Debugging Home Run – Problem Step Recorder in Windows 7
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I just got an email about a really cool new tool built into Windows 7 that Microsoft used to debug their new platform. It is called Problem Step Recorder. The best thing to do is to post a snippet of the email right here. I think it says everything perfectly:
“In case you’re not aware [...]
05/13/2010 09:34 AM
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Blogroll – SEO, Web Analytics, Usability, Upcoming Conferences, and Other Interesting Stuff
These are just some of the articles I have read in Google Reader over the last month and a half that I have found interesting. I thought maybe you would too…
SEO
Link Profiling with Open Site Explorer
30 SEO Problems & the Tools to Solve Them (Part 2 of 2)
Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL [...]
05/09/2010 11:25 AM
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Reflections from the Other Side of the Interview Table
Over the last 10 years, I have been involved with many, many interviews. I have blogged about good interview books, resources for interviewing, how to prepare for an interview as the interviewer, and how to conduct an interview. Being on the other side of the interview table is a bit different. It definitely added some serious insight into how [...]
04/23/2010 08:58 AM
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My Cheese has moved…
There has been lots of change in my life lately. For those that are not already in the know, I have taken a new position at The Associated Press. This is a very exciting opportunity. I am working for another company with a long and prestigious history, with a team of extremely smart developers and [...]
04/15/2010 06:05 AM
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Mobile-izing an Existing Site
There has been a lot of talk amongst my clients lately on how to make our existing sites more mobile device compatible. We have done some brainstorming, and have come up with some ideas on how to do this.
Build a separate site
The simplest thing to do would be to do build a separate site [...]
02/14/2010 09:01 AM
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SEO Blogroll
I don’t usually do this, but with my recent trip to India, it might be a good idea to do a SEO blogroll post. I have found a number of interesting articles lately, and thought that I would share them with my team, particularly the developers in India. So, without further ado, here [...]
10/05/2009 12:07 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Wrap Up
There are a lot of takeaways that I have brought back to the US with me after such a great trip to see Accenture in Bangalore, India:
Accenture is a people-oriented culture. They have an enormous program to identify, train and retain the best talent in India.
The team members are young, energetic, and ambitious. [...]
10/05/2009 11:43 AM
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Accenture India Visit – Photos of Bangalore
So it seems that I forgot to post a link to the photos I took of the first part of my week in Bangalore, India. You can follow that link and see India, or you can go to my flickr account and see all of my photo tags from the last two years. [...]
09/23/2009 09:31 AM
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Accenture India Visit – Flight Home and Mysore Photos
Rahgu came out to the hotel for Sunday bunch with Laurent and me. He brought his beautiful wife and cute kids. We talked about work, and vacations, and next steps. It was a nice send-off to a very productive and action-packed week.
The flights home went smoothly. I sorted through my photos, [...]
09/21/2009 05:51 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Mysore
The drive to Mysore was a bit longer than expected. We were told that it would take anywhere from two to four hours, the most common answer being two and a half hours. It took us about three and a half. One thing I did notice is that the space between cities [...]
09/19/2009 09:48 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Wrap Up and Shopping
Friday was a very short day. We started off with a brief review of the week. I cannot believe how much we packed in. A bit too much, in fact. There were no real breaks, no time to recover. I also didn’t get a lot of time to spend with [...]
09/18/2009 08:55 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Traffic
Traffic in Bangalore is interesting. Everyone at home warned me that I did not want to rent a car, and that I should let someone from the office coordinate transportation. To be honest, the driving style is not all that different from driving in New York City. Everyone drives like a New York [...]
09/18/2009 07:57 PM
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Accenture India Visit – UI Capability
Today was another packed day. In the morning, we met with the HR Lead for Life Sciences. It is interesting to see how such a large company focuses on identifying, training, and retaining such a large number of people. This month alone they have hired over 1000 new employees in India alone.
Next was [...]
09/17/2009 09:07 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Bang 2 and Bang 3
This morning was an early morning. Wewere out of the hotel at 8am to travel to the Bang2 office. This is all the way on the other side of Bangalore, about 20 miles or so. It took us an hour and a half to get there.
We spent the morning learning about the [...]
09/16/2009 09:55 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Bangalore Welcome Photos
Today I was presented with a great gift – a CD with photos of our welcome ceremony to the Bangalore office. With permission from Vasuki, I have posted them up on my flickr account. Please take a look at the photos of our welcome to Bangalore. It was very impressive. Our [...]
09/16/2009 09:53 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Meet the Teams
Today was an exciting day for me. I got to spend lots of time with the Internet Marketing team. I really wanted to go through the profile slides everyone put together, but I also wanted to have the BRM and onshore team to attend, so I shifted that meeting to the afternoon. [...]
09/15/2009 09:12 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Introduction & Town Hall
Today I slept fantastic. I got up at 8am, took a shower, and headed down to the restaurant for breakfast. Laurent and I ate together, and Jerry found his way over later. Breakfast was not quite as good as brunch, but it was still very good. I also found out that was included in the [...]
09/14/2009 09:01 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Recovery & Prep
When I finally got to my room, I slept until 11am. Not having slept on the plane, when my head hit the pillow, there was no waking me up. The bed was very comfortable, and the pillows were nice and soft. I am glad I got a wake up call, otherwise [...]
09/13/2009 09:30 PM
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Accenture India Visit – Newark to Bangalore
The trip has officially begun. With a struggling High Performance Team, I was asked to go to India to help build the relationship, and help get the team back on track. I knew this was a good idea. It was an opportunity for the team to really connect to the work we do, [...]
09/12/2009 05:40 PM
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Outsourcing 110 – The Outsourcing Contract is Signed
The Contract Gets Signed
While my peers and I were executing and expanding our contract with Intelligroup, our upper management was exploring a possible company-wide contract with Accenture. Rumors circulated the office, and everyone was worried about their jobs. Would they remain on the company side of the contract, converted to Accenture on the [...]
