_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

Over the last few years, I've developed tons of services, and you can see them on my Service Status page. But a few services are changing. 

Teacher Organiser

My one-stop-shop website for teachers to plan lessons, use AI to mark tests, make seating plans, and quickly produce course planners has come to the end of its life. I'm less interested in keeping teaching tools online, even if they're only costing me £60 a year or whatever. Teacher Organiser also hasn't really ever had much of a user base. 

ClickIt

ClickIt actually attracts tens of thousands of visitors a month, but it's time for me to sunset ClickIt for my own reasons. It went live over 10 years ago and was the world's first drag-and-drop HTML editor, despite others claiming the title. I know that a lot of schools have used ClickIt, and I know one or two who still do and will likely be disappointed by this decision. It will be available until July 2027. 

My teaching materials

These will remain available to users with accounts on my website until the 31st of December. After which I intend to revoke all access and remove them from my website. In addition, I'm removing teaching-related data from my shared drive starting today.

My teaching software support

I'm no longer supporting any of my teaching software, except for my LTS software such as eTraxion. Currently, there are 8 software programs, and since I'm no longer working full-time as a teacher, I've decided it's time to focus on more important projects.

My website was last updated with the current style in 2017; it's changed a bit, curves have been added, and my menu has been updated a bit and so on, but it hasn't had a massive overhaul since then. In 2017, the main focus was actually on performance, since my 2017 website didn't look massively different from my 2013 website. But this new version will be a big change, with a website style I've never used on my own site but have built for many others.

In addition, I'm going to begin to phase my website over from PHP to YASS code in the next few months as well.

I am really excited by the new version of my website. 

After making the new ZPE website trial, about.zpe.jamiebalfour.scot, using only YASS Web Pages (YWP), I think I'm ready to let ZPE do the same with my website. ZPE is faster than PHP at serving web pages; in fact, it's more than twice as fast (I posted about this on my BlueSky in the form of an infographic. 

But the main gain I have from this is that it uses my own YASS programming language, which is cleaner, easier to write, and more modern than PHP. This will also allow me to identify features PHP has that ZPE needs to be a drop-in replacement for. Some things like DASH are already available in YWP format. 

Over the last few days, I've built my own media centre application using YASS code and ZPE 1.14.11 (releasing tomorrow), and it's already very fast and feature-rich. It uses ZUI (ZPE Native UI) and things like my AudioStream class, the new Stream class and many of the new syntax features.

I'm really proud of ZPE, YASS and the whole ecosystem that makes things like this possible.

In 2013, my brother made my original logo, which has remained the style of my branding for 13 years. It was updated and refreshed by an ex-pupil of mine who told me one day he had redesigned my logo and asked if I wanted it. I adopted that logo from mid-2024 onwards, and it has remained the main logo since. 

This weekend I had a think about the refresh that I am planning for my whole website and came up with the idea of creating a new logo for it on Friday. 

Without further ado, here's my new logo.

It's designed to represent structure, creativity and flow, as reflected in the hexagonal shape, choice of colours and the flow of characters. I hope you like it!

ZPE 1.14.10 is scheduled for release on Friday. Some of the key new features:

• Natural-language code generation: describe a program in plain English with --generate, then run it or compile it natively.
• ZenLang support: load, cache, validate, and execute custom languages defined with JSON.
• ZenC native compilation: compile supported YASS programs directly into fast, standalone native executables.
• Expanded binary and resource support: work with in-memory byte streams and binary resources through File and Image objects.
• Improved native UI: better cross-platform startup and native bridge handling.
• New configuration and documentation tools: inspect configuration as JSON and access compiled-program documentation through --man.

Seriously, what happened to handing your CV over and that was it? 

In the last few months, I've noticed that many companies think it's a good idea to have their own application form for submitting your job details (and some of them ask for your CV as well). This makes the process slow and actually has deterred me from applying for some jobs, and I'm not alone.

A very recent UK survey from CV-Library's 2026 Candidate Behaviour Barometer found that 71% of candidates have abandoned an application because it was too long or complicated. From this article:

• 45% are frustrated at having to repeat information that's already on their CV.
• 37% complain about lengthy application processes.
• 30% dislike having to move between different websites/accounts.
• Among IT and Technology candidates, 60% complain about having to repeat information already on their CV.
• And an enormous 81% of IT/Technology candidates have abandoned a long or complicated application.

As a former teacher, one of the worst things about it was the 4,000-character limit personal statement, but then also having to repeat your history and work experience, your PVG status, your criminal record stuff - all of which could really just come from a single PDF of my CV, which I have spent a lot of time tweaking to perfection.

One thread on r/UKJobs is titled "Employers asking you to re-enter your CV on their application." The poster states that companies ask for a CV and then make them manually enter their name, previous jobs, qualifications, etc. One of the most upvoted responses complains about uploading a CV, having the system autofill it badly, and then spending half an hour fixing it.

What I find particularly interesting is the disconnect between employers and applicants. In that 2026 CV-Library research, 96% of recruiters described their application process as streamlined or fairly efficient, while 71% of candidates said they'd abandoned a long/complicated application. Only 2% of employers/recruiters admitted their process was too long or complicated.

It's not great because it also means that some stuff will get left out, like my awards, for example; there's never anywhere to put them. And the awards on my CV are quite important to show off my successes - digital development specialist of the year, Watt Club Prize - the highest award in Heriot-Watt, merit awards and best student awards all the way through my time at uni. 

So the thought I get of "I quite like this job, but I cannot be bothered going through this application system" is not unheard of, and apparently roughly 4 in 5 people applying for IT/technology jobs have reached that same point with at least one application.

It is an astonishing statistic when employers simultaneously complain that it's difficult to attract good technical candidates.

So why do companies do this?

Mostly because the application form is designed around the recruiter's systems and workflow, rather than around the candidate.

A CV is excellent for a human reader, but inconvenient for a database. Every CV has a different layout. One person writes "Software Engineer — 2018–2021"; another uses a table; another groups experience by project. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) would prefer neat fields such as employer, job_title, start_date, end_date, qualification, etc.

That lets recruiters search, filter, report on and compare applicants.

You read it right, my website has now hit over 100,000 visitors a month. I only just noticed back in June that I was getting over 85,000 visitors each month, averaging around 7,500 per day. These are genuine visitors too, not bots or AI agents, people. And over the past few weeks, I've also received quite a few comments on my website via the contact form, particularly about my courses and reviews.

I had one last week commenting on how useful my courses on HTML and CSS have been to help that person start building a webpage:

Thank you for your HTML course and your CSS course. Both of these have really helped me learn some new stuff with webpage development.

I do constantly get comments on my reviews as well. In addition, I noticed that ZPE had hit over 1,000,000 downloads when I checked this month - I don't know when that happened, but that's a good place for it to be.