You can read more about the launch and the products on the iCircular web site, and you can see some of the great press that the product is getting at the links below

• Fierce Mobile - Associated Press teams with local papers to launch iCircular mobile ads
• Poynter – AP, newspapers to redeem their share of coupon business with mobile app iCircular, starting today
• St Louis Post-Dispatch – Post-Dispatch launches iCircular for mobile advertising
• Fierce Mobile – Associated Press teams with local papers to launch iCircular mobile ads

This site is a significant evolution of the Winter Games and World Cup site, integrating with our new Press Pass Registration Service, as well as major enhancements from the Content API to include college football data.  Some of the new technologies that are being implemented in this site include cufon (for font amangement), prototype and jQuery, WebTrends and Google Analytics, the WebPurify profanity filter service, as well as tight integration with Facebook and Twitter. 

Check it out!  Let me know what you think!  Leave me some feedback!

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 of this, here is a little known Microsoft tool bundled with Windows 7 that can be extremely useful to illustrate a problem when testing an application. The diagnostic tool called “Problem Step Recorder” was originally produced by Microsoft during the development of Windows 7 Beta to assist their Quality Assurance team in debugging the OS. It uses a combination of screen captures with mouse tracking to record your actions and can be a great way of describing a problem to others. The program is launched from the Start menu by typing ‘psr’ or ‘psr.exe’ in the search field. You’ll get a floating applet that looks like this: When you hit the Record button, the applet tracks your mouse and keyboard input while taking screenshots that correspond to each new action. When you stop recording your session is saved to an HTML slide show that recreates your steps. It also allows you to add comments to further document the problem. I think it can be very useful as an attachment in [your bug tracking tool] for those hard to describe issues or as a “How To” document for end users.”

Which leads to other ways of doing this… you could youse WebEx or Windows Media Encoder to document any bug as a step-by-step. If you use WatiN, Selenium, or VS2010, you can also use their recorders to document any bugs you may find in a web application, hand that to the dev team, and then there is no guessing how to reproduce the bug.

Kudos to Microsoft, and to the folks who uncovered this!

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 Rewrite Extension
• Google incorporating site speed in search rankings

Web Analytics

• Faster, Better, Stronger. The GA Async Tracking Code
• Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets
• 6 Tools for Page Load Testing – New Google Ranking Factor

Usability

• Doing User Research Faster and Cheaper
• The Art & Science of Evidence-Based Design
• Are You Designing or Inspecting?

Upcoming Conferences

• Free WebCamps – North America, Asia and Europe – *Sign Up Now*
• Search Marketing Expo – SMX East – NYC – October 4-6, 2010

Other Interesting Stuff

• Competitive Intelligence: Purpose & Process

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 I conduct my interviews, and reinforced a lot of the process I have put in place.

There are different things to do before the interview,  to prepare for the interview itself, and to follow up with after the interview.  This is my brief step-by-step guide to navigate the interview process as an interviewee.  It seemed to be successful, as I have moved my cheese recently to the Associated Press!

Should you stay or should you go?

This is a big decision.  In this rough economy, having a job at all is a blessing.  But decide to leave a stable job for something else is risky.  But, with great risk comes great reward.  This move has been great for me mentally, personally, and professionally.  Here are a few sites that I used to help me decide to take the leap.

• Should I Stay or Should I Go? 7 Arguments For and Against Leaving Your Job
• 10 signs that it’s time to look for a new job

Preparing your resume

Your resume is your potential new boss’s first glimpse at who you are.  If you decide to make the leap and look for a new job, be sure that you spend the time to present yourself as best you can.  This is where the bulk of candidates will be cut from the running.  Make sure you stay on the short list with these resources.

• The Resume Handbook
• The Resume.Com Guide to Writing Unbeatable Resumes
• The Elements of Resume Style

Once your resume is just the way you want it, be sure to update your profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Dice, Monster, your Google Profile, or any of the other places where your work history might be stored online. Your new employer will check all of these, and consistency in you message and timeline is very important.

Where to look for a new tech job

Once your resume is all tidy, and your profiles are updated, now it’s time to start looking for that perfect new job.  Here are a couple of articles that will help you find that perfect new home.

• Top 10 best places to look for a new job
• Looking for a new job? Start here

One of my favorite places I liked to search for new jobs was indeed.com.  You could search across Dice, Monster, CareerBuilder, and lots of Fortune 500 corporate career sites.  Personally, I created a search on each of these sites, and added the RSS feed from the search to Google Reader, and checked it each day.  This made job searching simpler, and centralized it for me all in one place.

Preparing for the interview

When preparing for the interview, you should anticipate the questions you are going to be asked.  you should expect technical, managerial, project management, style, and soft skills questions.  Here are a few books that I recommend to prepare for your interview questions:

• How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
• Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions
• More Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions

Follow up afterwards

After the interview, you need to thank your interviewers and let them know that you are interested in the job.  Be sure to follow up with them after the interview.  Thank them for their time, build on some points or strengths discussed in the interview, and express your enthusiasm in the position.  There are lots of good sample thank you letters out there.  Be sure to customize it to your interviewer, the interview, and to you.

Research the salary band for the position

You are going to be talking about salary at some point with your potential new boss or HR department.  You need to be prepared.  Be sure to research the salary band for your title, position, region, and level of responsibility.  Salary.com is a great place to do this.

How to navigate the job offer

Job offers can be complex, confusing, and a very touchy situation.  This is very far along in the process, and you now know whether you want the job or not. Negotiations.com offers some good advice in negotiating your offer package.

