check it out.

Tags: Aaron Wall, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

Back in the early 90s, e-mail mailing lists were all the rage. You could subscribe to a list on just about any subject you could think of and receive e-mails individually, or in batches commonly known as digest format.

At the time I was making some money selling a small Windows 3.11 utility that monitored Windows resources and freed up memory, and I became interested in the Shareware marketing strategy. The Usenet newsgroups on the subject were all very US based, and so I decided to start a Shareware mailing list with a European slant. Euro-Share, The European Shareware Mailing List was born.

Over the next few years Euro-Share grew in popularity and influence. It had several thousand subscribers and I was annually making a five figure sum just from advertising revenue it created. I had joined the Board of the Association of Shareware Professionals and in 1999 I was invited to speak at the prestigious Shareware Industry Conference, in Tampa, Florida and had a wonderful 10 days in Miami, the Florida Keys and driving round the coast to Tampa for the 3 day conference.

But then people started to lose interest in mailing lists. The World Wide Web began to take off in a way nobody expected. Even Usenet began to move away from being a geeky newsreader based resource into a friendlier web based format, when Google bought out DejaNews in 2001 and created Google Groups.

The advertising revenue from Euro-Shared dropped sharply, and with my own business growing I couldn’t devote so much time to it as I used to. Eventually Euro-Share as an active e-mail mailing list fizzled out. I expect it’s much the same story with other mailing lists.

Nowadays, Blogging and RSS feeds are where it’s at. The distribution of people’s ideas thoughts and opinions has moved away from the push-medium of e-mail to the pull medium of the World Wide Web and RSS. This is no bad thing, but I lament the loss of the good old days of e-mail mailing lists all the same.

Tags: advertising, asp, blogging, e-mail, mailing lists, rss, shareware, sic

During the summer of 2003 I decided that I had had enough of messing around on track days and it was time to find out if I really was any good as a competative driver. I sold my Porsche Boxster S and signed up for the 2004 Caterham Academy Championships.

The kit was delivered in late 2003 and over a 15 man day period in the middle of winter I single-handedly built my Caterham 7 car in my tiny single garage. It was such a great experience I kept a meticulous diary and hundreds of photographs of the build as I went along.

Eventually I decided to turn my build diary into an eBook, and self-published “How To Build A Caterham 7 In 15 Days” in Adobe PDF format. So far it’s sold over 300 copies, and I hope one day (around the year 3012) it will have paid back what I spent racing it!

You can buy a copy of How To Build A Caterham 7 In 15 Days from my company website.

Tags: caterham 7, caterham academy, caterham build, caterham build diary, caterham racing, ebook

I do love upsetting queue mentality.

Whilst on the southern bypass the other morning a Police van came barrelling along the outside lane with its lights going, I move into a gap in the nearside lane and a woman in a TT roadster in front eventually does the same.

The Police van goes past, and I pull back out and accelerate back up to speed to take advantage of the nicely cleared road. Only TT woman thinks she has a right to still be in front of me, and attempts to pull out in front of me. But then she has to abort in order to not kill us both, but she has this look on her face that could melt bricks and is mouthing something at me which I expect isn’t very polite!

I jumped the queue. My bad.

This is why I think a lot of road rage occurs in this country. We are a nation of queuers, and the typical British driver considers a road to be one long queue. Dare anyone jump the queue, all hell breaks loose.

Tags: queue mentality