Google announced extensions with its latest Chrome release on 21st January this year – implemented to slow down improve the features of the browser and give Firefox a run for its money. Now Google Chrome for me is the super-fast, shiny browser used occassionally that resolves pages in an instant, handling as many tabs as you can throw at it (and periodically having a meltdown). However, when the real work needs to be done, it’s back to the trusty old Firefox.

So six weeks since the launch of the extensions, we had a browse around the library to see which ones could tempt us into using Chrome as a daily browser.

Ultimate Chrome Flag is a nifty little extension that sits in the end of the address bar.  You can quickly diagnose any geolocation issues as this tool displays the relevant flag for your website location and- importantly- no flag when the location can not be determined. Click on the flag and a box pops up showing the country or region name as well as the Domain name and IP address, Google and Alexa rank as well as the Web of Trust ratings.

Firebug Lite is the Chrome version of the fabulous Firebug add on that is a staple for any SEO using firefox. Whilst it seems the main significance of the world ‘lite’ equates to lack of javascript debugger, it still retains most of the features that have kept SEOs entertained whilst chopping and changing a client’s website.

Chrome SEO aims to be an all-in-one SEO extension. Whilst you’ll certainly need the help of some other extensions, Chrome SEO is great for some quick analysis of a website. The button sits in the top right corner of your Chrome page next to the address bar and clicking it opens up a scrollable frame containing lots of SEO-worthy metrics. The extension pulls in data from the search engines as well as popular tools such as Open Site Explorer  and MajesticSEO if you’re logged in. Combined with the robot.txt and sitemap detector, this is an extension that can save an SEO bags of time.

Meta SEO Inspector allows quick analysis of the meta tags of the page you are viewing. As well as the usual HTML meta tags you can see XFN tags, no-follow links and canonical tags. The box, which sits in the bottom right corner of your Chrome window, also displays warnings when tags are missing or wrong (ie. too short or too long).

SEO Site Tools is a great all round SEO tool which is talked about in much more detail over on SEOmoz. Using the free Linkscape API, this extension focuses on all aspects of SEO with the end result being a well-rounded SEO extension. With this tool you can measure external page data, social media stats, view your page terms such as meta and header tags, check your server and domain info and much, much more. If for some reason, you’re bound to installing just one Chrome extension – choose this one!

SEO Quake is based on the Firefox plugin of the same name. It displays key SEO parameters at the top of any webpage as well as highlighting no-follow links. 

The extension also appends these SEO parameters to your SERPs, allowing for a quick, basic analysis of competitors and the ability to re-organise the results by the metric of your choice.

Link Grabber extracts all the links from the current webpage and throws them into a list on another tab, all in a split-second. I like this tool as it’s a great way to (very) quickly get a quick overview of the amount of links on any given page. Whilst it doesn’t throw any SEO-specific metrics into the mix (anyone fancy taking up the mantle), I installed it and have found myself using it more than I would have expected. Did I mention how fast it is?

So here are seven Chrome extensions we have found pretty useful for SEO.  Which ones do you recommend? If you haven’t been too freaked out by the numerous screenshots of a close up Fabio Capello adjusting his glasses, then let us know which extensions are tempting you away from Firefox to the Google Chrome browser. For current Chrome users, what are you experiences using extensions with Google Chrome, does it actually slow down the browser?

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Its only been a couple of weeks since we announced that we were opening an office in Seattle. The last couple of weeks have been a hive of activity and there is a definite buzz in the air at Distilled HQ.

Over the next week or so I’ll be posting a handful of new jobs at Distilled. If you have always wanted to work with us, then now is a great opportunity to join.

The first person we are looking for is an experienced SEO Consultant to join the team in our London office. Incidentally, we also have a couple of roles in our new Seattle office.

We have ambitious plans for growth, so if you want to be a part of that, I suggest that you check out the roles available and apply.

If there isn’t a suitable role at the moment, you should follow @duncanmorris or @distilled on twitter, to ensure you hear about any new roles we post.

