Archive for the 'advice' Category
Back from BCS Talk
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 17th Apr, 2008
Just came back from a talk organised by the BCS on Field Service Technology where Steve Burrows, group IT director of Vanilla group gave us some insight on how JLA, the UK market leader in commercial laundry equipment rental, have used technology to streamline their Field Service Operations and integrated them with their ERP, CRM [...]
10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic
Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 12th Apr, 2008
Great post down at ProBlogger with some great tips on how you can improve traffic to your blog. Here they are in a nutshell:
Create link clusters within your blog
Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts
Invite your readers to connect with you on StumbleUpon and Facebook
Save your best posts for the best times of the week
Edit [...]
Facts on Software Engineering
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 28th Mar, 2008
I came across a post on CodingHorror where Jeff pulls out a summary from Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. There’s some great stuff in there that everyone working in software should know. And good advice is like cheap glasses, you can never have enough! So I’m echoing it here:
People
The most important [...]
5 ways to start a company (without quitting your day job)
Posted by: Owen on Sunday, 23rd Mar, 2008
Interesting post on CNN Money, which albeit being a couple of years old is always pretty interesting. It talks about ways you could legitimately start a new company while leveraging your day job. Here’s what it suggests in a nutshell:
Use your salary as funding
Turn common complaints into a business plan
Make your boss a beta tester
Take [...]
Elements of Sustainable Companies
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 21st Mar, 2008
I came across this great list of attributes that are critical to the success of a start-up. Check these out:
Clarity of Purpose - Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card. Interesting test of how clear your objectives and targets are.
Large Markets - Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. [...]
Top 10 Application Design Mistakes
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 20th Feb, 2008
Excellent post by Jakob Nielsen called Top 10 Application Design Mistakes in which he talks about what he feels are the worst mistakes application designers make when designing a front-end for users. It’s echoed in a number of places, with people like Jounalistopia, Jack Schofield and Phillip Lennsen adding some flavour.
The thing about Jakob’s writing [...]
AJAX attacks and how to mitigate against them
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 18th Feb, 2008
Excellent post on The Register entitled Reduce your exposure to AJAX threats, which talks about three pieces of advice you need to keep in mind when developing AJAX applications. There’s nothing new in terms of security principles, just an application to the fact that a good portion of AJAX applications work on the client’s browser [...]
Choosing a projector
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 12th Feb, 2008
A projector is quickly becoming an essential piece of office equipment. It’s a great way to run a meeting (assuming you’ve done the right amount of preparation), and can be a good way to use software during a meeting .. and no, I don’t mean Facebook.
So what do you need to think about when choosing [...]
Five things SOA vendors are missing
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 11th Feb, 2008
Excellent post by David Linthicum on Infoworld today talking about 5 things that SOA vendors need to do to get in order to be more successful. If you’re in the SOA space you’ll be able to relate to these points; especially if you’re on the bleeding end of trying to implement a product suite that [...]
Setting up Community Server 2007
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 31st Jan, 2008
I picked up some excellent pointers from my hosting provider’s forums by someone who had has been working hard to set up his website: http://evilmidgetsocialclub.com There are some great pointers, so I thought I’d replicate the post here.
For those wondering what Community Server 2007 is … it’s a content management system (CMS) like Joomla, [...]
Thoughts on Google PageRank
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 15th Nov, 2007
There has been quite some debate in certain circles of the blogosphere with respect to what has been happening with Google’s PageRank (PR). Some websites have experienced a significant drop in PR, some claim that bloggers who make earnings through paid postings have been penalised, some even think that Google, as a monopolist, is censoring [...]
Does segmentation result in exclusion?
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 30th Aug, 2007
I’ve been thinking about the topic of segmentation recently. Segmentation is when group of people are identified specifically for a particular purpose because of some desirable attribute they may have. So, for example, Coca-Cola may target their marketing at young people with disposable incomes. They are the likely group to purchase their product, and because [...]
The intrepid Lord Matt and the dastardly Dr Notley
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 24th Aug, 2007
I woke up yesterday to read about a fellow blog, Lord Matt, who is speaking out about someone’s attempt to get him to take down one of his blog posts. The post consists of an analysis of the efforts of another individual (Dr M G Notley) who makes some very rudimentary errors in trying [...]
Using the Internet to scale your business
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 30th Jul, 2007
I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Dr Helen Nightingale last Friday over lunch and we had a pretty interesting conversation over her plans to start up a new website focusing on delivering advice and self-help over issues relating to anxiety, trauma, insomnia and other mental issues. It was actually quite refreshing to [...]
To WordPress or not to WordPress
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th May, 2007
Ian Fernando just asked a question on V7N as to whethr to go for WordPress or not. His questions are specifically about extensibility, customization and spam. Here’s what I responded:
Easy to manipulate: WordPress has an extensible API that has allows 3rd party developers to write plugins for it. There’s a wealth of plugins out there [...]