06/14/2009 06:40 PM
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Usability Week 2009 – Day 3
Day 3 was the final day of the Usability In Practice 3 Day Camp. Today the presenters covered a wrap up of how to report your findings by reviewing our homework. Reviewing the bad Findings Report was just as informative as seeing the good report. They also covered paper prototyping, field studies, [...]
04/13/2009 07:40 PM
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Usability Week 2009 – Day 2
Today started off reviewing our homework. We had to write an objective and 3 to 5 tasks to review the inmod web site. We spent the first half hour reviewing the tasks in small groups. I am always surprised when working in small groups how easy it is for people to take [...]
04/08/2009 07:50 AM
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Usability Week 2009 – Day 1
Sunday was the first day in a 3 day intensive boot camp on how to run User Tests called Usability In Practice. I have been trying to keep up with my activities in Washington, D.C. by posting on Twitter as well as here on my blog.
Hoa Loranger kicked things off by covering the foundations [...]
04/06/2009 08:47 AM
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Usability Week, Washington D.C. – Day 0 – Cherry Blossom Festival
In preparation for the Usability Week conference, I checked into The Omni Shoreham Hotel the day before. To my pleasant surprise, Saturday was the same day as the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was a very windy day, it was late in the afternoon, and there were hundreds of thousands of people in town [...]
04/06/2009 07:35 AM
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Outsourcing 102 – The New Team Members
The Plan
The initial plan was to train the liaison within my department, as there was an immediate need for assistance. After, he would be cycle through the teams of my peers, to have him learn about each of their departments. The liaison was to learn about the environment, gather documentation, and set up [...]
03/16/2009 09:12 PM
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Outsourcing 101 – Introduction
The World is Flat
Outsourcing and offshoring is a mainstream business practice in today’s economy. Companies reach to outsourcing and offshoring to find cost savings, find expertise outside of their core business, and provide a follow-the-sun workforce. Blended costs for outsourced companies is lower than a purely domestic team by leveraging lower resource costs [...]
01/24/2009 07:50 PM
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Some Research on User Interface Standards
The Task
I have been asked to put together a working group to put together user interface standards. Initial discussions are that we will need to come up with different standards for different environments, like portal sites, websites, custom applications, mobile applications and off the shelf applications. So… I have done some research on the areas [...]
01/18/2009 05:47 PM
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Virtumonde is not your friend
I was the victim of a very annoying piece of malware I have been avoiding the corporate install of Internet Explorer for months now, and I have been using Firefox 2 and 3 instead. I am sure I was doing something I should not have been, because for the last two weeks these strange [...]
01/15/2009 02:36 PM
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Techno-Christmas 2008
Well, another Christmas has come and gone, and we have all exchanged our gifts. Everyone in the family got new gadgets to alleviate their tech addiction.
Nicholas got his long-overdue Xbox 360. We bought him the Elite version, with the wireless remote and the 120GB hard drive. Can’t get a new console without [...]
01/05/2009 10:09 AM
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Analytics Tool Wars – Dodge, Parry, Thrust, Spin!
On October 10, Yahoo! launched their new free analytics tool named Yahoo Web Analytics, a rebrand of IndexTools which Yahoo purchased earlier this April. This isn’t very different than Google’s move to buy Urchin in 2005, refine it, and make it available free to the public. However, what is different between [...]
10/25/2008 08:44 PM
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Visual Thesaurus Bends and Stretches Your Way to Synonyms
I have stayed connected to the search industry ever since I was involved with the original launch of the Pravachol web site ten years ago. One of the ways I have stayed connected is through great online resources like Alt Search Engines. This week they covered a great new online tool that helps [...]
10/09/2008 09:21 PM
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3 SEO Site Analysis Tools to Grade Your Site
I don’t usually do this, but this blog entry will be about an email I received from one of my readers. I got an email from Rachel, who works at a company called SEO Site Checkup. She asked me to take a look at their site. They have created a simple-to-use web [...]
08/28/2008 02:54 PM
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Software Metrics
Being able to measure success for a software development group is a difficult thing. But not being able to show the success of your development group is a dangerous thing. Your management team will want to be able to measure quality, show improvement, and benchmark against industry standards. All the popular maturity [...]
08/26/2008 03:29 PM
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Blogging Trends in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to get a message out to your audience. Readers can read and bookmark a blog and get content when they want it, or subscribe to your posts via an RSS feed and have content pushed to them when it is available. There are lots of [...]
05/24/2008 02:06 PM
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How to Redirect Like A Pro
If you have ever redesigned, moved, or migrated a web site, then you know how important 301 redirects are. You have worked hard at building up your page rank within all of the search engines. And you don’t want to lose it. Your users have bookmarked your pages, and your partners all [...]
05/23/2008 03:29 PM
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How Strong is Your SEO Kung Fu?
I am by no means an expert. I work on web sites every day, and work hard at making sure that those sites are optimized from a technical and content perspective. There are a lot of good things I do, but there are a lot of things still left to learn.
It is always [...]
05/18/2008 01:01 PM
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Sermo: It Takes a Village to Raise a Doctor
Daniel Palastrant, CEO of Sermo.com, has come to Bristol-Myers Squibb to speak at the quarterly OMNI meeting. This meeting is targeted to the individual Brand Teams and intends to bring innovative ideas into the company. Daniel came to talk about Sermo and Online Physician Communities – Salvation or Mirage?
Direct from their web site, Sermo [...]
05/17/2008 04:35 PM
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20 Reasons Why DHTML Layers are Bad
A bit of background before I dive in to the post… My team and I are responsible for developing and supporting the Brand web sites for Bristol-Myers Squibb. The Brand Teams and external Marketing Agencies develop a concept for their site, and they deliver a fully functional version of the site in HTML to us [...]