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Recently, I have found myself talking quite a lot about tracking whole visitor paths in Google Analytics. Rand and I discussed the issue in a Whiteboard Friday kill the head or chase the tail and I covered how to get past last click attribution in a subsequent post. These have tended to cover the why and the (broad-brush) why. If you’re interested in what first touch, last touch or multi-touch tracking is or why you’d want to do them, the resources above are a good place to start.

The main point can be summed up by the chart below showing the visits to convert report from Google Analytics:

The point is not what those exact values are, but simply that a significant number (in this case more than half) of all conversions come from visits that aren’t the first!

Today’s post, however, is all about the details: how to get first touch tracking working to get you actionable data about real acquisition costs from Google Analytics.

You will need to be able to:

• Import a custom .js file
• Modify the Google Analytics embed code across your website
• Create custom reports in GA

Note that this is going to set custom variables. If you are already using this functionality, you should be very careful with how you integrate this. Oh, and all of this is provided as is, with no warranty. I hope it will help you out, but only you are responsible for changes you make to your website and tracking code.

By default, GA attributes conversions to the last touch – i.e. the source of the visit that led to the conversion. I’m going to show you how to get the source of their first visit to your site.

Step 1

Embed a JavaScript file defining three functions:

• distilledCheckAnalyticsCookie – in order to track first touch information, we only want to record details to custom variables on someone’s first visit. This function checks for the __utma visitor cookie
• distilledTruncate – as I discuss in more detail over on SearchEngineLand, Google won’t allow you to set custom variables of longer than 64 characters (including the variable name) after URL encoding so this function is a slightly long way round of truncating the variable information
• distilledFirstTouch – the heavy lifting – this is the function that sets the four variables outlined in more detail below

You can embed this with the following code anywhere above the Google Analytics code script in your page code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://attributiontrackingga.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/distilled.FirstTouch.js"></script>

It’s a little clunky at the moment and I want to refine it a little to cope better with combinations of Google Analytics and Website Optimizer. If anyone has any good ideas for this, feel free to drop me a line or raise issues over at Google Code.

Step 2

Move your GA code above any Website Optimizer code or anything from Google that might write a visitor (__utma) cookie and look for:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X"); pageTracker._trackPageview();

In between those two lines, you want to put the following code:

distilledFirstTouch(pageTracker);

So that your trackpageview code looks like this:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X"); // Distilled first touch tracking distilledFirstTouch(pageTracker); pageTracker._trackPageview();

Make sure you use your own UA-XXXXXXX-X identifier string!

This writes 4 custom variables (apologies for the ridiculous naming conventions – Google limits the whole of the variable name + value to 64 characters!):

• l : original landing page (no query string)
• s : original landing page query string
• r : original referrer
• q : if q=keyword+keyword is found, this contains that part of the referrer (it’s actually more complicated than that – I have taken the full list of keyword delimiters from Google help and attempted to pull them out into the fourth variable in case the full referrer is truncated by the character limit).

Step 3

The detail of this is probably best reserved for another day / another post, but suffice it to say that I have found that custom reports exported to Excel are probably the best way of analysing the data this method produces. Far be it from me to tell you what reports to create, but I suggest something like conversions or revenue by original referring keywords might be interesting!

I have found the Visitors –> Custom Variables report in GA to be flaky at best. I would advise avoiding that and creating your own reports.

Step 4

Work a tiny bit of Excel magic.

Because (as described above) Google encodes the data on the way into GA, you need to decode it to make real sense of it. I have made the assumption that Google’s URLEncode function works like JavaScript’s encodeURIComponent() function and written an Excel formula to help:

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"%2F","/"), "%2C", ","), "%3F", "?"), "%3A", ":"), "%40", "@"), "%26", "&"), "%3D", "="), "%2B", "+"), "%24", "$"), "%23", "#")

Just paste this formula into an empty cell and place the information you want to decode into cell A1. Manipulate as necessary. You’re welcome. And yes, I’m a (tiny bit) sorry for the nastiness of that formula.