Wrap Up

Overall, the objective of an interview is to get to know your new possible employer, and let them get to know you.  If you are a match for them, and they are a match for you, things will work out fine.  If not, then don’t be disheartened – you and your interviewing company were not a match for each other, and you are better off finding a job that will make everyone happy.  You move on to the next interview.  My piece of advice to find that perfect match is to be yourself, be honest, and be prepared.

I have also changed my blog’s home.  After much of the hemming and hawing, I have moved my blog onto my own domain, PixelatedViews.com.  There is not a lot of content on the main site, but more is on the way.  The new URL for my blog is http://www.pixelatedviews.com/blog.   I have changed the old FeedBurner feeds to point to the new ones, so you might have gotten 140 new posts from me in your feed reader.  Sorry about that.  I have also created two new FeedBurner feeds – Pixelated Views Blog and Pixelated Blog Comments.  I recommend following them.

So… that’s enough change for me for now.  If only it were always my choice…

The flights home went smoothly. I sorted through my photos, and worked on a lessons learned and next steps PowerPoint deck. I also watched a whole bunch of movies to help pass the time. I decided to try to stay up the whole flight like I did on the way to India. I thought I would adjust to the time difference easier. It worked. The only problem is that I caught Laurent’s cold, so I have the sniffles now.

I have posted some of the better photos of the Mysore trip onto flickr. There are a lot of them, but that is because it was a long day, and we saw a lot of great things. I like flickr. Itis very easy to use, and the pro account has unlimited space. I also like the slideshow feature. Take a look at the photos, and leave me some feedbackwith what you think.

Our first destination in Mysore was the Sri Chamundeshwari Temple. We parked the car and hiked up a huge stone staircase. We walked through a few side streets liked with simple houses, and watched the “free range monkeys” climb all over the rooftops. We turned a corner, and all of a sudden there was this huge temple in front of us. It was very impressive. We took a number of photos, decided we did not want to wait the hour to get inside, and went into a smaller side temple. The Hindu religion is not one that I know very much about. Laurent recommended a number of books that would be good for me to read.

Next stop was a brief photo opportunity at the Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel. Our driver said that this used to be the home of one of the Princes, and that now it has been turned into a hotel. We took a couple of snapshots, admired the beautiful sunflowers, and moved on to the zoo.

It had been a long time since I have been to a zoo. I have been to the drive-through safari with my nephew earlier in the year, but walking through a zoo is much different. It seems much more personal, and allows you to connect to the local residents a bit more. Laurent and his wife have been visiting zoos wherever they travel, and find that it is a fun thing to do and an opportunity to get away from more touristy location. The Mysore Zoo was very nice. They had lots of local animals, particularly birds and snakes. They did have African elephants, white tigers, gorillas, giraffes, rhinos, leopards, and king cobras. The short walk through the zoo was 3 kilometers. It was a bit hot, and at the end I was ready for lunch and a cold soda.

Lunch was at a very nice hotel within the town proper. It seems that hotels have the safest restaurants for foreigners’ delicate stomachs. They had an international menu, and the food was good. The coke was cold, and the seat was comfortable. It gave us time to rest and rejuvenate, and prepare for the trip through Mysore Palace.

As we approached the center of town, we turned a corner, and Mysore Palace was on our right. It was an impressive sight. Our driver parked by the side entrance, and let us out. He had coordinated for someone to give us a tour. We took photos of the palace exterior, then had to check our cameras and our shoes, as they were not allowed on the inside. The tour inside took about an hour and a half. The guide was very knowledgeable. He told us all about the paintings, the hand carved mahogany and teak doors, and the history of the maharajahs that lived there. The most impressive room was the audience hall, with its gorgeous view of the palace, its colorful painted ceiling, and the overall architecture of the room. Other interests were the pure gold thrones that the maharajahs use atop elephants, and the pure silver doors that are used as entrances to their private audience hall.

After the tour, we made our way to one of the temples on the palace grounds. On the way to the temple, we came across the elephants and their riders preparing for the parade that evening. One of them reached out his trunk and smelled my hand! This is considered good luck, as elephants are associated with the god Shiva. The only problem with that is that the elephant must have been sniffing around some mud or dirty water, as my hand and pants got covered in brown mud. But that’s okay, I think I need the luck.

After the temple, we collected our shoes and our camera, and went shopping. We went to a local silk shop. Laurent wanted to see if he could find something for his children. The first place we went sold mostly bulk silk, not clothes. We moved on to a Cauvery store, the only company that can sell sandalwood. I bought white wood statues for Nick and John, and a small sandalwood statue of Shiva for myself. The driver took us to another silk clothing store for Laurent, and he was much more successful. He found something for both of his kids there. As we got into the car, the rain started. We were afraid it would ruin our plans to get photos of the palace all lit up at night.

We finished up our shopping at 6pm, so we had some time to kill until the lighting and the parade at 7:30pm. We headed back over to the hotel where we had lunch, and spent some time at the bar. The beer was very cold, and very refreshing after a long day. Laurent and I passed the time with some interesting conversation. We did not want to spend a lot of time at the palace again, just enough time to get some photos. We made our way back to the car, and the driver fought the gridlock and the rain to get us to the palace. We hopped out, took a few quick snapshots of the main gate and the palace, saw the tail end (don’t mind the pun) of the elephant parade, and hopped back in the car to head back to the hotel after another long day.

With all the rain we got, it took us four hours to get back to the hotel. The roads throughout Bangalore flooded. This is an example of the need for improved infrastructure. I know this is the monsoon season, but the three times we got rain this week all flooded the streets to the point of real danger. This is different than the gaps of power from the electric companies. A man died during the first rainstorm. Cars were washed away during the second storm. I was afraid that we would have problems getting to the airport the next day. Bangalore is expanding very fast. I hope the infrastructure catches up soon. I really like this town.

