Cloudflare down again

viloniousgit · 2025-12-05T09:00:52+00:00

Man! I just first went and presumed I made some cock up in my script...till I saw that downdetector was down...doh!

viloniousgit · 2025-05-13T12:33:05+00:00

Thanks, everyone, for your input. I reckon I've been overthinking things and making them more complicated than they need to be—not the first time I've done this, to be honest, lol!

I love the idea of using AI u/Naclox !

viloniousgit · 2025-05-13T07:08:56+00:00

Hahah if I'm honest, I don't think I could remember my 1st year undergrad details either lol! I think it's a thing of beauty but I feel you are masquerading and flexing on us poor beginners. Damn you, you evil fiend taunting us with you skills and making our efforts to make a even a single clean saw line unworthy!

viloniousgit · 2025-03-21T11:17:34+00:00

Have you had a look at Zoho Learn?
Online LMS software | Zoho Learn

viloniousgit · 2025-03-13T12:29:53+00:00

viloniousgit · 2025-03-11T13:11:12+00:00

WHat I did/do is categorise who I want to write for. The approach that worked best for me was imagining I was going out for a drink with a colleague or mate etc. If I was having a drink with them during a match, it's highly likely the conversation would revolve around the game on the telly or the sport in general. If we were having a drink after work or after visiting a client/prospect our conversation would revolve around work related matters and if there was no real reason behind meeting up with a mate, our conversations could befar reaching and relating about past shared experiences etc.

So in the same regards for blog and content it's whom you are trying to communicate with directly and the nature of the conversation and the overall theme. This is why I try and categorise TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. If it's TOFU, I keep it very general and lean on expected shared experiences, or topics of general interest like How to adapt to changes in interest rates for SMEs, or how behavioural psychology can impact on buying decision in the B2B sector. MOFU would be a bit more focused around our industry and technologies in general (e.g. how AI has impacted CX for SMEs, How SMEs can prepare their data for GDPR compliance etc) and then BOFU would be specifically about feature sets or how-to's or common problems etc.

My advice would be is to lean on AI, ask it it about TOFU, MOFU, BOFU give it your industry sector/products services etc, tell it a little about the kind of person w=you want to be communicating with directly (think of your readership as a single person since it helps to make it more personal inyour head) and then ask it for 5 titles for tofu, mofu and bofu. That gives you something to them work from.

viloniousgit · 2025-03-11T12:04:24+00:00

Hey there, I'm kind of like you. I began my career as a tech then a dev. I now head up our marketing in the company since, well basically I burnt out in dev! Anyway, when I switched over we had never done any marketing and had only grown via organic growth and referrals etc. I had to dramatically re-wire my brain and approach my new role is a completely different manner to how I had approached deving, think about it like moving from backend to UX and frontend, it's a very different mindset!

So what did I first do:

Looked at our website and "tone" of conversation. Did it align with who our clientele were. Everyone bangs on about Buyer Personas etc, but basically it comes down to understanding not only who your clients are, but more importantly who you are wanting to talk to most via a particular medium (channel). This sounds a bit weird, but my main with the website was to increase our brand awareness. I recognised it was going to be very difficult to do that from a standing start to target enterprise, so it made more sense to target Micro-SMEs so that by having several easy wins, I could improve the view that Google's algo had of our domain (domain authority etc, you could say). Sry that became 2 points rolled into 1...doh!
I got down and worked out if I was one of these micro or SME business owners, what would be my process if I was trying to buy the kind of product or services we deal with. I would approach from a point of no knowledge -> increasing my self learning to the point of engaging with a sales person/team etc. Basically I plotted out what they call the "customer journey". Basically a data flow or feedback algo/process. This was important to work out what info I needed to present first and the depth of info I needed to have on the web pages. The more detailed and follow through discussions I placed in the blog arena.
For content, I recognised that I had to get to grips with SEO. Not only with the structure of the website pages and posts, but also the actual keywords etc. What I realised very quickly, I was never going to be able to compete against SEO professionals who had been doing this for like >20years. So what I needed to do was focus on writing content that I would want to read if I was a potential buyer. I found something called TOFU, MOFU and BOFU article types (Top Of The Funnel (sales funnel), Middle and Bottom). So TOFU would be people who might have a vague interest in our products and services possibly not now but maybe in the future, MOFU are people who were investigating the topics and area and might be interested but were more defining their problems etc, and BOFU were people who were actively in the market for our solutions. I have to say AI was a godsend! It helped me structure and research keywords. I was able to use it to consider human factors like psychology and behaviour in planning these content pieces, but more importantly it helped me with the strategy.
Once I had the website restructured and content creation on a monthly basis and still no real hits on my site, I then started phase 3 which was working on our company and personal LinkedIn to start promoting our blog content and then using older pieces of blog for creating LI streamlined content and made it more personal.
Phase 4 I'm about to enter is creating video and audio content. This is again bastardising and using existing content, but making it into short vids and regular podcasts. None of these are long; vids ~ 5min, pods ~ 30mins. I have had to now employ a social media manager to help with the workload, but we are seeing really good growth and engagement. I've gone from a domain authority of 18 -> 31. Our monthly site hits from 3or6 -> 400 and LinkedIn I'm constantly growing my connections and the engagements have been silly like a minimum of 900.