04/11/2008 04:23 PM
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Dynamic sitemap.xml Files in ASP.Net
I know this is not a new topic. It is not even a new topic for me. I have posted on defining what a sitemap.xml file is for, and on dynamic sitemap.xml files in C#. But my team is finally ready to start implementing this as part of our custom development platform [...]
03/25/2008 09:46 AM
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Mix08 – Session 10 – Application = Designers + Developers
This session is based on a big selling point that Microsoft has been driving home for Silverlight and WPF. Designers and Developers who share the same source code can work on different aspects of the same project seamlessly without stepping on each other’s toes. The session walked through two different development scenarios to demonstrate this [...]
03/07/2008 10:41 AM
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Mix08 – Session 9 – Silverlight and Web Analytics
This session was a panel discussion regarding Web Analytics. The panel was composed of members from WebTrends, Omniture, and Microsoft. I found this session very interesting, since most of the solutions to track analytics within Silverlight applications are very similar to the ones we implemented with our Flash based RIA sites.
Agenda
Omniture – SiteCatalyst, hosted [...]
03/07/2008 08:38 AM
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Mix08 – Session 8 – The Future of Advertising Technology
This session was very interesting. As a technology professional, the business side is not as transparent as it could be sometimes. This session opened the door to understanding how advertising, both online and traditional media, work today and could work in the future. Microsoft is investing in this vertical very heavily, and through some of [...]
03/07/2008 07:12 AM
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Mix08 – Session 7 – ASP.Net Model View Controller
This session was conducted by the famed Scott Hanselman. I had been looking forward to this session since I heard he was speaking – one, to meet him, and two, to learn about the MVC framework and design pattern. I had been neglecting my duties as a technologist to follow up on MVC, [...]
03/06/2008 08:51 PM
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Mix08 – Session 6 – Social Networking
This was another panel discussion about social networking. Guy Kawasaki was the moderator. Following the Steve Ballmer keynote, he kept things interesting, and asked some of the hard questions. My notes are scattered, and the session was interesting, but one disappointing fact is the panel did not really cover the use of [...]
03/06/2008 08:04 PM
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Mix08 Session 5 – The Open Question
This is a panel session talking about Open Process, Open Source, Open Development, and Open APIs. The panelists were Mike Schroepfer from Mozilla, Andi Gutmans from Zend, Miguel de Icaza from Novell, Rob Conery from Microsoft, and moderated by Sam Ramji from Microsoft. The session was interesting… it provided a lot of perspective on how [...]
03/06/2008 08:53 AM
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Mix08 – Keynote 2 – Guy Kawasaki & Steve Ballmer
The second keynote was a one-hour interview format between Guy Kawasaki from Apple and Steve Ballmer from Microsoft. There seemed to be friendly banter between the two of them, and they both seemed to enjoy the session. He is a ham, and plays to the crowd and pulls you into the conversation. [...]
03/06/2008 07:43 AM
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Mix08 – Session 4 – Integrating your site with Internet Explorer 8
There are two new features that Microsoft is announcing the Beta1 version of Internet Explorer 8. These two new features are Activities and WebSlices, as mentioned in the keynote.
Activities
XML installed to the browser using the OpenService Format
There are a few simple components that make up an activity – Category, Context, Execute, and Preview
Category – [...]
03/06/2008 05:37 AM
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Mix08 Session 3 – Silverlight and Advertising
This session is to be geared to how Silverlight is used in advertising and media delivery. Following the last few acquisitions of Microsoft’s, and listening to the keynote, they are going to be focusing on advertising a lot more now and in the future. With my current focus on Brand sites at BMS, this is [...]
03/05/2008 07:28 PM
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Mix08 – Session 2 – Advanced Search Engine Optimization
For session 2 I had selected a session on Advanced Search Engine Optimization. It sounded like the session was right up my alley. My hopes were high.
Search Engine – Crawling, Ranking, Finding
Search Engines do three basic things – crawl, rank, and find.
Crawling – search engines start with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and follow [...]
03/05/2008 06:21 PM
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Mix08 – Session 1 – From Flash to Silverlight – A Rosetta Stone
There are lots of similarities and lots of differences in the way Silverlight operates as compared to Flash. This session covers some of those, as well as some of the improvements to Silverlight 2 Beta 1.
Basics
In Silverlight 2, all objects now inherit from the userControls base class.
In Flash, X and Y are properties, you [...]
03/05/2008 05:04 PM
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Mix08 – Keynote 1 – Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, and More
Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie kicked off the Mix08 conference with launch announcements. New Beta1 versions have been released of Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 2.0, IIS 7, Windows Office Live, SQL Server Data Services, and a New Expression site (expression.microsoft.com), just to name a few. Ray focused on the impact of Content, Commerce & Community on [...]
03/05/2008 04:00 PM
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Mix08 – Mixing it up with a Scavenger Hunt
The Flight
Today I arrived in Las Vegas for the Mix 08 conference. After our airplane had taxied out to the tarmac for takeoff, the pilot informed us that since we were going to Las Vegas, our lucky number for the week would be 34. That was the number of planes in front of us [...]
03/04/2008 08:00 PM
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My Most Useful Programming Development Tool Ever
The most useful development tool I use makes me more productive on lots of tasks all day long. I can open just about anything I am working on, and get the job done fast. It applies colors sparingly to my work, and helps me identify mistakes. It helps me multitask, working on many things at [...]
02/20/2008 04:23 PM
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On The Road to Mix ‘08
I consider myself blessed to work for a company I believe in, and in a field that I love. Working in the field of web development is exciting. The job is never the same. The technology is always in flux. Tomorrow will be different than today. Bristol-Myers Squibb has treated me well. And they [...]
02/06/2008 02:01 PM
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Techno-Christmas 2007
Christmas in 2007 was centered around electronics for the whole family. Invion 4″ GPS Navigation Systems were given and received for all of the cars. They were easy to set up, and work great… the only issue is that the SD card is the source of the maps. If you lose the [...]