On a side note

I was amused to see the following tweet from @jaamit:

First click attribution is a bit like crediting your first girlfriend with your current marriage

(Attributed to @avinashkaushik’s keynote).

Swiftly rebutted by @Philipbuxton:

Last-click attribution is like selling Alonso because he doesn’t score enough goals.

On that note, I’ll leave you to go ahead and implement and let me know what you think.

This documentation also appears on the Google code wiki.

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What is your Twitter background? A random photograph strangely filling only a quarter of the screen? Or perhaps a slightly pixelated company logo in the top left hand corner? Or maybe you’re a minimalist… just a plain colour background for you?

We have been doing something fun with our Twitter Backgrounds, read on to find out more.

We have developed a FREE Twitter background template available to download. This will help you design a background the works well with the current twitter design:

FREE Twitter background template

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. All we ask is if you use this image on your website or blog that you link back to this blog post.

This template will help you to design your background with Twitters existing layout in mind. The template helps to ensure that all the important information you need to include is visible even at small browser widths.

At Distilled we have been trying to make our Twitter backgrounds more cohesive, both with each other and with the Distilled brand. We want to promote our company in a fun and visually appealing way  - you can see the background in action via our list of Distilled staff on Twitter.

This is how we applied this template to the Distilled brand:

It is important to design your Twitter background with the existing twitter layout in mind. The main column on Twitter is centred regardless of browser size. The main column has a triangular notch at the top (giving it a speech bubble affect) that points towards the centre of the letter ‘w’ of the word t’w‘itter.

When designing a Twitter background the constraints to consider are:

• Any copy within the background must be clearly visible at the smallest of browser sizes.
• The Twitter logo has a transparent background behind it; this must not conflict with the design. This means keeping any other copy lower than the Twitter logo level (20px) from the top of the page.

This is something that Will had not considered on this old Twitter background:

Will Critchlow’s old Twitter background

• The background should be a different colour from the main Twitter column. This helps to ground the text on the page and also to clearly show the columns width which prevents copy looking like it is floating in the middle of a massive expanse of white space.
• A pattern or colour should continue to fill the whole width and height of the page. using a limited amount of colours or repeating a pattern will keep file size, and therefore loading time, to a minimum.

First it was important to design a format that could easily be applied to everyone as an individual. Everyone should still feel their Twitter page was theirs so individuality was important. It was decided that everyone would have an illustration of their choice but the rest of the background would be a uniform design. The template design incorporates the Distilled colours and the individual names are styled the same way as the Distilled logo. People visiting both a Twitter page and the Distilled website should make a connection between the similar visual styles:

Twitter background template

The person’s name is aligned vertically to ensure that it is visible even at smaller browser widths.

Our Twitter background at a small browser size

The image should be visible within the darker grey section within the page structure but as this is a very small area the main content of the image can extend to the end of the lighter grey square. The width of the Twitter central panel is 765px wide. Positioned here within the 1024 average, you can see that the most important information the name and Distilled website address is still clearly visible.

I have provided the Distilled team with a style guide so that they can easily make the side bar and other elements on their twitter page fit in with the background design and the Distilled brand guidelines.

Check out Will on Twitter

Distilled on Twitter

Tom Critchlow on Twitter

Andy Davies on Twitter

Stephen Fry is, by most standards, a power user on Twitter. His Twitter background has an illustration and a few image links to other websites. The illustration includes his interests, and the links to other sites are great too, if only they were more easily visible! The problem is that your browser has to be at a wopping 1263px width to be able to view this important information.

Stephen Fry’s Twitter background at 1263px

Unfortunately, knowing the screen size of your users is a constant battle as it is always changing. One of the most widely used website formats is a 1024px width and roughly 50% of internet users are thought to have a screen this size or smaller. Therefore, roughly speaking approximately 50% of Stephen Fry’s visitors will only see a few random letters of the background copy.