Laurent and I put together a quick set of slides regarding recognition. Raghu pulled together an impromptu meeting of all the BMS folks. He asked us to talk about our impression of our trip with the team, and then to present our recognition to the team. It was very difficult to narrow down my choices. I feel my whole team is doing a much better job. I think that is due to some of the new leadership (Smit and Abhijit), and our focus on quality (Premalatha and Jasmine).

After the impromptu recognition meeting, I dragged the Internet Marketing team outside for a photograph. We weren’t allowed to take the photo inside. We weren’t allowed to take it just outside the building. We weren’t even allowed to take it facing away from the building. We had to go all the way outside the security complex to the road of the IT Park to take it. So we all hiked outside. One of the security guards took the photo of us. This photo is the best souvenir I am bringing home with me.

Lunch was at a nice restaurant in downtown Bangalore. On our way there, it had started to drizzle. While we were eating, it started to pour. We could see the sidewalk flooding. This is a big problem in Bangalore, particularly during the monsoon season. This was the second flood we experienced. The food was wonderful. Nisha Rai and Nupur Maini came with us to help Laurent and I shop for some jewelry for our wives.

Shopping was a lot of fun. Raghu recommended a place called Tanishq, so our driver brought the four of us there. The jewelry shop was a Tata company. Tata owns everything… cars, telecom, water, energy, electronics, steel, they are into everything. Anyway, we went into the shop and the ladies helped us pick out some very nice pieces of jewelry. There was a definite Indian / Asian flare to the jewelry, which is exactly what I was looking for. I hope my wife likes what I picked out. The ladies were a big help, and we all had a great time.

We drive around town a bit, saw some of the sights, and headed home. This was our first early night. We had dinner at the restaurant downstairs, and went to bed early. Tomorrow is a big day. We are off to Mysore.

There are a lot of motorcycles on the road, They zip around in between cars recklessly. I am so surprised I did not see any more accidents. “Speed breakers” are speed bumps. They slow traffic down everywhere. Some have signs, but most are poorly indicated. People try to cross the road anywhere, and at any speed of traffic. I was so afraid we were going to squish someone. And the roads don’t have potholes, they have craters. They are mud-covered when it rains because of all the construction, and at night the dust makes it so hard to see.

I did see one accident. A large van on the opposite side of the highway must have bumped a tiny little car. The car driver cut off the van driver, pulled in front of him, and turned off his car, stopping all traffic. The car driver approached the van, and punched the van driver dead in the face 3 or 4 times. He then proceeded to call the police. Amazing.

Next was a meeting to review the UI Capability. This was one of the meetings that I had been waiting for the most. It also seems that my ideas were very much aligned with their recommendations. The best way to evaluate an existing product for enhancements is through usability testing. The best way to evaluate an off the shelf product is through heuristic evaluation and some sort of checklist. I want to set up some additional meetings when I get home to talk about tools that we can take advantage of that can evaluate a product / application / site.

During our lunch break, the IDC Quality and Delivery Excellence group presented. They showed us their quality analysis tool, and how they use it to do quality audits. Their vision of quality not only includes both compliance (whether the task was completed or the document was generated) and quality (how well a task is executed) measurements. Right now they are running audits on every project, but once things are more stable, their plan is to run these audits manually.

Upstairs was the Application Outsourcing Center of Excellence. The CoE had a dedicated room with flat panel monitors for each of the 6 different areas of focus. They also showed us the PMC, which is the nerve center for the Center of Excellence. This is what keeps the delivery center going, and provides constant feedback to each of the engagements. I didn’t get the opportunity to see all of the PMC, as I had to head over to Bang 2 for a videoconference with the BRMs in the US.

Abhijit set up our weekly Thursday meeting as a teleconference for us. Bruce and Derek were out that day, and Jenn was unable to make it to the room. Butas a proof of concept, videoconferences will work much better for us, and will be a great way to pull the team together. We will have to try to do teleconferences more often.

Dinner was with the MHRA team at the Brigade Millenium WoodRose. This is where Raghu’s boss lived. They had a courtyard in the back of the complex where the MHRA team within Accenture provided entertainment. The team performed traditional Indian dance, and some modern guitar and singing. It was a really nice performance. What impressed me was that these were Accenture folks who were doing this. Laurent and I were discussing this… if we were to host Accenture, andwere asked to do a talent show, what kinds of things would we do? I am not sure.

We spent the morning learning about the Life Sciences R&D Center of Excellence (CoE). I learned a lot about how our R&D division works, and how IT can really drive performance in that area of the business. The idea of a CoE makes a lot of sense for Accenture – they can train new people very quickly, share knowledge across a similar skillset, and bring new ideas to the table. I just dont like the idea that our competitors can benefit from that if they are also an Accenture client. We also had an opportunity to stop in and peek into the MHRA bay briefly. Smit used to work in this bay, and Laurent knows one of the MHRA executives from his earlier days at BMS during the DuPont Pharma merger.

From what I have gathered about Accenture, they have organized about 40 Centers of Excellence across their organization. A center of excellence is a way to consolidate knowledge across one of three dimensions: technological skill, organizational skill, or a type of work. So, for example, a SharePoint CoE would be on the technological dimension, the R&D CoE would be on the organizational dimension, and the Application Outsourcing CoE would be on the Type of Work dimension.

After our tour of the R&D CoE, we headed off to Bang 3 for an SOA discussion. There was a deep dive into case studies, their use of tools, and a discussion of lifecycle management of SOA. Laurent walked away impressed with the level of understanding of SOA as a strategy within Accenture, and may leverage their skills in the near future.