02/05/2008 03:20 PM
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Netscape is Dead, Long Live Netscape!
Well, it is official. The once-popular browser, from Mosaic through Netscape Navigator and all of its Mozilla variants, fought in the Browser Wars from 1994 through 2008, and is now throwing in the towel. My once-favorite browser has finally fallen under the weight of Internet Explorer (and Firefox, too, I suppose).
AOL announced on December [...]
01/11/2008 04:31 PM
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Book Review – How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
Over the holiday break I decided to tackle some of the books that I have stacking up next to my bedside. One of them was How Would You Move Mount Fuji by William Poundstone. This was a book that I know some of my colleagues had read already, and they recommended it highly, so I [...]
12/31/2007 10:31 AM
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The Lost Art of Debugging – Part 3 – Things To Do
As I have said before, debugging is a complex and time consuming process. I have outlined 10 resources for debugging, and provided a primer for things not to do when debugging. Now, we get to the meat and potatoes of debugging. This is a guide of things to do when debugging. I have broken this [...]
12/30/2007 04:41 PM
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The Lost Art of Debugging – Part 2 – Things Not To Do
Debugging is a complex and time consuming process. In my last post I listed 10 Resources for Debugging, both web sites and books, that every software developer should read to keep their debugging skills sharp. Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what you should do. Here is a list of [...]
12/28/2007 01:43 PM
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The Lost Art of Debugging – 10 Resources
Debugging is as much of an art as it is a science. There are lots of great tools to help developers debug their code. I believe developers, including myself, have learned to depend too much on these tools instead of thinking through the problem. There is a common thread across all programming [...]
11/29/2007 04:40 PM
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Happy Thanksgiving 2007!
Happy Thanksgiving to you all! I can’t believe I am blogging today. I guess I do fit into the addictive category of bloggers. I have read an article on Web Analytics World inquiring How Addicted Are you To Blogging. You can take the blog addiction quiz on the justsayhi.com web site. [...]
11/22/2007 07:54 AM
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20 Bad Ideas – Black Hat SEO Practices
I have spent a lot of time outlining the right things to do for SEO – things that are typically called White Hat SEO. Some of the practices I have written about would even lean a bit towards the Gray Hat arena. I have even discussed the 3 different hats of a search [...]
11/19/2007 10:02 PM
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50 Easy Tips to Keep your Blog Search Engine Optimized
Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get content published to the Internet. Everyone, from the average Joe to the Corporate Communications Specialist wants to see their blog and their most recent posts on the Google results page. But, just like SEO for any other web site, it takes time, effort, and patience. Here [...]
11/19/2007 04:01 PM
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5 Benefits of Internal Corporate Blogs
Blogs are not new anymore. They have been around for a few years, and have proliferated fairly deep into the technology culture. If people are not writing one of their own, they are reading one, or a handful of them, or have an RSS aggregator where they are reading dozens or hundreds of blogs.
Blogs [...]
11/19/2007 09:19 AM
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7 Sources to Help You Conduct a Peer Code Review
The end of the year is swiftly approaching, and as the budget cycle is coming to a close, the work piles up quickly. I have had a staff of three from January through August, and with the piling work, we have had to triple in size. A staff of nine is very different to manage [...]
11/15/2007 08:28 AM
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htmlSQL – Query your Page Elements like a Pro!
While stumbling across the InterWeb, I came across this really neat page. The page, by Jonas John, describes htmlSQL, a PHP class to query the web by an SQL like language. I know, I know, this is PHP, not C#. But the idea really interested me. I have spent a lot of time focusing on WatiN, which [...]
11/13/2007 12:56 PM
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The Truth About High Content to Markup Ratio and SEO
A common SEO tip for web developers is to keep your content to markup ratio high. This is supposed to make the crawling of your site easier, more efficient, and faster. It is possible, however, that more modern site crawlers like Google ignore code already, since they behave like a text based browser anyway. However, implementing [...]
11/10/2007 03:35 PM
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Generating sitemap.xml files in C#
One of the things that I would like to tackle before the end of the year is including sitemap.xml files with all of the new sites that my team develops. We could generate these files manually, but this would be tedious at best. There are a number of tools that will generate these [...]
11/02/2007 03:22 PM
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10 Firefox Extensions That I Can’t Live Without
Firefox is the best browser available. It is easy to use, pretty fast response time, has tabbed browsing, rarely crashes, and the extensions capability is fantastic. I thought that my list of favorite extensions would make for a good topic.
Firebug – A great way to debug JavaScript, view the HTML source of the page, examine [...]
10/15/2007 03:31 PM
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3 Indispensable Tools for Candidate Review
Tools are a great way to shorten time to complete tasks and improve quality in a process. Hiring, Candidate Review, and Performance Review are no different. Here are three tools that I have founds myself using while reviewing candidates.
SkillSurvey
So I got an automated email last week. Big surprise, eh? If you are like me, you get dozens of [...]
10/09/2007 03:01 PM
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Windows Live Search Gets an Upgrade
On the Live Search Blog this week, Microsoft’s Search Team announced that it has released an upgrade to its Live Search engine. The enhancements to the search engine include:
Improved Core Relevance – Improved search results for the searches you do day in and day out
Reduced Spam – Constantly improving to stay ahead of the curve to filter [...]
10/06/2007 11:42 AM
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TouchGraph Google Browser
Pandia reviewed a new tool called TouchGraph Google Browser. This tool allows you to visualize the connections between sites. You can read the initial review on the Pandia web site, and you can check out the TouchGraph Google Browser on the TouchGraph site. The TouchGraph team is a group of interface designers who are exploring [...]
10/05/2007 02:39 PM
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The Interview Killer – What Goes in the Head Tag?