Stephen Fry’s Twitter background at an average screen size

Sticking to our template guidelines ensures that important information is visible at small browser widths:

Unfortunately Stephen Fry’s important information is hidden with the browser at this size..

Stephen Fry on Twitter

Feel free to visit us all on Twitter and check out what we are getting up to. I would love to hear what you have done with your Twitter background, and also how you get on using our FREE Twitter background template

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Recently there has been an influx of infographics being used online to gain traffic and links. I love infographics. Therefore I’ve compiled this post to explain what they are and give you some inspiration for creating your own infographics and information visualisation.

Why Do You Care About Infographics?

Information visualisation is playing an important role on the web. Users have the attention spans of goldfish. Goldfish on crack. Mmm crack. Where was I again? Oh yeah, infographics are very good at driving traffic and links. Check out the state of the internet that Focus produced recently:

I’d say I’m 10% expert, 12% snarky.

This did very well, appearing more or less everywhere on the internet:

Everyone loves the internet. Fact.

Not only did this get lots of traffic and exposure, it also gained a large number of links from places such as Mashable.

It’s not just bloggers getting on board with information visualisation, however. I recently went to a conference where Russell Smith, head of editorial development for the BBC News website, talked about database journalism. He directed me to the following resource page of infographics and visualisations from BBC News.

On that page you can view all kinds of visualisations, such as this tool for plotting where the Premier League’s players come from:

Where Liverpool players came from in 1989

Russell told me infographics are vital to the BBC news website’s story telling – I love the term Database Journalism:

Examples Of Great Infographics

There are many many great examples of infographics, i’ve included a few of my favourites here along with some unusual ones and some more resources for finding more. If you’re not inspired after reading through these then I don’t know what will inspire you!

The Guardian Zeitgeist

The Guardian recently launched a zeitgeist feature which allows you to easily glance at the news and see which categories and headlines in one place:

Colours, boxes, Charlie Brooker – what’s not to like?

Photographers Rights In The UK

This one is a little left-field and takes a different approach to data visualisation, it’s not numbers but laws that are being demonstrated in the photographers rights in the UK:

Warning: will not save you if you are also a terrorist

I strongly recommend checking out anything at all from informationisbeautiful.

Visualise The Music You Listen To

A step up from visualisation of data is letting users visualise their own data – HacKey is a great Last.fm app that lets you visualise the key of all the music you listen to:

My favourite chord is G major. Who knew?

Spotting a Hidden Handgun

Spotting a hidden handgun is just a small fraction of the amazing graphical reporting powers of Megan Jaegerman:

Run, gun-man, run!

Poor Sweden

I particularly like this piece about The Petabyte Age (designed by column five media), partly because it’s driven from data which is readily available and partly because it’s so similar to a piece of linkbait we did many years ago:

Either Sweden doesn’t have electricity or lolcats use a lot of energy.

OK Cupid, More Than OK Infographics

Towards the back-end of 2009 OK Cupid started blogging about the data that they have. In an excellent way. They clearly ‘get’ what it takes to do linkbait and have a great combination of visualisation along with easily digestibale pull-quotes. I highly recommend that you check out their blog for a great example of how to get this right.

I just realised my twitter profile pic shows off my abs… What does that say about me?

Other Collections of Information Visualistion

Others have been over some of this territory:

• A Reddit comment full of infographics
• A Reddit search for infographics
• Smashing Magazine does a roundup
• Six Revisions does a roundup
• 50 examples of great infographics
• Beautiful information visualisations
• Designing Infographics with plenty of examples

Data Sources

Of course, if you’re going to go about visualising information then you need some information to start with! One of the best places to look for data is your own site and your own users. OK Cupid do this perfectly as mentioned above and often this is the best data to use since no one else has access to this kind of information. If you don’t have access to this or if you’re looking for other data sources to mash up (combining two sets of data is always funky!) then check out these sources:

APIs

If you don’t use your own, then use someone else’s. APIs are designed to allow you to query other people’s information and pull out the data you need. I like to think of the following 4 step process:

