Data shows that the UK economy is deteriorating at a rapid pace, and further government spending is on the cards. On Monday, the government announced a £500 million package to help the long-term unemployed back into jobs.

There are several plans under discussion, with technicalities surrounding the £20bn in loan guarantees for small and medium-sized businesses.

Exact details are yet to be revealed, a Department for Business spokesman said “discussions remain ongoing and final details are still to be confirmed.” – WSJ.com

Meanwhile, UK retail figures released by the British Retail Consortium show that same-store retail sales dropped 3.3% in December from a year earlier.

The UK jobs market continues to deteriorate, with many employers giving the governments new employment incentives a lukewarm reception.

Mr Gieve commented that the central bank didn’t understand the severity of the economic situation facing the UK before the financial crisis began.

After Mr Gieves’ remarks, Sterling fell as traders speculate a further interest rate cut in January. The pound also fell sharply against the euro. After reaching parity with the euro and declining to £0.9556 last week. Sterling fell even further to £0.9502.

The pound also fell against the dollar to $1.4737 and fell to Y132.45. Central banking software enables banks to benefit from advanced software that lets them focus more on derivatives as well as improved analytics and liquidity.

Cash management software enables banks and financial institutions to increase the speed and performance of various financial aspects of their business through innovative software solutions.

GM have been frantically trying to convert their financing arm GMAC into a bank so as to benefit from the federal bank bailout, however, this strategy faced setbacks apparently after Pacific Investment Management declined to tender its bond holdings.

One option that has emerged, is the merging of two of the large finance arms that back GM and Chrysler, and this has received a certain amount of interest from government.

Central Bank Benchmark Rate

On Friday the Bank of Japan lowered it’s benchmark interest rate from 0.3% to 0.1% in an attempt to improve liquidity in the capital markets. The BOJ board voted 7-1 in favour of a rate cut. This move follows similar large cuts by other central banks across the globe in recent weeks.

Economic conditions “have been deteriorating and are likely to increase in severity for the immediate future,” the BOJ statement said.

Recent data has shown that a slow down in exports have hit corporate profits, pressuring firms to cut output, as well as increasing bankruptcies and unemployment in Japan.

The yen has also risen sharply against the dollar in recent days, to a 13-year high which could put further pressure on Japanese exports.

With global recession and increased pressure on large corporations to cut costs, a bespoke cash management system enables businesses to centralize their commercial and treasury payments, as well as control all financial transactions from a single location.

Governments and central banks benefit from central banking software that is fully pre-configured to incorporate industry best practise and efficiency.

Although it looked like the market region occupied by Google could remain recession-proof, it looks like this isn’t necessarily the case. The Wall Street Journal reported on Google tightening its belt.

The WSJ stated, “For much of its 10-year history, Google spent money at a pace that was the marvel of Silicon Valley.” – WSJ.com

Google is well known for its numerous employee perks aimed to keep employees in tip-top condition for coming up with the companies future bright ideas. However, rumours suggest cut backs in this area look likely.

In the past year, Google have moved out of pure Internet advertising, into the realm of TV advertising and products such as Google Checkout. However, these haven’t performed as well as expected, with 97% of revenue still coming from online advertising.

Comments from Eric Schmidt, Google CE, suggests that employee cut backs and the dropping of new projects is a precautionary measure rather than an indication of the overall health of the business. He said, “we have to behave as though we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Google is looking at generating more growth by putting adverts on products that are presently free to use and have no advertising revenue stream. Google are pulling back in other areas, including finishing the SearchMash project which allows users to view search data in different ways, as well as dropping ‘Lively’. This approach is aimed to put the priority back on Google’s core search provision.

The Big Three

The fact that this global heavy-weight is feeling the heat of the global recession doesn’t bode well for traditional businesses like Ford, GMC and Chrysler – who have been putting forth their cases for US Government bailout funding.

Conditions for the three largest car manufacturers in the US look gloomy, with the WSJ reporting that both GM and Chrysler could collapse by the end of December unless they get billions of dollars in emergency government loans.

Banks Cutting Costs

There are several ways to get in on the action with market volatility. Trading foreign currencies allows retail investors to speculate on fluctuations between currency pairings. The most traded pair being the euro dollar. For corporate institutions there are various solutions to offering fx trading solutions, one being an advanced solution specifically designed to meet the needs of major market players, including central banking software to support large scale institutions with large market capitalizations and liquidity of funds.

Cutting costs in this area is of prime concern for many large banking institutions with the present global crisis biting hard. An advanced solution that can cut costs as well as offer better functionality enables banks to positions themselves more adequately in these difficult financial times.

If you use WordPress it is important to keep your WordPress install up-to-date. The latest WordPress patches certain vulnerabilities, however, there are some other precautions you can take to avoid some of the potential problems out there.

Matt Cutts wrote a post about protecting your WordPress install. The first point is the real tip, the second one has been fixed in recent versions of WordPress, and the third is just a good idea for regular RSS readers.

I have tried and tested Matt’s recommendation. To avoid plagiarism and to avoid me getting RSI strain I recommend following the instructions in his article on filtering visitors to the admin area of WordPress by IP address.

Another important consideration to keep your PC safe, as well as avoid any potentially sensitive information being picked up by phishing websites is to have up-to-date antivirus software as well as using firewall software. For PC users these means using antivirus software other than the standard Windows XP or Windows Vista incorporated firewall.