Lunch was a continuation of SOA for Laurent, but I got the opportunity to talk to Pavan about exploring Agile methodologies in the delivery of our Internet Marketing projects. This is a very intriguing idea. My concern is the Legal/Medical/Regulatory process, the time constraints of the BRM team, and the engagement of the agencies. But this is something I think we should try to see how it would work. I will probably set up some additional meetings to discuss.

The Technology Labs presentation was actually very exciting. They showed us a tool called RAT – Requirements Analysis Tool. It is a MS Word / Excel add-on that evaluates your requirements for clarity and completeness, and cascades through the traceability matrix and test cases. I love this tool. We should use it on our requirements documents, and on the template too. We also saw a tool called Pivot. This tool takes advantage of existing data (such as CruiseControl logs, ClearCase data, etc) to monitor project health. This is a whole new way to monitor projects, and may offer more project metrics beyond defect analysis. The last tool we saw was ACQT – Accenture Code Quality Tool. This is Java only right now, but is like an improved version of FXCop. You can define any rule to test against your code, and it integrates with CruiseControl. I would love to see this in .Net.

The Avanade meeting was a bit disappointing. We asked them to talk about the integration of Silverlight and SharePoint. They spent most of the meeting discussing what SharePoint was and trying to sell us on the product, even though we already have it. They spent the rest of the meeting on the architecture of the product, so we never got to see a demo. Two things struck me as a little strange. The Avanade team kept referring to SOA as a technology. It is not. It is a strategy for implementing enterprise level services (not just project level services). They also talked about the decision to use Silverlight was driven by the need for drag and drop, and the avoidance of postback. They could have used jQuery and AJAX and .Net MVC for any of this. I I asked, but never really got a good answer why Silverlight was better than any of those for this project. Maybe next time.

The Open Source discussion was very interesting. We got to see full project stacks using only industrial strength open source projects. We got to hear about all the different products on the market that are Open Source. I am not sure how much of this we are going to be able to use, though. But Open Source is a very interesting topic. It sets a lot of ideas in motion.

I had a couple of meetings with the teams back home, and we wrapped up the day. We ate at a South Indian Restaurant at another Taj hotel in Bangalore. The food was great, the company was great, andI had a great time. The Accenture team are being overly gracious hosts. I am not sure I could do as well.

Laurent and Jerry attended the Internet Marketing session as well. We took a deeper dive into BMS overview and strategies. We encouraged the team to make this a collaborative session, and to jump in with questions and comments, and they certainly did. They asked a lot of great questions, and was a very engaging session. I have put together a deck of over 150 slides, and we only got through the first 50 or so. We covered a lot of information, and we all learned a lot about the pharmaceutical industry, about BMS, and about each other.

Today I noticed a lot of small details that the team has put into hosting Laurent and I. They have folks check in with coffee and cookies all the time, the lunch and dinner meals are all planned, and every day there are a new bouquet of flowers in the room. Today was a table arrangement with greens and lilies, which smelled fantastic. These little details make the trip so much richer.

I had the opportunity to meet the SharePoint development team in the IDC. This is a growing group of 15 developers. There is a lot of talent here, and they are most probably going to help me augment the Internet Marketing team as we explore migration to SharePoint. They had a lot of questions about improving their development process, and about the upcoming work in Internet Marketing.

Later in the evening, we finally got to review the Internet Marketing Profile slides. I had each person get up and review their individual slides. It seemed that just about everyone was a Sachin Tendulkar fan or a Roger Federer fan. Lots of people are chess players, too. Some of the favorite quotes were very interesting. My favorite is “Doing what you like is freedom, liking what you do is happiness.” Mukesh was even kind enough to notice I was a numismatist and give me a coin from Nepal. A few people didn’t make slides, and we had a lot of fun making new slides for them. We got a bit creative. I am glad the team is good-hearted. I hope they take advantage of the photos they have, and get even with me.

Dinner, again, was very good. We ate at Zuri. We started off with RC on the rocks, a local Indian whiskey. Again, Raghu ordered appetizers and the main course. Everything was very good. We finished up at midnight, and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow is anther full day.

We took the Avis car over to the Bangalore 6 office. Laurent and were met with an unexpected welcome. We were presented with sandalwood necklaces that smelled wonderful. The team had arranged for the Bristol-Myers Squibb logo to be made out of blue and white rice on the floor of the entrance. We were asked to light some ceremonial oil lamps. And, we were followed around by a photographer. It was truly impressive. As Jerry said, we were treated like a superstar.

We were set up in a conference room on the third floor. After setting up our laptops and checking our emails, Vasuki gave a presentation as an overview of the IDC, or India Delivery Center. It was very interesting to see the statistics on the India sites. There are 6 different buildings in Bangalore, and there are 20,000 Accenture employees just in those Bangalore offices. Jerry followed up with an engagement overview deck, outlining the different teams focusing on the BMS engagement.

Following the two overview presentations was an all hands Town Hall in Bang 6. This meeting included all the Accenture folks on the BMS engagement. I always seem to get a bit nervous before these types of presentations. There was no real need for me to, though, as I have a strong grasp on the material I was presenting. Laurent and I shared the presentation. He covered the bulk of the material, including BMS IM, Enterprise Architecture, and SOA. I covered the corporate strategies around the brands, and covered some Internet Marketing specific slides at the end. The material was very well received, and was a big success. I was very happy not only on how well received the material was, but also how I kept the audience engaged. There were not as many questions as I had hoped, but the ones asked were very good.