1. Find an API
2. Pull API data into pie charts
3. ?????
4. Profit

There are literally thousands of APIs out there but here’s a few to get you started:

• SEOmoz site intelligence
• The Guardian’s Open Platform
• ProgrammableWeb’s list of popular APIs

ProgrammableWeb is THE place online for APIs

YQL

I’m not really a developer but I’m still excited by what services like Yahoo’s YQL make possible. Allowing you to mash up all kinds of API’s as well as enabling you to get data from sites which don’t have APIs is pretty cool. Gotta Love Bacon was built using PHP and YQL, you can read more about that here: How We Built GottaLoveBacon.com Using Twitter, PHP And YQL

This doesn’t quite work as YQL code, but it’s not far off!

Data.gov.uk

This is a recently launched website by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the UK government to provide open access to all kinds of public information so that people can make mashups, do analysis etc. It’s still in beta at the moment but already has quite a buzz around it. Check out www.data.gov.uk for all your UK data goodness.

They’re more data guys than design guys…..

Creating Visualisation Without Design Skills

One of the challenges to creating good infographics and information visualisation however is actually designing the data. There are a few good tools that will let you make your own pretty graphs and charts (Google Docs I’m looking at you) but one tool I noticed recently is Tableau Public. It’s not quite released yet but when it does (in the next week or so I’m informed) it will let anyone use Tableau’s services to visualise data quickly and easily and embed data within blog posts.

Despite the name, it’s not quite public yet…

You can see a few examples of this already in the wild and it’s pretty neat!

• Eagereyes shows off some global temperature data
• The WSJ looks at how long it takes to build a technology empire
• The Cranky Flyer looks at how often bird strikes occur

If you have any other great examples of infographics or information visualisation please share them in the comments!

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Blog posts begin with a little preamble. This part sets the tone of the article, and helps the reader establish what they’re going to find out over the next 500 words, even though they’ll probably only just read the section headings. This part typically segues quite quickly to a controversial statement or question – designed to provoke the user into thinking they actually need to read another vapid post; in this case I’ll be asking:

With the establishing question out of the way, we’ve set ourselves up for criticism if we don’t deliver an answer. The best thing to do is to distract the user with a picture; either something to do with technology or sex works well here – a blend of the two works even better.

See – you’ve almost completely forgotten what we were talking about.

After your eyes have lingered for a while, you may eventually get back to the text. Since you’re almost certainly feeling a little down about how your life sucks compared to Little Miss Sexyblogger up there, the post will boost your ego by spatchcocking a variety of selcouth expressions into this farrago, to show that the writer trusts you to know their definitions. And then the galimatian text continues with:

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

After a clichéd title that’s clearly had little thought put into it, the post hits the readers with the statistics equivalent of a one-two combo: statistic, plus graphic.

We’d rather you didn’t look too closely at this chart – it’s just there to suggest we’ve done some substantive research.

If the statistics need some justification, this is probably a good time to do some name dropping to create a vague air of trust about you. This idea actually came to me on the afternoon with James Franco. (True story, I did. Calm down girls.)

Time for Controvesy

In this section, we mention that Michael Gray is a hack, Lisa Barone shouldn’t voice her opinions, DaveN’s never done a day’s work in his life, Rand is only well-known because of a legion of fanboys and  Jeremy is a sell-out.

This segment has two main aims: it first causes division amongst readers which encourages them to tweet about it saying how right the post is, or link to it saying how wrong it is. Secondly: by linking to some prominent bloggers, we hope they notice the link and come over to visit the site.

The intended outcome here is that by bringing more visitors and having controversial statements, the post will receive more comments . This is important, because as you may know: comments are the lifeblood of bloggers and without comments they will shrivel and die.

Comments are also useful as a substitute for real world relationships so, you know, they show that I am loved. All I ever wanted was someone to tell me they loved me.