As a department that designs, develops, and constructs web sites and web applications, one of the skills necessary is HTML development. There are lots of other technical skills that are important – database development (i.e. Oracle or SQL Server), SQL and PL/SQL, C# .Net, ASP.Net, JavaScript, CSS, Java, Struts, and so on. But since this [...]
09/27/2007 03:12 PM
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Week(s) in Review – Test, Test, Test!
It has been a bit of time since I have posted, and over that same period of time, I have been lax in reading the blogs I am subscribed to. The last 2 weeks the team has spent lots of time implementing Watin UI tests on one of our new sites. We have [...]
09/26/2007 11:16 AM
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The 6 Test Styles of Google Website Optimizer
So I attended the Google Website Optimizer webinar this Tuesday afternoon. I did not know too much about the feature set of this particular tool, so I thought the webinar would be a good way for me to find out more.
The class was moderated by ROI Revolution. They are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant [...]
09/13/2007 01:35 PM
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The Truth About Plurals in Keywords
So I was reading through some forum postings on SEO and came across a question on highrankings.com about plurals in keywords. Everyone agreed in the forum posts that including plurals in your keywords will give more accurate search results.
They recommend testing it yourself. if you search for “search engine” and search for “search engines” you will [...]
09/10/2007 06:38 AM
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Google Reader Gets an Upgrade – Search!
Google Reader now has a fantastic new feature – the one I have been waiting for – Search! It now is just as good as any desktop feed reader. The only drawback is that it can only search what is in the RSS feed. If the feed is a partial feed or title only feed, that [...]
09/07/2007 10:36 AM
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Free Google Website Optimizer Demo
I read about this in an article on Kathy Scott’s Unofficial Google Analytics Blog. This webinar is hosted by ROI Revolution on September 11th at 2pm ET (1pm CT / 12pm MT / 11am PT).
From their web site:
This 60 Minute Free Webinar on Google Website Optimizer Will Cover:
How to overcome the odds — continual website [...]
09/01/2007 07:49 AM
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Infragistics shows off their .Net Wares
Infragistics came to the office yesterday to show us their shiny new products and to talk about their roadmap for development. We scheduled the meeting as part of the .Net Working Group series, and was the first working group meeting of 2007. Jack Schwinn, one of our Sales Reps, brought in Devin Rader [...]
08/30/2007 06:54 AM
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7 Sources that Laugh at SEO and Web Analytics
Everyone needs a little comic relief. So I have compiled a list of funny Search Engine and Analytics sources here for your amusement. Take a break and laugh a little.
Video – The Break-Up
Dilbert Comic on Web Analytics
Top 21 Signs You Need a Break from SEO
Web Analytics According to Captain Kirk
SEO Comics
SEO Refugee – Cartoons
SEOs and [...]
08/29/2007 07:12 AM
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26 Definitions from the Web Analytics Association
A Press Release from The Web Analytics Association announces the delivery of 26 Standard Definitions to Promote Consistency across the Rapidly Evolving Web Analytics Community. These were released at the much-hyped Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, California. This is a follow up to their release of their Web Analytics “Big Three” Definitions in 2006, [...]
08/27/2007 01:25 PM
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Microsoft Has Entered the Building!
Microsoft came to the office today to walk us through their Technology Roadmap. David Solivan, our Architect Evangelist, came in and spent 4 hours walking through the future vision of Microsoft and their products and services. His presentation was split into two sections – Enterprise Product Roadmap and Enterprise Developer Roadmap. Below [...]
08/26/2007 08:41 AM
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10 Steps to Conduct a Successful .Net Job Interview
This is a follow-up post to my posts on .Net Hiring Manager Resources and on Preparing for a .Net Interview. I will be interviewing a number of candidates next week for open positions in our department. I thought it would be good to review the process that we have typically followed, and get [...]
08/22/2007 12:00 PM
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7 Steps to Prepare for a .Net Job Interview
Our department has gone through some changes lately; some changes have affected the process we follow when interviewing. Since I know I will be doing lots of interviewing this month, I have been thinking a lot about what we have done right in our process, and what can be improved. Here is the [...]
08/20/2007 02:00 PM
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Gatineau Beta is Open for Applicants
Ian Thomas is a Microsoft employee in their Digital Advertising Solutions group. He is “responsible for bringing Gatineau to market,” as his blog states. Gatineau is in essence a Microsoft Competitor to Google Analytics. Microsoft already has adCenter, just as Google has AdSense and AdWords. You can read all about his work and his perspectives [...]
08/18/2007 09:46 AM
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The 3 Different Hats of a Search Engine Optimizer
Optimizing your page for search engines is risky business – one wrong move, and all of a sudden your site is de-listed. There are three lines you can walk while optimizing your site, each with an increasing level of risk – White Hat, Gray Hat, and Black Hat.
White Hat
SEO experts that follow the path of [...]
08/13/2007 07:35 AM
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7 Resources that .Net Hiring Managers Can’t Live Without
Hiring quality developers is the key to any great application development organization. In our department we have experienced the joys of a great team that has jelled to produce high quality projects, and experienced the pains of bad coding practices, bad spaghetti code, and bad attitudes. Our team has very high standards, and [...]
08/10/2007 12:07 PM
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7 SEO Tip Articles That You Need to Read
While I have surfed the web, trolled the forums, and read the blogs, I have compiled this list of SEO Tip Articles that have guided me in the right direction.
1. The SEOMoz article Beginner’s Guide – What is SEO outlines the following topics: why a company would need SEO, how search engines operate, [...]
08/09/2007 01:32 PM
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The Truth About Organic Search (SEO) and Paid Search (PPC)
In a recent New York Post article, Google claimed that, “its own research shows surfers look toward natural search over paid search by a ration of 4-to-1.” A recent newsletter by respected SEO company iProspect claims that their research shows, “[60.5 percent] of Internet users found natural search results more relevant than paid search advertisements.” Either [...]
