I recently wrote about my bike and how I’ve switched to cycling to work on a daily basis. I found this product in Shortlist magazine the other day and thought it was a fantastic idea so should share it. I’ll be picking up a Shirt Shuttle very shortly. I used to roll my shirts and [...]

Shirt Shuttle
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Walking through the work car park in the morning is never boring. There are loads of beautiful cars that are being tested by What Car?, Autocar or Pistonheads.com. Sometimes I even manage to blag a ride to work in one. Words can’t explain how much I wanted this car after bring driven to work in [...]

The joys of working at an automotive publisher
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

This post has been sitting in my draft folder for the last 3 months so about time I got round to finishing it! Late last year I signed up to the fantastic Ride2Work scheme that my company offered provided through Evans Cycles. I of course took the full £1,000 allowance and got myself a Cannondale [...]

Cannondale Bad Boy Hybrid Bike
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

I stumbled upon this post in my draft folder, it should have been published months ago but it’s still highly relevant. I’m finding myself being drawn towards enterprise search and information architecture increasing more these days as I work on new product developments. I’ve even gone so far as joining the Enterprise Search London group on MeetUp.com. If [...]

Endeca Pattern Library
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

The job title Product Manager still isn’t that established here in the UK compared to the US. Over the last couple of years though media and technology companies have acknowledged the need for someone to bridge the gap between the business and the development teams. These are the teams that build applications, write the code and ensure [...]

ProductTank MeetUp
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Are you thinking about installing Joomla, WordPress or Drupal to power your website? You should take note of the below diagram. Its true……

Open source CMS learning curve
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

I know its a bit late but Happy New Year. Back at the start of 2010 I posted a small overview of what happened in 2009 on this blog. I was meaning to do something similar at the start of 2011 but I’ve been so busy. Anyway here is a quick review of what happened [...]

2010 blog review
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

I’ve been reading up heavily on Scrum as a development technique and came across this fantastic diagram. It gives a nice overview on one page of everything a Product Owner or Product Manager is responsible for. Well worth printing out and sticking somewhere near your desk if you practice Scrum, a Product Owner or Manager. If you [...]

Scrum Product Owner
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Finally managed to get my CSS hat on and spent time changing the background image on this blog. The Thesis theme which I use here doesn’t only look great but offers fantastic extra functionality. You should check it out if you are using WordPress to publish your site/blog. I hope you agree it looks better.

New site background
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

For years now I’ve owned the domains to my name (nickflood.co.uk & nicholasflood.co.uk) but I’ve never done anything with them until now. I’m a massive LinkedIn user and almost always look up individuals before I meet them. LinkedIn profile pages do very well in search results, a search for “Nicholas Flood” returns my profile as [...]

Why I launched nickflood.co.uk
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

My fiancee managed to pick up one of the first HTC Desire HD phones in the UK from Carphone Warehouse recently. She had been an iPhone user but wanted to change things up a bit. A play around with my Google Nexus One gave her the confidence to make the decision and call O2 for her [...]

HTC Desire HD
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Browsing my usual feeds I stumbled across a nice little service named Qwerly which was covered by TechCrunch. By allowing it to connect to your Twitter account you can view all your contacts and the other social networks they also registered with (it’s all out there anyway). It’s a really nice aggregated social profile system and [...]

Qwerly – Aggregated social media profile service
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

I’m getting really into American TV at the moment. I’ve just finished the first series of the fantastic Breaking Bad and am looking forward to some new shows that are on the horizon. One of my friends recommended the two series below which are due to air shortly. The Walking Dead What’s it about? One [...]

The Walking Dead & The Event previews
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

If like me you’ve got AdSense implemented on your blog or website you’ll want to improve your revenues. I’ve changed placements to varying degrees of success, incorporating the ad units into the natural flow of your website in terms of position, format and design will do wonders for your AdSense balance. Google have put together six small videos [...]

Optimise your AdSense placements to improve revenue
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Image via Wikipedia My job as Product Manager on whatcar.com sees me cover many aspects of digital publishing. Part of my role involves me looking after the sites search engine optimisation, I work in a very competitive industry so it’s important that I get things right. I’ve used a fair few specialist agencies over the years for the more advanced [...]

Google search engine optimisation guide
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr Found this great presentation by Jesper Astrom, Digital Director & Online Tactical Specialist at Honesty. The following presentation was given at a recent conference. It gives a great outline for setting up an analytical framework around  viral and social media marketing campaigns to judge true success. eMetrics Stockholm – How to Analyze Viral Campaigns [...]

Measuring viral & social marketing campaigns
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Last year I looked after a fantastic motoring website – autocar.co.uk. The Autocar team in conjunction with Courland Automative Practice and the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders recently launched the second Next Generation Award. The award attempts to find the new stars of the motor industry with a promise of 5 month’s work experience and [...]

Autocar Next Generation Award
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

I recently had a situation where the admin account on a WordPress installed site got removed or merged into another user account. Obviously WordPress doesn’t allow you to create new admin accounts outside the CMS so I was stuck and locked out from doing anything. Thankfully after much searching I found this great blog post [...]

Adding a WordPress admin account to the database
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

Just canceled my trail access to the new Times website. They predictably made it impossible to find information on stopping my account so I just emailed them in the end. I got the below reply. Dear Mr Flood, Thank you for your email.  As per your request, we can now confirm that we have cancelled your Direct [...]

The Times customer retention
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits

I’m a massive fan of Joomla, the open source content management system that I think compares to the likes of Drupal and WordPress. I’ve been using Joomla for years on various projects but recently WordPress (version 3) and Drupal (upcoming version 7) seem to be steaming ahead in terms of functionality and user take-up. The Joomla team [...]

Joomla 1.6 features infographic
BedroomPublishing.com - Experiences and views on Product Management, UK digital publishing and a few other bits