For more information on avoiding phishing scams have a look at the APWG website.

In general this has covered server-side caching, mod_rewrite rules and optimizing CSS files.

Below is a round-up of the most popular articles that people still email me about from time-to-time. We aim to bring more useful articles over the coming months so feel free to ask if you want to see a specific topic covered on the blog.

• Compress Web Pages with mod_deflate on Apache
• Rewrite URLs on Apache with mod_rewrite
• Cache pages for Faster Load Times
• Squeeze Your CSS Files into Shape

Dealing with widows

For web designers who have a good founding in typography, dealing with widows is a must. jQuery enables us to do this in a semantic way. We needn’t clutter our code with unnecessary elements. However, jQuery lets us inject a joining ( ) space to make sure we are always left with two words on a line rather than only one.

Visit the tutorial here. I have tried and tested this method and a have found it works, however watch out for funny effects if you have multiple styled heading tags.

Edit Me

Another interesting jQuery tutorial enables users to copy and paste code into the address bar so that they can manually edit all elements on the page in real-time. Quite a nifty idea, and it’ll be interesting to see if people come up with some useful ways to implement this into their websites.

The first is over-use of flash – This is still a big issue, far bigger than it should be since technology has moved on. With large companies still using excessive amounts of flash, thus hiding vast amounts of useful content on their sites. (PS the skip intro feature in Google SERPs is a great little adddition).

Easy navigation – this proves quite simple to do on a small website, but for large corporations creating easy navigation still seems to elude many. Definitely time well spent.

An area that is vaguely covered, is that of, too much clutter on pages. This has to be a big issue with so many widgets and blog plugins – knowing where to stop is one of the big things nowadays.

See if you agree with the rest of the ideas in the article by visiting the article.

For those involved in web development or similar industries, looking to areas other than the financial services sector may be the best move in current conditions.

According to the Financial Times: “The financial crisis is starting to take its toll on the jobs market for IT staff, with investment banks cutting back on recruitment as the credit crunch forces them to reduce costs.”

The number of new I.T. jobs within the investment banking sector fell by 18 percent in the first three months of last year, compared to the same time period in 2006.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t any I.T. jobs out-there, but the financial services sector is certainly tightening the belt after torrid economic conditions felt since the final-quarter of 2007.

Back on May 23rd, Finance Exchange reported on tough times for jobs in general within the financial services sector.

Finding web development and I.T. related jobs is made fairly easy with a variety of online job search sites such as monster.co.uk, reed.co.uk and careers & jobs.eu.

Finding uk jobs within the web development sector is far quicker when potential job seeker actively search on a vareity of job sites for the best job in their location. If you find you are seeking jobs that you are under-qualified for, then consider undertaking some further training, reed have a page on Certified I.T. qualifications that will get you started.

Update 12/06/08: Research carried out by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) shows that finance sector jobs outperformed I.T. jobs during the first-quarter of 2008. – MyIris.com

The purpose of this article is to make your pages load as fast as possible by compressing jQuery even further than by using standard packing methods.

The jQuery website offers different versions of the script, including a standard uncompressed version, a minified version and a packed version.

The difference in size between the versions can be quite substantial (version 1.2.6, correct 02-05-08):

• Minified and GZipped 16kb
• Uncompressed 97kb
• Packed 30kb

For development purposes, the uncompressed version offers the most versatility, especially when testing developing new plug-ins, however, by using the minified or packed version of jQuery, you will be able to shave off a substantial amount of extra kilobytes.

By using server-side technology you can save even more size, by compressing the script on-the-fly and even cacheing the script so that when the user navigates from page-to-page on your site, the script is ready for use in their temporary cache folder rather than being requested from the server each time.

Cache jQuery

The following assumes you are using an Apache web-server, however with some adaption this technique is possible with other server technologies.

By including instructions within our root .htaccess file we can cache any file type that we specify. In this case we will cache JavaScript files (.js) This will automatically cache our external jQuery file, as well as any other external JavaScript files for use across the whole site. This should significantly speed up page loads, by calling the file from the temporary cache on the users PC.

One recommendation when using caching for extended periods (I.e. longer than a few hours), it is recommended to use numbered file names. In the case of jQuery, it is automatically given a unique file name when downloaded. It is recommended to maintain this structure for when the script is upgraded on the site. Please read our previous article for more detailed instructions on .htaccess/page caching.

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
<filesmatch “\.(js)$”>
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 month”
</filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

By changing the file extensions the above code can be used for a variety of file types. Changing the default expiry time can also be adjusted. Read more on caching pages.

Compress jQuery

The following assumes you are using an Apache web-server, this technique is possible with other server technologies but for the purpose of this article, Apache is being used.

Here comes the fun part of actually compressing the jQuery file size. I personally use the packed version of the script rather than the minified version, to avoid any compatibility issues that can arise with minifaction of files. However, if you choose to use the minified version of the file, you will likely get an even smaller file size.

Please read our article on using Apache mod_deflate for a detailed explanation of this technique.

The following line of code is simply added to your root .htaccess file to enable compression of JavaScript.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/javascript


The above code will compress the external JavaScript as well as the HTML code used on the page.

An example of the saving in size can be seen below. As mentioned before I used the packed version of jQuery, and managed to compress the file down from 30kb’s to 15kb’s using this method.

If you find this method useful, let us know how much of a saving you’ve been able to make on your websites.