08/07/2007 09:29 AM
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7 Easy Steps to Improve your Blog Content
Getting people to your blog is only half the battle. What do you do then? You need to hold their attention. As the old adage goes, Content is King. Here are 7 steps to keep your content focused.
1. Pick a specific topic
Your blog should already have a general topic. Now you must narrow your topic and deliver [...]
08/05/2007 01:37 PM
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10 Web Analytics Resources You Can’t Live Without
Avinash Kaushik recently posted an article listing the Top Ten Web Analytics Blogs for 2007. His selection method, based on Technorati and Feedburner rankings, received a lot of heat (don’t mind the pun) across the analytics blogosphere. Turns, out there is a bit of overlap between Avinash’s list and my own anyway. I thought it [...]
08/04/2007 08:23 PM
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What Google’s Supplemental Results Change Means to You
The job of search engines is to index every site out on the Internet, rank them according to relevance, and be able to return them based on free-form search. When you think about it, that’s a lot of data. When you perform a search, you want to see the most relevant listings first, [...]
08/03/2007 02:54 PM
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16 Search Engine Optimization Resources You Can’t Live Without
Following up on the Article by Avinash Kaushik, I thought it would be a good idea to detail what SEO resources I have been using. Below I have listed the web sites and the associated blogs that I read regularly, the free online tools that I use to check out the sites I work [...]
08/01/2007 09:54 AM
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Week in review – SEO and Web Analytics Blog Posts
Search Engine Optimization articles
Search Engine Optimization Pricing – This is an article that details the SEO pricing model for SEOMoz, a premiere SEO company in Seattle. This will give you a good idea if you are paying too much or too little. However, it will still be up to you to decide if [...]
07/28/2007 03:48 PM
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How to Twitter Your Way to SEO
Twitter is a new Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is a site where you can log on and answer the question “What are you doing right now?” Each entry you make on your Twitter account is called a “tweet”. You can then link to your friend’s Twitter account and read what they have [...]
07/24/2007 08:20 AM
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SEOMoz – Search Engine Ranking Factors v2
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
This is a great article on the effective methods of Search Engine Optimization. SEOmoz collected the opinions of the 37 top SEO experts, and compiled them into one document. They broke them into the top 10 positive factors (i.e. the ones with the most impact), the most controversial factors (i.e. the ones the experts disagreed [...]
07/23/2007 08:15 AM
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To Frame or Not To Frame for SEO
http://seo.gympieonline.com/frames-seo-article.html
http://www.seologic.com/faq/frames-html-links.php
http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/299/index.php
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167901
The best way of optimizing a site that uses frames is to stop using frames. Most crawlers only follow HREF links, not SRC links, which means that the crawler won’t find anything past the page with the frameset.
Typically development techniques like tables, server side includes, master pages, [...]
07/20/2007 09:04 AM
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The Secrets of WHOIS on SEO
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=183
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060508-235246
http://www.internic.net/whois.html
WHOIS is a protocol that is used to identify the owner of a domain name or IP address on the Internet.
The WHOIS information is now used for validating domains and their content dynamically by search engines and their crawlers:
inception date of the domain (age of the site and its [...]
07/19/2007 01:52 PM
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Book Notes – Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams
So, while I was at the beach this week, I finally finished “Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. As I read through the book, I kept having these moments where I thought that the two authors were walking with me through my days at work. There were [...]
07/18/2007 10:29 AM
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Web 2.0 Goes Corporate – Enterprise 2.0
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB118194454386837188.html
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB118194536298737221.html
While I was sitting on the beach of Ocean Grove NJ this week, my wife and I read the Technology section of the Wall Street Journal from June 18. This was a very intriguing article. It describes how IBM has embraced the idea of Web 2.0 . A good definition [...]
07/17/2007 10:27 AM
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5 Serious Server Side SEO Specs
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/more/A234_0_1_0_M/
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since your site was crawled last. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
DNS Resolution – If there are any consistent DNS resolution issues while the crawler is trying to [...]
07/15/2007 10:26 AM
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The Relationship Between SEO, SEM and Web Analytics
I think it would be best to start with some definitions so that we have a base level to begin with. So, I have gone to Wikipedia and grabbed their definitions:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via [...]
07/13/2007 10:21 AM
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6 Sources for SEO and Successful Server Redirects
The rundown on 301 and 302 redirects
http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/477/index.php
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007233.html
Redirect Checker
http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php
HTTP Status Code Checker
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp
Code Samples
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-scripting.asp
Spider Catching & Cloaking
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/spider-catching-asp
If you are going to move your site, 301 redirects are the recommended practice. These are best understood by search engine crawlers, and happen before the content of the page is rendered for the crawler or the user [...]
07/09/2007 07:18 AM
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Technorati , Bloglines, & del.icio.us
Scott Hanselman has a great post about how to keep you blog from sucking… http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BlogInteresting32WaysToKeepYourBlogFromSucking.aspx
So… I have followed a number of his suggestions. I have signed up with Technorati.com . Technorati is a great place to list your blog. It is not a search engine, but it is a way [...]
07/08/2007 02:00 PM
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10 Tips to Easily Blend Your Content and Your SEO Keywords
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625720
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3530366
http://www.graphicstudio.com/engines_tips.htm
Site content should actually contain the keywords you choose… actually a better way to think about it is that your keywords should be chosen based on your site content
It is important to drive home a very important point – forcing keywords into places that do not belong will be [...]
07/07/2007 12:00 PM
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10 Essential Site Organization and Structure SEO Tips
Organize according to themes and logic based on your keywords phrases (key phrases can also be a single word).
Use book-like structure, with chapters and blocks delegating importance.
Each page should have one concept, i.e. – one or maximum two main key phrases that are more important than the rest.
A single, [...]
