Ok, first a quick bit of background: The Government are funding a pilot scheme for independent TV news production in Scotland, the North East of England and Wales. In Scotland, this would replace the regional news currently broadcast by STV. If you’re interested, The Guardian has a good history of the whole process.
Only two proposals made it through to the final selection process in Scotland. One bid was from a consortium including STV and the other was our bid, the Scottish News Consortium, which includes the Herald & Times Group (where I work), Johnston Press, DC Thomson and Tinopolis.
The winning bidder was announced by the DCMS today… and it’s us!!!
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At 2pm on Monday we took heraldscotland.com out of public beta and directed all of our traffic from www.theherald.co.uk and www.sundayherald.com to the new site.
We ran the beta for just over a month during which time approx 10% of our regular online readership switched over to the new site. This gave us a lot of valuable feedback and led to various tweaks and changes to make the site more user friendly.
We also had a fairly mamoth task of copying across 90,000 articles from the old sites and re-mapping those URLs to our new Polopoly URLs so that old links (example) from the likes of Wikipedia (example) and the search engines continued to work. Wikipedia alone had links to over 2,300 Herald and Sunday Herald articles and given its massive PageRank and search engine reputation, it was essential for our SEO efforts that these links continued to work.
It’s still early days, but the site seems to be coping well — both with the traffic and the number of articles in the system which, including our 20 year archive, is now nudging one million articles.
We finally flicked the switch tonight on our first Polopoly-powered site! Heraldscotland.com is now officially a public beta, running in parallel with the main Herald and Sunday Herald sites for the next couple of weeks while we train everyone up on the new system.
More details to follow when I have time (as well as launching heraldscotland.com this week, I’m also on a five-day Java training course). For now please go and have a play with it and let me know what you think…
The new version of s1jobs has won the Online Excellence category at the prestigious Marketing Society Star Awards in Glasgow.  The site, which was designed and built by my technical team last year, beat strong competition from Blonde, BigMouthMedia, Story UK and Whitespace to take the award. Â
The win recognises the talent and dedication of everyone involved in the build. It was a real team effort with sales and marketing staff playing a key role in the design and development process.  Full credit to everyone involved in the build, especially Colin Clark and David McLaughlin who did the majority of the design, HTML and programming work on the project.Â
David Craik, Head of Marketing for s1 accepting the award
It seems one of the key factors in ’s1jobs 2.0′ winning the category was the measurable effectiveness of the new site.  The improved job seeker interface — including a personalised homepage, improved job alerts and AJAX-powered search results — combined with an improved recruiter offering — JobCasts, personalised CRM, and automatic applicant screening — led to a direct improvement in all our key metrics. Visitor numbers were up, the average application rate soared while the number of page impressions actually decreased*.  Â
* While a drop in page impressions would be bad news for some sites it isn’t an issue for s1jobs, which generates revenue through job listings.  A drop in page impressions (coupled with an increase in applications) simply means users are getting to the content they want more easily — a great result.
I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash. Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language. And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.
My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.  This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.  The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too. Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files. The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application. Â
You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews
My final freelance project of the year is another educational game for Glasgow Science Centre.  Pixelated Pix explains some of the technology behind digital imaging, from CCD capture through to LCD display.Â
The aim of the game is to correctly identify images that have been ‘pixelated’ in one way or another. The game also sees the return of cheesy gameshow host Charlie Smiles, who last made an appearance in Bang or no bang.
The completion of this game ends a hectic year of freelance work which saw the development of:
These projects have been a lot of fun, but have taken up a huge amount of my free time this year, probably around an extra 50 days on top of my day job. So I’m going to take a wee break in early 2009 and turn my attention to some home improvements.  Tool time!