The Seven Point List Bit

1. Some posts may consist solely of the seven point list bit; in other cases it might just be one of the sections
2. The seven point list bit may have any number of items, but magic numbers like three, seven or ten are most common
3. They can be used instead of having to write full sentences
4. A list of the top seven lists posts would be the most awesome post-modern blog post ever if the idea hadn’t been done to death already
5. Most lists are way longer than they ought to be; the writer is typically grasping at straws by now.
6. Did you know that rats can smell x-rays?
7. With great relief, the last point it reached and the author hurries on to……

Some other reading

Again, the writer makes a shout out to other blogs, in the hope that someone will read their post. These are typically posts that are much better written and much more useful than the one you are reading, or demonstrate quite clearly where the idea was ripped off from.

The Funny Bit

By now, the writer knows you’ve just scanned the post and not really read anything. They also know that the post massively lacked any humour, so it’s time to crowbar someone else’s comedy to liven up the post. A barely related cartoon works well: try something from XKCD or that one with the dogs from the New Yorker.

Your crazy pills are right there next to the bed; I suggest you take them.

The Call to Action

This is the end of the post, and hence it’s time to reiterate a call to feed the poor blogger with acknowledgement. Hence, the writer begs you to FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER, asks what you thought of the post, and then offers the invite that’s as old as the web: “LEAVE A COMMENT, AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!“

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The message in the length of a tweet: Distilled is opening an office in Seattle and taking over SEOmoz’s consulting business.

This might be the single biggest step we have ever taken. In some ways, it’s bigger than when Duncan and I first started the company. When we started, we had very little – no contacts, few assets, no clients and no employees. Personally, we were both unmarried and renting. Over the last (nearly) 5 years, we have grown a ~£1m business that employs 16 people, both got married, bought flats, sold flats and bought houses.

It turns out that this isn’t enough. We are still shooting for 2010 to be a bigger year personally and professionally. Not only are we both starting families in 2010, but we are also taking the Distilled family to the US of A.

As many of you will know, over the last couple of years, we have worked very closely with SEOmoz:

• in 2007, we started informally working together and receiving referrals from the recommended list (including some big name brands that we are still working with today)
• in mid-2008, we teamed up more formally as global associates to work together on consulting projects and contribute to Q&A and the main blog
• in October last year, we collaborated on the London PRO SEO training seminar that brought together a couple of hundred expert SEOs (and aspiring expert SEOs) for two days of fantastic learning and networking

The Global Associates deal has worked well for both sides. We have worked together for some great clients (including Microsoft, Real Networks’ Film.com, Scribd.com, etsy and others) and I think we’ve written some pretty cool stuff:

• A linkbuilding method so effective I can’t believe it’s not blackhat (by Tom)
• The 3 cornerstones of SEO (one of my favourites of Duncan’s posts – maybe because he nicked the diagram from me)
• 7 ways to use the web developer toolbar for SEO (by Rob)
• How to find out what search engine users are really asking (by Rich)

I’m also told that the accent works well for Whiteboard Friday (I joined some early ones, ran some myself and am going to be appearing in a few over the next few weeks after Rand and I recorded five on my recent trip to Seattle (so far, Scott has published kill the head or chase the tail? and making clients happy).

For a variety of reasons (which I’ll let Rand elaborate on in his post on the subject – I’ll update this with a link when that’s live), SEOmoz has been moving further away from consulting over the time we have worked together (and this formed a large part of the evolving goal of the global associates relationship). In summary, though, they want to focus on growing their awesome products and community and consulting is both a distraction (especially a time-sink on Rand personally) and a potentially confusing message for agencies considering using Linkscape and paying for PRO membership. For some time, Rand, the rest of the SEOmoz management and their board have wanted to move away from this, and now the time has come to make that leap as their PRO community goes from strength to strength.

At the same time, it seems crazy to throw away such a powerful legacy of branding, success and relationships. We are focussing 100% on making our client services as good as they can possibly be and are excited about reaching ever more clients in more places.