07/06/2007 12:00 PM
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5 More Query String SEO Tips You Need To Read
I have been asked to post some information regarding my resources for my query string post. The original post is located here – http://btw73.blogspot.com/2007/06/seo-tip-querystrings.html
So the resources that I used when compiling my information were the following sites:
http://blog.tripledogs.com/?p=76
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?p=131401
http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/search_engine_friendly_urls/
Here are also a number of other issues to consider when constructing URLs (note [...]
07/05/2007 02:00 PM
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SEO Tip – View State in ASP.Net
View state is nothing but an ASP.Net way to keep and maintain form data between server request and response. There is a hidden text box which carries this information on the page.
Since some search engine crawlers only read the top x number of characters of a page, having view state at the top of [...]
07/03/2007 02:00 PM
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SEO Tip – Alt tags for images
Users on slow connections will see the ALT text until the image downloads.
If the image fails to load in the user’s browser, the ALT text appears.
People using text browsers or browsers with images turned off will see ALT text instead.
Alt tags also make your site more accessible to visually [...]
07/02/2007 04:00 PM
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eBay Entrepreneur
Well, I had posted the Transformers on eBay that my brother and I found at my parents house. They went very quickly, and fairly successfully. Eleven of the fifteen I posted were sold successfully. There were 35 people watching the Optimus Prime and Devastator auctions each. Most of the others had [...]
07/02/2007 02:00 PM
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Blast from the Past
So this weekend I went to a wedding for a good friend at work. His name is Frank Thompson. It turns out that he is the uncle of an old friend of mine.
I grew up in Rutgers Village, a small neighborhood in New Brunswick, N.J. right where U.S. 1 and Route 18 [...]
07/02/2007 12:00 PM
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SEO Tip – Yahoo’s robots-nocontent tag
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000444.html
http://searchengineland.com/070502-132315.php
This new tag provides a way to flag that part of your page shouldn’t be included in an index
Use the tag (technically, it’s an attribute) to surround text you do NOT want included in searchable content within Yahoo
<div class=”robots-nocontent”>Text that will not be indexed by the Yahoo Search Engine</div> [...]
07/01/2007 09:53 PM
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SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 5 – Other Meta Tags
Character Set
This tells the browser what character set to use to display the characters, or letters, on your web page
meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″
Language
This indicates to the search engines what language this content is associated to.
This helps search engines display language-specific versions of your page to the right users
META [...]
06/28/2007 03:00 PM
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SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 4 – Robots
Allows or disallows indexing into search engines by robots or crawlers on a page-by-page basis
This is very different from the robots.txt file. The Robots Meta tags will not be seen if the robots.txt file blocks indexing, since the crawler will never get that far.
You can find out more about this meta tag [...]
06/28/2007 02:00 PM
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SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 3 – Keywords
Words or categories that identify what the page is about
As time has progressed, the misuse of keywords has encouraged search engines to rely less and less upon them. There is still debate about how much of an impact keywords have on SEO.
Some SEO experts have recommended putting your important keywords first. This [...]
06/28/2007 12:00 PM
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SEO Tip – Meta Tags Part 2 – Description
The Description Meta Tag should be a brief summary of the contents of the page
Keep this concise, as if it gets too long it could be truncated.
A good rule of thumb for the description tag is 200 characters or less
Here is a good example:
<META name=”description” content=”Search Engine Optimization Best [...]
06/28/2007 11:00 AM
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SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 1 – Overview
Meta tags are page elements that help a search engine to categorize your page properly. They are inserted into the HEAD tag of the page, but a user cannot directly see them (other than by viewing the HTML source of the page).
Meta tags should be applied to each page, should be unique to the [...]
06/28/2007 09:41 AM
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Web Analytics Life Cycle – Phases
1. (Re)Define
While reading Avinash Kaushik’a Blog, I found this article on defining the business purposes of your web site – http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/02/getting-started-with-web-analytics-step-one-glean-macro-insights.html.
Defining the business goals of your web site boils down to answering one simple question – What do you want them to do on the web site? Here are some questions to [...]
06/27/2007 09:38 PM
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Web Analytics Life Cycle
I got the idea one day in the car as I was driving home that Web Analytics is a continuous improvement process. This is not a profound idea, but struck me at the time as being very important. It is not a process that you go through once. The value of Web Analytics is to [...]
06/27/2007 09:16 PM
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New Book – Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik
Avinash Kaushik is a leading Web Analytics expert and practitioner. His first book has been highly anticipated and well received. You can go to the book’s web site at http://www.webanalyticshour.com/ , or read reviews and buy the book on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-Hour-Avinash-Kaushik/dp/0470130652.
He is also the author of a famous Web [...]
06/26/2007 09:14 PM
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SEO Tip – The Title Tag
The title tag is one of the most important SEO tools in the toolbox.
Changing the title tag is one if the easiest changes to improve page rankings
The title of your page is stored in the HEAD tag of your HTML page
It should describe the specific contents of the page, [...]
06/26/2007 09:10 PM
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SEO Tip – Use robots.txt file
Robots.txt files tell Search Engines what should and should not be crawled
NOTE – This is very different from the Robots Meta Tag. The crawler will see this file before it tries to call the page, so this file will override the Robots Meta tags on the pages.
Robots.txt files should be stored in [...]
06/25/2007 09:08 PM
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All Grown Up…
Well, it was bound to happen. I have had many hobbies over the years, and since I have gotten married my hobbies have not gotten the attention that they used to. I used to collect comic books, baseball cards, hockey cards, play Warhammer 40K, Magic: The Gathering, and read massive amounts of Sci-Fi and Fantasy [...]
06/24/2007 09:06 PM
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SEO Tip – Use Sitemap.xml files
Site Map files are a new standard for search engines. You can create an XML file as part of your site, search engine crawlers can find them, and the file helps define pages and their relation to each other
More information is available at http://www.sitemaps.org
The Sitemap file should typically go in the root [...]