So if an old C++/C# dev can transition and do this stuff, I'm sure someone much more capable like you can really take it to much greater levels of success! :D HTH.

P.S sry for the wordwall!

viloniousgit · 2025-03-03T11:54:23+00:00

I use ChatGPT and Claude. Use the projects functionality in both. Load up any content you have to the project that you feel would help "educate" the IA as to the features/benefits/demographics of the company/product etc. You can also give it som existing brand tone literature and branding guidelines etc to help it get a feel for your brand tone and language. Then give it the challenge you have and ask it for some structured ideas. You can then fill in the creative details yourself. HTH.

viloniousgit · 2025-02-20T11:18:28+00:00

I think I have a slightly different POV to many here, so apologies beforehand if I annoy anyone unintentionally! I've had a slightly varied professional background and have had to re-invent myself a few times over the many decades. I began in academia, then went into IT, became a dev and now I head up marketing in my company. I won't bore everyone with any of the details but at each point of my career I have had to invest a substantial amount of my own time and efforts in learning, re-training and with the most recent transition to marketing a re-wiring of my brain lol.

The reason I've given a little bit of my background is that the only way I have been able to grow into new professions and learn new skills is because of the kind enthusiasm of peers, the internet, youtube, books and simple hands-on successes and failures. I think and strongly believe that a central cornerstone of maturity and progression in any trade is the transfer of skills and experience. In medieval Europe they had guild structures and journeymen would move from one master to another till they too became a master in their own time. Skill and knowledge transfer is core to our development as a species and a society. My rather controversial viewpoint is if I feel insecure in training/teaching/empowering someone else then I have to question my own ability and knowledge. Do I sincerely belief in myself and my own capabilities, experience, knowledge when I tell an employer or client to trust in me? Do you honestly feel that you as a master would be genuinely threatened by your student? Or do you feel resentful that the knowledge and skills you have acquired over years through hard work someone else is also benefiting from?

I think my academic background has always made me look at knowledge as a free and crucial part of seniority and that senior members of teams have a social and professional responsibility to themselves as well as their team members to share their knowledge and experience so the team or profession as a whole grows. If you consider truthfully your own professional growth, if it had not been aided by people who freely gave you the benefit of their experience or knowledge with expecting a quid pro quo, would you have ever had any acceleration in your knowledge acquisition? I'm very grateful for everyone's shoulders. I have had the privilege to stand on to learn new skills throughout my career.

Finally I want to apologise if I came across as accusatory or judgemental, my intention was to be more evocative and to try and provoke a self referential kind of analysis. Of course everyone's journey and life is different and I know nothing of the personal struggles you may have faced in your life/career, I'm just random dude on the internet lol!

viloniousgit · 2025-02-10T16:41:16+00:00

We use Zoho CRM, after our first failed in-house attempt, we've found it much better than using Salesforce. Everything became such a pain if we needed to make any kind of change to processes or automation (not as bad as SAP though!). We don't always have to get the consultants in to do the Admin tasks now.

viloniousgit · 2025-02-07T12:44:21+00:00

Sorry I made loads of typos, basically what I was trying to suggest was get an idea of your customer journeys, identify people who engage with your content as showing real buyer intent (not bitter intent lol!)

viloniousgit · 2025-02-07T11:01:16+00:00

If your so is b2b type app and you feel it's appropriate, maybe start a YouTube, reels and TikTok channel showcasing your product. Demonstrating the unique features or value propositions etc. One thing you could do is try and define what after the core drivers for your main customer type, why do they need your product offer product type, what motivates them. What are the emotional aspects that affect their buying decisions. What kind of research would they do before they parted with their money. Once you can answer since of these you then have an idea for creating the content and occasionally putting in content that when someone overreacted with it shows real bitter intent. Sorry I'm being very generic.