After the town hall was lunch. Our Accenture hosts have been wonderful at providing lunch for us every day. Following lunch was a discussion on tools and connectivity. More applications that I knew have been delivered to the offshore team through Citrix. This speeds up some things, but makes a lot of other things more difficult, including managing files. I need to spend some time with the team and make sure we are using our tools over Accenture’s connection to BMS to their full potential.

We spent time meeting each of the team leads across Laurent’s organization. Each presented their area, discussed staffing, completed projects, upcoming work, and success stories. This gave me a great picture of all the work we are doing, and it was just within Laurent’s overall area. After this meeting, I took two calls with the U.S. – the technical team meeting, and the new work intake meeting.

While we were wrapping up the day, and waiting to leave for dinner, Raghu pointed out the windowand showed us the bank of busses that return everyone home. The last set of busses leaves at 8:30pm. This is very different from home. Most folks drive to and from work in the United States. The bulk of people take busses to and from work in Bangalore. And, since the growth of Bangalore is exponential, it takes hours to get from one side to another. 20 miles could take an hour and a half to travel. The infrastructure has not kept up with the exponential growth, and that causes massive traffic problems. The logistics of work is so different than it is at home.

Dinner was at an Indian influenced Chinese restaurant on the other side of the Technology Park. The food was very good, and we got to enjoy the company of all the team leads. Building these relationships is one of the most important take-aways from this week, and events like this allow us to focus on that.

We got back to the hotel at about midnight. These are long days, with a lot of information, and a lot planned, and I am very tired. I am really glad that the Town Hall went so well, and got to meet large parts of the team.

Laurent, Jerry and I planned on having brunch together. We met up at the restaurant at 11:30am. They didn’t start serving until 12:30pm, so we spent an hour catching up, relaxing, and drinking the fresh fruit drinks. At 12:30pm We were all starving. We hadn’t eaten for what felt like days. Brunch was great! There was fresh fruit, lots of vegetarian dishes, pasta salads, breads, salads, and lots of non-vegetarian dishes too.

One of the things that Laurent noticed was that the culture in India is one of service. Everyone opened doors for us, the gates to the hotel were opened manually, they walked us to our room, at the airport there were employees who walked us everywhere… Later, I found out there is an expression in Sanskrit, “Athiti devo bhava”, which means Guest is God. This is a tradition in India that honoring your guest is like honoring God. Hospitality is extremely important in this culture. This explains a lot.

After lunch, I went back to the room and worked some on the slides for Monday. Laurent and I got together at 4pm and reviewed. We did the last bit of organization, and called the deck done. I am really excited about doing the presentation. We have lots of great information, and I think it is mostly new to the team.

Laurent, Jerry and I met Raghu and Vasuki for dinner at the Northern Indian restaurant in the hotel, called Terracotta. I got to try the local beer, called Kingfisher. It was very good. Raghu did most of the ordering. The food was all fantastic. We had tandoori chicken and lamb shanks for appetizers, and both lamb and chicken biryani for the main course. All the food was absolutely wonderful. Raghu keeps teasing me that he is going to order very spicy food for me sometime this week. Raghu ordered two traditional desserts for us to try, rasmalai and kulfi. I was not a big fan of the rasgulla… the taste was fine, but the texture was spongy, and I didn’t take to it. The kulfi was a cold ice cream served in a small clay pot, and that was really great.

I am still adjusting to a vegetarian culture. It is very clear in their language that vegetarian is the dominant preference, because the word for those who eat meat is in the negative – “non-vegetarian”, or “non-veg”. In the United States, it is quite the opposite. It is assumed that you can eat meat, and has a special section of the menu for those who choose to eat vegetarian.

It is almost 11pm here. I am off to bed. We have a long day tomorrow, including our town hall presentations.

Well, I took a big bite of travel today. I had the car service my house at 4:30pm on Friday. I like car services to the airport. i don’t have to worry about getting there on time, and when I get off the plan exhausted, I don’t have to deal with extended parking and driving home for an hour. But I have digressed. I got to the airport at 5:30 and checked in. I was at the gate by 6pm. Business class meant I got to wait in the President’s Lounge. That is where I met up with Laurent and Jerry. We had a few drinks, and piled onto the plane. the rain did not cause any delays, and we left (relatively) on time at 8:30pm.

The 15 1/2 hour flight to Mumbai did not go very quickly for me. They started us off with dinner, which was surprisingly good. It was a curry chicken. All the courses of dinner took about two to three hours. I worked on my slides for all of my presentations, and that ate another 2 hours. With my power cord packed, that was all I could get out of the laptop. I watched the new Star Trek movie, and Iron Man, and that took up another 4 hours. That left 6 hours of me trying to fall asleep without success.

Once in Mumbai, we had a 4 hour layover to Bangalore. I upgraded my ticket to first class on the India Air trip, so that I could sit with Laurent and Jerry in their executive lounge. We talked a lot to pass the time, and I worked some more on my slides. The flight to Bangalore was uneventful, and we got our baggage without too much pain. The hotel is 45 minutes from the airport, but the rainstorm we hit extended that a bit more.

I am finally in my hotel. After the hour to Newark, the 1 hour check-in and security, the 2 hour wait, the 14 hour flight, the 4 hour layover, the 1.5 hour flight, the 1.5 hour trip to the hotel, and the little bits of time in between, Newark to Bangalore took 27 hours.

NowI can finally get comfortable and sleep. Goodnight from Bangalore, everyone.

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 other side of the contract, or receive an end date as no part of the contract at all? It was a time of little information, and lots of rumors and speculation.

Mass Exodus

With those rumors came uncertainty. The consultants in my group were all told that they were to have stable employment for the next 9 months, and would be given at least 2 months notice if that were to change. That was not enough for some people, especially when they could find more stability in another position. Lots of people decided to start looking right away. I am glad that I had a solid, honest relationship with my team. They recognized that I was keeping them as informed as possible, and they let me know when they were interviewing. We were able to coordinate departure times to minimize impact to our projects, and I appreciated that.