For those skipping to the punchline, here’s the low-down:

• Distilled Limited now has a wholly-owned subsidiary, Distilled LLC registered in WA
• There isn’t much of a US web presence yet, but you can still check out distilledconsulting.com
• Rob Ousbey, one of the lead SEOs at Distilled here in London is heading West to brave the frontier and begin the process of establishing our US office
• We are opening up office in Seattle
• A relationship very similar to the ‘global associate’ deal outlined above will continue – with our staff writing for SEOmoz, answering Q&A and contributing to product decisions and testing (in exchange for which we will get loads of access to powerful tools, data and expertise)
• We will manage the SEO consulting page on the SEOmoz website and handle bespoke consulting needs for any of the SEOmoz community who would like to work with us. Rand, Scott, Gillian et al. will also continue to pass people who enquire directly to them on to us (for which we will be paying a small commission)
• We will all continue to refer to the recommended list where appropriate
• We are now hiring in the UK and the US: if you are a talented SEO or great marketing administrator, please check out our jobs pages
• Yes, we are also wondering if we did this just to make ourselves into a case study in international domain strategy.

We are already working with a number of US (and especially West-coast) companies and are hoping to announce new deals in the upcoming weeks. If you are based in the US and always really wanted to work with Distilled, but thought we only worked with UK companies, think again – now is a great time to get in touch.

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To celebrate Burns Night, we ran a little competition on Twitter to give away a bottle of whisky (Ardbeg to be precise) along with a Distilled hoodie.

All people had to do in order to enter was follow @distilled or tweet the hashtag #distilledwhisky.

We had well over 100 entrants (including a few people trying to enter more than once – but more on that later).

Cooler than that, though, we had two companies contact us offering to chip in with additional prizes:

• Jura whisky offered a bottle of their whisky (and told us about their own competition on Facebook and their twitter account). They also told us about a charitable endeavour by Whyte & Mackay and Jura: auctions for Haiti
• Master of Malt chipped in a cask strength single cask 19 year old Tomatin . You can also follow them on Twitter (though I suggest buying some whisky from them would make them even happier)

To say thank you for this amazing generosity, we are sending each of them a copy of Seth Godin’s book Tribes. (Incidentally, why is his new book, Linchpin not available in the UK yet, nor on Kindle? – I’m surprised by Seth on that).

Since we ended up with such a range of prizes, we decided it would be silly to send all of it to one person, so in addition to the original prize (the Ardbeg and hoodie) which remains randomly chosen from all entrants, we have two additional winners:

• New entrants
• Special mention

But first, the main element of the competition:

The winner of the hoodie and Ardbeg

Randomly chosen from all entrants, Mat Clayton of MixCloud is the winner of the hoodie and Ardbeg. Congratulations, Mat. Please see the instructions at the bottom of the post to sort out claiming your prize.

New entrant

Since we didn’t only enter new followers into the main prize draw, there was every chance that the winner would be someone who hadn’t even heard about the competition. To balance this out a little bit (and to make sure that the awesome cask strength single cask 19 year old Tomatin went to someone who likes whisky!), we decided to do a second draw taken just from the people who specifically entered the competition.

The winner of this “surprise prize” is @jmorell. Congratulations – that is one superb whisky you’re getting there (and yes, we’ll throw in a hoodie as well as long as we still have one in your size). Please see the instructions at the bottom of the post to sort out claiming your prize.

Special mention

This chart tells a story – although we only allowed one entry per person in the random draw above, one entrant still went above and beyond and dwarfed the competition:

To re-iterate, we only counted one entry per person for the random draw. However, we have wept along with Stephen as he has failed to win macbooks on multiple occasions and we wanted him to be able to say he had finally won a Twitter competition (please Stephen, you can stop now!). So the bottle of Jura is going to Stephen. Well done

As above, we’ll also throw in a hoodie as well as long as we still have one in your size. Please see the instructions at the bottom of the post to sort out claiming your prize.