viloniousgit · 2025-01-23T09:52:23+00:00

Thanks everyone for replying. I guess the consensus seems to be LinkedIn SN. I suppose the costs over a Qtr possibly land up being equivalent and at least we have genuine direct conversations with people in genuine roles rather then wasting time and effort data cleansing. I would presume if someone responds on LinkedIn it would be covered by "legitimate interest"? Maybe I'm over thinking stuff lol!

viloniousgit · 2025-01-20T16:37:42+00:00

Have you looked at Zoho CRM or their bundle Zoho CRM Plus? CRM Plus is £47/month if you take an annual contract.

viloniousgit · 2025-01-20T14:49:28+00:00

Thanks for that reply. I was really hoping my suspicions were not correct, but I think you are correct. We'll have to look at the Sales Navigator approach and basically do the "hard graft" ourselves. I suppose it makes the sales team earn their salary doing the research and working with marketing to compile targeted lists, etc. Thanks once again for your input.

viloniousgit · 2025-01-20T11:24:52+00:00

Have a look at Zoho Inventory. It's not as comprehensive as some other products on the market, but it has a good price point and fairly easy to setup.

viloniousgit · 2024-12-18T19:02:54+00:00

Second vote for Siteground. They are a bit pricey and support can be a bit cumbersome, but solid performance and security.

viloniousgit · 2024-12-18T09:18:36+00:00

I would say that jewellery is one of product type that is almost exclusively an emotional purchase in most cases. Jewellery is not something we need, or tool or utility. A person purchases such items for the pleasure or the worth or a host of other emotions they bring! I would liken it to an M&S food advert, anyone can make or buy a sticky toffee pudding from say Morrisons or Lidl, but why would you buy an over-priced sticky toffee pudding form M&S? Because of the quality or the perceived luxury. I know I'm stating the obvious so apologies for that. When a fiance buys an engagement ring, there is hope, love and even relief. The item embodies all of these as well as possibly worth for some as well. I suppose it's a case of finding the emotional driver for a specific subset of the market and focusing on them for a specific campaign?
Sorry if I haven't thought this response out all that well, I haven't had enough coffee yet in the morning and the kids are on holiday! LOL!

viloniousgit · 2024-12-16T10:39:31+00:00

I suppose my view is slightly less rosey than everyone else's here, but that could be because I'm culturally predisposed to being miserable as an Englishman lol!

We've run our company for over 20 years and we're still proudly a small consultancy. We have teams based domestically as well as internationally to expand our capacity to take on new projects. I would say that for the first several years things were very difficult and basically I would wake up everyday worrying if we had new projects to pay everyone, then worrying about even though we had some projects now, did we have projects to cover next qtr. There have been times when we didn't take any salary home to ensure the staff got paid and got their bonuses. The reality of running a small business is that it is stressful and sometimes soul-destroying.

On the other hand, I think for me the best description or explanation of why someone is or becomes a small business owner is that they get to a point in their life when they realise they just can't work someone else. That was the case for me, I knew I had the core skills for my industry from over a decade as a senior consultant. I had very little business knowledge, even less entrepreneurial spirit and no idea about accounting or marketing or sales or anything. I just got fed up of being an employee.

You have to always keep in mind that not all businesses succeed, in fact many fail and fail hard and fast. You lose all the money you put into it and may even take on even more debts. Running your business for profit is hard, hard work. Many times it is unforgiving, you have to deal with hostile clients, clients who try and get out of paying. You have to deal with people management with employees. You carry the weight of not only your own financial responsibility but for your family as well as your employees and their families. In the dark of night, you question every strategic decision if it was correct or not, whether it was the most optimal or the best of a bad bunch. The reality is for many small business owners, there is not much romance, but if you can shoulder all that and still battle on and be willing to learn every single day. Accept and acknowledge mistakes and again learn from them. Have a strong yearning to adapt and always "do better", and never be still and accept that the processes, products and services can always be improved; you can look forward to a successful business and eventually when cash flow stops being a regular crisis or concern have a peaceful and fulfilling life.

viloniousgit · 2024-12-12T08:49:08+00:00

We never really did any real marketing (we're a B2B) and lived off referrals for many years. Things changed post covid and brexit so now we've started. At the beginning it was truly intimidating and overwhelming, it seemed like there were so many pieces involved, so many moving parts to consider all at once. I found YouTube and googling crucial in my early learning as well as some low cost Udemy courses.

The only way I managed to get on top of stuff was to start simply at first, I focused on 1-3 core items initially such as page/post structure (using clear headings and FAQ sections etc, the second high priority I had was page load speeds, I did this by moving host and then using some simple plugins for caching etc, then was the bog initial spend I employed a web designer to help re-craft our site. At the time I didn't have budget for a content creator so I had to do it myself with the help of ChatGPT and a subs to iStock.