As people left, we did not have enough time to post open positions, interview, and hire good people. We would also have to find people who would then stick around for only 6 months or less. This led us to look for other alternatives, like the Intelligroup contract that we had. We reached out to them, and they were exciting to expand the scope of the contract. We increased the number of resources we had onshore and offshore. Recognizing that training would be difficult offshore, we tried to keep as many people onshore as we did offshore, so that we could continue to pair up resources for each projects. We struggled a bit when we lost Jim Sharp, our Support lead. Intelligroup stepped up and identified a great resource, Gangadar Kotu, who filled both support developer and support lead shoes, and did a really great job when we were in a bad spot. Intelligroup was a huge band-aid over the gaping wound that was our staffing exodus problem, and gave us the ability to keep our projects on target and transition to Accenture.

Other Teams

On my team we did not run into too many difficulties on my team with the mass influx of new resources from Intelligroup. We left the interviewing to Intelligroup, and, we had a resource or two that didn’t meet our expectations. They did not stay around long enough to cause too much of a problem. Other teams had a lot more trouble that we did. They experienced trouble with code quality, accurate estimates, resource performance, source code control, and a host of other difficulties. Although the Intelligroup did pretty good by my team, we all were looking forward to the move to Accenture for different reasons – new staff, formal knowledge transfer, new tools, resource stability, and more structured teams. We all were hoping that we had learned from the Intelligroup experience, and carry that over to our Accenture contract.

I am sure that the folks I worked with on my team, my peers, and their teams, will have lots to add about the Intelligroup contract. I hope they post their comments and share their experiences here.

What Next

In my next post, I will over the Accenture Knowledge Transfer, the Shadow Period, and the High Performance Team kickoff.

Paper prototyping is a low-fidelity, cheap and easy way to try lots of different ideas for new designs without spending a lot of time building them. It is also great for setting expectations that this is not a polished product, so the critique stays much more focused. Paper prototypes are great for reviewing navigation, work flow, layout, content, terminology, labels, and naming conventions. Testing will run very similar, except your users will use a pen instead of a mouse and keyboard, and you will have an additional person in the room playing the part of the computer.

Field Studies area great way to get lots of information about your customers. These studies show how their environment affects how they use your product. Artifacts, or the things around your users, give you clues to their habits, tools, and distractions. Be sure to tell your subjects not to clean up before you arrive! And if you are going to view someone like a call center employee, don’t let their manager give you a demonstration instead. They will definitely use the application differently, if at all. Field studies will provide lots more information, so be prepared to record all the data in different ways.

Jakob Nielsen presented some great numbers on usability testing. If the time of an employee is subtracted, the only cost of usability testing is the cost of incentives. Usability budgets for big projects from major corporations average around 10% of the project’s budget. What you should expect to see is an increase in conversion rate, a decrease in bounce rate, an increase in community participation, and an increase in clickthrough rates.

Kara wrapped up the session with a discussion of usability programs. The focus wason building user-centereddesign and testing into your projectsfrom the beginning. This means that usability needs to fit within the existing project structure withinan organization. This can happen in centralized, decentralized, or matrix organizations. Having acentralized repository for all usability documentation will instill a cultureof knowledge management and continuous improvement. Start small, make management your ally, and you will be great!

This was a really great session. I walked away with a lotof information on how to conduct usability tests, and how to indtroduce this continuous improvement methodology into our organization. It is nice to move on to a new topic, however. I think our lecturers did a great job, but were getting tired of seeing the same faces day in and day out. A couple of us even noticed that they were cutting Q&A sessions short to avoid some of the participants who could not seem to stay on track. Unfortunately, it did limit other people from asking pertinent and intelligent questions. Looking back, there wasa brief discussion on usability guidelines. I was hoping we would have spent more time on this. This left me looking forward to the sessions over rest of the week.

Hopefully, some of my friends from Usability Week 2009 are reading my blog now. Any comments yet, usabilitists?

The big topic for session 2 was about conducting the user test. You need to make sure that not only you are prepared, but everyone involved is prepared. The steps of a user test session are Introductions, Run the test session, Debrief the user, and Prepare for the next session. You should prepare the participant for what to expect, and make them comfortable. Stay as neutral as possible during the session. Get any final feedback you may need from the user, and answer any questions they may have. Then reset the computer and get your notes ready for the next test.

After all the sessions, it is time to analyze all of your new data. You organize your data into Findings with supporting details, assign each of the findings a Priority, make Recommendations that are based on the findings, and then cycle your changes into the next development cycle. All of this information should be included into a Report of your Findings. You should try to provide a short, informal report within the first 24 hours, and a more detailed, formal report within two weeks. Your reports should focus on the positive (what worked well) as well as the negative (what needs improvement). You should also formally present your findings to your client. Keep your meetings short. Leverage the video you took and include quotes from the users.

Jakob presented variants to the user testing methodology. You can test more than one user at a time, if it makes sense (like husband and wife, co-workers, etc). When you cant go to the user, and the user can’t come to you, remote testing is one of the last possibilities. You can also test more than one site (either two separate designs, or competing sites). Sometimes you may want to follow users over an extended period of time, so diaries or videos can be used. Eye tracking is a new technology that is very useful with video recording.

Based on the studies that NNG have implemented, tehy have found that the ROI per user tested is maximized at 4 users. They recommend on testing 5 users to be sure that you are safe in your results. But, anything beyond 5 users, the number of findings flattens out but the cost continues to increase incrementally.