Best tweet

I also thought it worth throwing out some special mentions for innovative entries. Sorry there isn’t more whisky (or hoodies, in fact!) to go around guys, but thanks for keeping us amused – we’ll buy you a beer next time we see you at a meet-up:

• Jaamit
• Simon Barber
• Rhys Wynne

Collecting your prizes

Can you email lynsey.little@distilled.co.uk with your postal address and preferred hoodie size and we’ll get it all coordinated? We don’t have that many hoodies left so while Mat gets his choice of size from S to XL (as the winner of the original competition), the others will have to choose from our remaining stock of sizes. We’ll coordinate to sort everyone out as well as we can.

Oh, and some small print we forgot to mention in the original post – we’d love to see some pictures of you guys drinking your #distilledwhisky wearing your hoodies!

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Update: This competition is now closed. Thanks to everyone who entered. You can read about the winners here

We try really hard (OK, not that hard) to hide our love of whisky and any possible influences it might have had in the naming of our company. But there is one night of the year when we don’t even pretend. January 25th is Burns Night (shouldn’t that be “Burn’s night”? Apparently not, according to the BBC). The supper to celebrate Robert Burns, eat haggis and drink whisky competes with the best national holidays around the world including Tomatina and the Superbowl (and since I’m now part-Scottish by marriage, I figure I can claim it as my own).

To celebrate Burns Night, not only will we be raising a glass, we will also be giving away a bottle of Ardbeg, one of the finest whiskies in the world (you can also follow them on Twitter).

Update: Jura have contributed a bottle of their whisky as well, so now there’s twice the reason to enter! Read more about Jura on their website, or say thank you by following the Jura Twitter account or entering their own Jura competition on Facebook.

Update 2: Well, this is super-cool, those nice folk at Master of Malt have also chipped in with a spectacular addition – a Single cask 19 year old Tomatin (cask strength). You can thank them by following them on Twitter or, you know, buying some whisky from them.

In order to tenuously link it to our company, we are also throwing in a Distilled hoodie. Limited edition (hardly anyone outside the company has one at the moment), they are super-cool, quality hoodies in dark grey with the Distilled logo and web address on them. Thank you to Lucy Watson from our web dev team for modelling the hoodie against our bright green wall.

All you have to do to enter is follow @distilled on Twitter or tweet @distilled with the hash-tag #distilledwhisky. We will be judging the winner randomly from the entrants early afternoon tomorrow GMT (26th January).

The small-print:

• We reserve the right to disqualify entrants for all kinds of manipulative or unfair behaviour (at our sole discretion). Yes, we know all your tricks. It’s for fun, people.
• We will send the prize to you wherever you are in the world, but it is your responsibility to ensure duty is paid if required (outside the UK) and that it is legal for us to send spirits to you!
• The spirit (!) of the competition is to have a bit of fun and give away some nice whisky. Please be nice and spread the word

Incidentally, if you are into whisky, I recommend checking out Connsr – the whisky social network. Here’s me on there: willcritchlow.

So, do you want to win a whisky? Just follow Distilled or tweet:

“Yes, I’d like to win a whisky from @distilled #distilledwhisky. Happy Burns Night.”

Ardbeg photo courtesy of keepwaddling1 on Flickr

Update: This competition is now closed. Thanks to everyone who entered. You can read about the winners here

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Firebug is a Firefox plugin that lets you inspect the code on a webpage, giving you a quick way to check if best practice, SEO-friendly coding has been used. The ability to edit page code and content means you can create ‘before and after’ images of changes that you suggest to a site.

Something that I didn’t mention in the video, is how useful the app can be for helping people who’ve not spent a lot of time looking at HTML to understand the structure of pages and the purpose of different HTML tags and CSS code.

Other useful features include a tool to monitor all the http requests made by a page, which helps identify any linked images or external code files which are slowing down page load speed.

Firebug is one of the most important SEO plugins for Firefox. It’s an invaluable part of an search marketer’s toolkit, and I’d highly recommend having it close at hand.

• Download Firebug from Mozilla
• Find out more about Firebug

NB: this is the first video blog post I’ve done. Let me know if you have any thoughts about the format. I used the incredible usability testing tool Silverback App to create the video.

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