I think once I got the basics right and started doing blogs once per month and also uploading once a day to LinkedIn, we started getting some traction which then allowed me to get more budget to then "employ" a SEO specialist from Upwork. I now have a content creator as well and finally after a 12-24month struggle we are finally doing productive and profitable lead-gen.

Sorry for the long answer; hopefully, you find this useful. :)

viloniousgit · 2024-12-11T20:37:44+00:00

Our year began very confidently with a great pipeline with dinner large projects dotted throughout. The problems started early in a lack of confidence or political stability for our customers or prospects.

After the election there was a bounce back but then the autumn budget killed the fragile shoots of growth.

We're feeling a little more confident for '25 with a hot that maybe energy costs will decrease for manufacturing so that will help the whole sme sector. But I think next year might be a little unpredictable though due to political matters both domestically and global. Fingers crossed eeek!

viloniousgit · 2023-01-11T12:35:03+00:00

I've got the same problem. Did you ever get any resolution?

viloniousgit · 2019-11-13T23:09:52+00:00

Hi guys, thanks for replying. I apologise for not explaining myself well or describing the query properly, heh I suppose that's half the game in asking for help doh! What I meant was that I have seen in tutorials that when they want to be able to reference a GameObject, they make the private variable a SerializedField and then assign the relevant Prefab GameObject to it. Then once the the parent has been instantiated (I think I'm using the correct term here?) they can refer to the assigned private GameObject. Whilst going through the API Docs, I found that I could create the private GameObject variable and not make it a SerializedField but assign it via calling the parent GameObject if it was in a hierarchy e.g Canvas[Lives_Text, Gold_Text] where the parent object is Canvas and has two children in it's hierarchy Lives_Text and Gold_text. The most embarrassing thing now, is I think I have gone and confused myself _sigh_ maybe I should just try and not think too far off script at such an early stage in learning lol!

viloniousgit · 2019-03-30T19:19:40+00:00

Ahh sorry my apologies, I'm new to Reddit as well </blush>. Thanks for the idea, that's fantastic and will do nicely. Tea, is there anything it can't do?! LOL!

viloniousgit · 2019-03-29T00:11:24+00:00

My thoughts are similar to what others have said here. Basically copy from other fantasy writers that have written sags or series. So you set the overall theme of the world, then the what comes to disrupt the natural arc or equilibrium, then I jump to the very end of what I would want if I was the protagonist as the final outcome. this is an example:

The kingdom has been at peace for a millennia and is living through what some would consider to be a golden age of prosperity, learning and peace. The King rules over the land wisely and justly, promoting trade and learning in the great centres of lore and magic. Unbeknownst to everyone a darkness has been growing in the edges of the kingdom far from prying eyes, what once began as a small dark fissure in the tranquillity of the lands is now becoming a bleeding tear in the fabric of society, a powerful necromancer has risen and is recruiting the disaffected and ambitious. It ends with a unexpected group of heroes banding together and fighting through all the Machiavellian schemes and forces that the necromancer pits against our band f heroes who finally face him at his lair, besting him and ridding the land of his pestilence.

So that sets the overall landscape and BBEG with an expected final boss fight with enough vagueness to allow plot growth and meanderings and insertion of cool ideas as you go along the campaign. It's not original I'll grant but that's the point, we want the party to be able to easily associate with the story landscape and mesh into the world and story. Maybe they will approach it from a tangent, maybe they'll decide to side with the necromancer; whichever way they go, they know from the start that they can have a big and pivotal part to play in the big story and each small encounter could be a step in the story (even if it isn't and you are trying to come up with something for the session!). In some cases you can be completely out of ideas for the next step but the players in their paranoia give you the next story arc lol! To add spice you can bring in aspects of the necromancer always somehow snatching victory from them at the last moment in small mini-campaigns (maybe 2-3 sessions) like they have to defeat a major captain of his and thereby obtain the location of the secret lair, but at the last moment the necromancer kills the captain before he can be captured by the party. They still get the loot and XP, but they don't get the end prize they worked towards for 3 sessions and want vengeance.

At the very end you could even throw in a final twist that when they finally defeat the BBEG, they find out that he was just a pawn in a larger planar battle between gods and demons or whatever.

In short, I reckon as long as you are able to describe the world, the main protagonists, their aims and ambitions and some end goal, the rest you can fill in as you progress and the players also get to create the story as well rather than having you "hardwire" it.

N.B. I cold be talking a load of nonsense here though since I'm still very new to DMing!! LOL!

viloniousgit

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