You also need to be very careful when testing users with special needs. Disabled users and low literacy users should be tested with simpler tasks and shorter sessions. Senior citizens love teh attention and are over polite, but should also be given less tasks, and expect more time for the introduction and wrap-up of the session. Testing childres is also very different than testing adults. Testing in schools is ideal, if you can get permission. Shorter sessions and co-discovery methods make testing easier. International testing can be much more expensive, as it requires translators or much more travel. Hardware testing works similar to software testing, but you need the real product to test.

Jakob closed this session with a discussion of the ethics of user research. You need to remember that these are people that you are testing. You need to treat them with respect and dignity. The rule of thumb is that you should treat them as you would want to be treated.

After today’s session, a few of us went to a sports bar to watch the North Carolina / Michigan State game. The three of us that went all had ties to Michigan. Shawn and his wife live there now, Rebecca has bounced back and forth between Detroit and Chicago, and I used to live there when I was very young. Naturally, we were all cheering for Michigan State. After 3 minutes of the game, Michigan State was down 15 points, and they never recovered.

Hoa Loranger kicked things off by covering the foundations of usability. She explained that you and your colleagues have a very different experience than your users, and makes it very difficult to predict their needs. This is the basis of user-centered design. She covered 5 dimensions of usability as a quality criterion – learnability, efficiency of use, memorability, errors, and subjective satisfaction. The relationship between design and usability is like the relationship between writers and editors. The Discount Usability method focuses on qualitative rather than quantitative tests. This provides faster methods with fewer resources.

Hoa then introduced the user testing methodology. This is a simple way to collect forst hand data from real users. It is a simple feedback loop – plan your user tests, conduct the tests, analyze your findings, present your findings, and finally modify your designs and retest.

Janelle Estes then took over and walked us through most of the methodology. She covered how to plan your study, how to recruit your participants, how to write your tasks, how to choose your location, and how to observe and take notes. When planning your study you need to decide exactly what you will be testing, what metrics to collect, and how to identify your target users. When recruiting participants, don’t under-estimate the amount of time it takes to find participants. A screener, or script of questions, is a great way to opt in or opt out possible recruits. Once chosen, send a confirmation letter to your users, and include information about their incentives to show up. Schedule your sessions with both their time and your time in mind. When writing your tasks, keep them focused on the goals of the test session. You can have first impression questions, exploratory tasks, and directed tasks. When choosing the location, you need to keep the user, the tester, and the observer in mind. Should it be in-house in a conference room, or in a usability lab? Be sure that you can capture your setup with screen capture, audio and video, time and note taking. Pilot your test before your users. Be sure that on the day of the tests you are ready to take your notes with a notebook or spreadsheet.

Jakob Nielsen then wrapepd up the day presenting information on the Usability Toolbox. He discussed a number of different sources of data and techniques to improve your site or application. Improvement of your site can be fit into any systems development lifecycle. Jakob also walked through Expert Review methods. The first method is a Heuristic Evaluation – a way for experts to examine the interface. The second method is Guidlines inspection – a way to inspect the site relative to a list of guidelines. An interesting thing that he brought up was the expected vs actual results of a Leikert scale. When implementing subjective satisfaction surveys, keep in mind that when using a Leikert scale of 1 to 7, the mean is usually 4.9, not 4. This means that human nature is not to give a 1 or 2, changing to a Leikert scale of 1 to 5 (or 3 to 7, actually). Very interesting.

So that wrapped up Day 1. Lots of great information. Tomorrow will cover conducting the tests, and analyzing, reporting, and presenting the results.

When I got off the Metro, I had to fight the tens of thousands of people trying to get back down into the subway. Once I got through the crowd, and made my way past the Smithsonian and the Washington Monument, I finally reached the Tidal Basin. The walkway along the tidal basin was absolutely packed with people. It reminded me of the WaterFire Festival I attended last October in Providence, Rhode Island, except there were more people here in Washington D.C.

I spent two to three hours walking along the basin, and took a lot of photos. I posted them on my Flickr account, and you can see my cherry blossom photos there.

Amit had recommended that I eat at Tono Sushi on Connecticut Avenue. It is only a block away from the Omni Hotel, so I decided to give it a try. The food was excellent, and the seafood was very fresh. I particularly enjoyed the Baked Salmon Roll, which was something new that I tried.

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 an environment offshore for development. As demand increased, we would slowly grow a team offshore. My focus was to start them off slow, as content managers, support staff, and graphic designers. As experience grew, we would spread the offshore team into other, more complex areas of development, such as new development and project management.

Step One – Training and Environment

My team has always been ahead of the game in terms of documentation. We use a shared platform across all of our sites, so the structure of our projects are all similar. Each of the services and the methods are documented with code samples on their usage. We use a project template to jump-start project development, with documentation on the functionality of each of the DLLs, aspx pages, and ashx handlers. We also have templates for project estimation, requirements documentation, and system testing. We have a checklist to guide the developer through the project process. All of our code is stored in VSS, all of our DDL and DML SQL is stored with the solution, and all the documentation is stored in our Documentum instance. Promotes are handled throught CruiseControl for .Net code, and SQL Navigator for the SQL code. All pur projects are initiated through a centralized PMO, and our Client Facing team are the overall project managers. Providing all of this information about our code and our process was the easiest part of the transition.

Getting the offshore team a working environment was not as easy. All of our servers are in the United States, behind our firewall. Working with our security team, VPN access was ruled out as too risly to provide without a more diligent legal contract. This left few options. The one that was chosen was a web based Citrix solution. Tools such as Visual Studio, VSS, and SQL Navigator, were provided to the development, test, and production environment through the Citrix Business Partner site. Some other tools were provided directly to the offshore team, such as local copies of Visual Studio and a local version of our database.