06/23/2007 09:04 PM
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SEO Tip – Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are the nervous system of a crawler. Crawlers follow these links to determine which pages of your site should be crawled. If your hyperlinks are broken or unusable, this will prevent your pages from being crawled.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
JavaScript for navigation [...]
06/22/2007 09:02 PM
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SEO Tip – Querystrings
The treatment of querystrings is a controversial topic amongst SEO experts. This should add a bit of insight onto how querystrings really affect SEO.
If Google and other search engines couldn’t traverse dynamic sites, then huge swaths of the Internet such as online databases, blogs, threaded discussion forums, and e-commerce sites (to name a few) [...]
06/21/2007 09:01 PM
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SEO Tip – File Names, Directory Names, and Directory Depth
The physical directory structure and names of your files can have an impact on the success of your Page Rank and keyword success.
Whether it helps or not to put your keywords in your URLs is a debatable point. If you’re doing a logically organized, SEO-oriented site, each page is going to be associated with [...]
06/20/2007 08:59 PM
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SEO Tip – Well Formed HTML
Well formed HTML is easier for the crawlers to read. They are computer programs, after all, and expect HTML to be in a specific content. If the crawlers see no errors, your site is indexed more accurately.
Well-formed HTML is HTML that conforms to a specific HTML standard
Your code should be W3C compliant [...]
06/18/2007 08:57 PM
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SEO Tip – Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short, are extremely powerful development tools. They allow you to define global styles for any page element. these styles are reusable, making the page more consistent looking and easier to maintain. CSS allows developers to manage not only font, color, and size, but also position and [...]
06/14/2007 08:53 PM
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SEO Tip – JavaScript
JavaScript is a very powerful tool for designers and developers alike. There is lots of functionality, and allows you to do a lot of great things within the browser on the client side. But if not used carefully [...]
06/08/2007 08:49 PM
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New Book – Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed.
The review from amazon.com looks like it would be a great read for an airplane ride:
Peopleware asserts that most software development projects fail because of failures within the team running them. This strikingly clear, direct book is written for software development-team leaders and managers, but it’s filled with enough commonsense wisdom to appeal [...]
06/06/2007 08:19 PM
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Great articles – In-House SEO for Large Companies
This is a great two part series called Laying the Foundation for In-House SEO Success in Large Organizations. The simple answer is to create a matrix team across all the organizations involved. The complex answer is in these two articles.
Laying the Foundation for In-House SEO Success in Large Organizations: Part I
Laying the [...]
06/04/2007 08:15 PM
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Apple Invasion Continues – Safari On Windows
Scott Hanselman has a review of a beta version of Safari on Windows. Just what we needed… another browser to test.
06/01/2007 08:14 PM
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Mix 07 Session 9 & Session 10
Session 9 was a WPF fundamentals section. Not very much to say about this. Good session, covered blend, XAML, and the API. I have a few ideas of some fun apps to try this out on…
Session 10 was a preview of a new Commerce Foundation that is being developed. Microsoft [...]
05/03/2007 08:13 PM
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Mix 07 Session 8
Session 8 was all about search. There are a few things we can start to do on our side, like robot tags and sitemap files, that will help get us indexed. There is also a search provider bit that has come out on Monday that allows you to set up multiple search providers [...]
05/03/2007 08:10 PM
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Mix 07 Session 7 and Keynote 2
So session 7 was supposed to be about Lessons Learned for WPF. There were two speakers, both from a small company in Tacoma WA called Identity Mine. The same company did the great comic book reader session, so I thought it would be really good. The first speaker did a conference 2 [...]
05/03/2007 08:08 PM
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Mix 07 Session 6
The Emotion of Customer Experience seemed like a companion session to the futures of design session. The speaker was very dynamic. Its not about the brand, its not about the product, its about the Experience. Its not just about what the customer feels about us, but how we make the customer feel. [...]
05/02/2007 08:06 PM
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Mix 07 Session 5
Well, session 5 was a pain for me. I wanted to attend the Futures in Design session… It wasn’t quite what i expected.. It was kind of a design 101 combined with a design source revue. So i decided to go see the IE future session. When i got there it was [...]
05/02/2007 08:03 PM
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Mix 07 Session 4
So this session was about keyword services, which is a new service Microsoft is offering to its clients. This service allows you to analyze what keywords you should use based on site content, forecast what your success rate will be, and give keyword costs. There are three ways to use this new service [...]
05/02/2007 08:00 PM
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Mix 07 Session 3
Session 3 was a strange session… It was called “Getting Unstuck – Enhancing Designer and Developer Collaboration for mutual success.” sounds exactly like the problems weare having. All we seem to do is bump heads with some of our agencies, and it is becoming more and more of a barrier to getting things [...]
05/01/2007 07:58 PM
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Mix 07 Session 2
The second session I went to was about a digital comic reader similar to the NY Times Reader, but for comics. The reader was very, very slick. They talked about the requirements collection process, and their UI concerns. The reader was built with WPF, and can use JPGs, or XAML. We also got a demo [...]
05/01/2007 07:53 PM
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Mix 07 Session 1
So the first session I went to was about identity cards. This is a really great idea. I was hoping to get more information on how Microsoft implements identity cards and how it would or could work with OpenID. There were 3 guys presenting – two from Microsoft, and one from Novell. Most of the [...]
05/01/2007 07:49 PM
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Mix ‘07 Keynote
Well, Mix 07 has officially begun, and the keynote I have to say was quite good. It was all about Silverlight. Now WPF we [...]
04/30/2007 11:53 AM
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A Little Bit About Me
Well, I suppose it’s about time that I start blogging. I have been in the technology industry for ten years… I think it’s about time I started using it. Anyways here is a bit of resume-writing.
A little bit about me:
I was born in New Jersey, but moved to Detroit, Michigan when I [...]
04/01/2007 11:24 PM
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