Step Two – Content

Some of the first tasks assigned to the offshore were to help manage content for new projects. I figured that this was a simple set of tasks that would expose the outsourced developers to our development environment. An offshore developer was added to a new project, paired up with an existing onshore developer, and work was divided. Each new page has to be registered in the database, and assigned to the proper application, with all the right properties and URL rewriting information. Our page content comes from advertising agencies in the form of HTML. We take that HTML, slice it into reusable blocks and unique blocks, and insert them into our custom content management database. Each of the pages then has to be associated to each of the content blocks. All of this data is inserted into the database via Data Manipulation (DML) SQL scripts. Once inserted, the pages need to be tested with the solution. These activities were the responsibility of the offshore team members.

Step Three – Support

A significant part of our development activity is support. Each project allocates a 5 year budget to support that application, and we need to manage those activities just as well as projects, if not better. In fact, support tickets are like mini projects. They contain an analysis, design, implement, test, deploy, and stabilize phase just like projects do. The only real difference is that upport activities last less than 15 days. This is another great way to get new staff familiar with a new environment. We set aside two people offshore to be responsible for support. The tickets were divided across the two people. And they had all the same resources as the project based developers. These two very quickly got a cross section of all projects and sites, tools and technologies, and processes and procedures.

We had also implemented a role onshore that would be responsible for coordinating all support, both across technologies and across the globe. This person was responsible for support assignment, workload, quality, and process, all as it related to support. This was received well. Support functions now had a champion; a clear voice representing their perspective.

Next

In my next post, I will cover the results of our new outsourcing contract, and how some other teams were impacted by the outsourcing contract. I will also cover and how it became the most important decision of the year for the team.

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 in other countries like India, Brazil, and the Philippines. Things are no exception where I work.

The Story

I have decided to document the transformation of my department into a global organization that embraces outsourcing and offshoring. I am also hoping that those that went through this process with me who read my blog will provide comments of their own, and keep me honest.

In The Beginning…

In the middle of 2007, my department decided to globalize our work force and find an outsourcing vendor. Other departments had experience with Satyam, Intellogroup, and Accenture. We decided to start with Satyam, as we heard the most positive reviews of their performance.

We put together a brief meeting and walked through our objectives of blending a global team to drive down costs. Over the course of the next 4 months, we focused our interviewing skills at a half dozen candidates for our first outsourced team member. The first candidate seemed to be a good fit for our team, and so we made short order in making an offer and getting a contract signed. But, in the 24 hours between interview and offer, the candidate mysteriously became unavailable. Interview followed interview, and all the candidates seemed to fall short of our expectations. It reached a point where the resumes stopped coming in. With only two months left in the year, we resolved ourselves to try another outsourcing company.

After reaching out to Intelligroup, we held a brief meeting with them. The meeting turned into an ad-hoc interview for one of the attendees. He seemed to be strong in .Net technologies, have a solid background in software architecture, knew enough about web technologies, and had project management experience. We made an offer, signed a contract, and on December 3, 2007, we had officially taken the plunge into offshore outsourcing and hired our onshore liaison.

Next…

My next post will talk about how we expanded the team to include our first offshore resources located in India, how we integrated them into the team, and some of the bumps and bruises we experienced along the way.

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 of user interface standards, usability, and user experience.

Some Definitions

Wikipedia was a big help. Here is what I found there.

• User Interface – also known as Human Computer Interface, user interface is the aggregate of means by which people interact with the system. The user interface provides means of input ( allowing the users to manipulate a system) and output (allowing the system to indicate the effects of the users’ manipulation)
• Usability – the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal
• User Experience – a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service
• Human Interface -

Existing Standards

I know this is material that has been covered by other companies. Here is what I have found available that other groups have compiled.

• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines
• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
• IBM’s Common User Access
• Elmer 2 (the usability of web forms)
• ISO 9241
• W3C Web Standards

Other Standards

These are some other user interface standards that I have heard mentioned in other articles onbline, but could not find any links directly to them.

• DIN 66234 part 8 standard – 1988
• The Data Company’s standard
• Motif™ style guide [OSF 1990] 167
• OPEN LOOK™ [Sun Microsystems 1990] 404
• Smith and Mosier [1986] guidelines 485

Conferences

These seem like two promising conferences about user web usability.

• Usability Week 2009
• UPA 2009 International Conference

Organizations

Here are two organizations I found that focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and usability. I hav just joined the UPA, and plan on re-joining the ACM.

• ACM SIGCHI- Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction
• UPA – The Usability Professionals’ Association

Books

Amazon is a cornucopia of information on user interface standards, usability, and user experience. I have most of these books, and plan on getting the others soon.

• Don’t Make Me Think
• Designing Web Usability
• Usability Engineering
• Homepage Usability
• Designing with Web Standards
• Yale Web Style Guide
• The Elements of User Experience
• The Design of Sites

Link Roll

Lots of good sites out there about usability and user experience.

• UserFocus
• Usability.gov
• useit.com
• Human Factors International
• UX Matters
• UX Magazine
• Usability Body of Knowledge

If there are any sources that you use that I have not included, please leave a comment and let me know what it is.

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 a shiny new game too, right? So we got him one of his favorites… the new NHL 2K9. He also got lots of gift cards, so that he could go out and get a game of his choice. He picked up Call of Duty 4, and another wireless remote, so that he can pwn me and his friends up in NHL 2K9 or Call of Duty.

Mary Ann was light on the technology this year… she did get some CDs that would help her learn basic Dutch in the car on her long commute to work every morning.

I was burned by the HD-DVD fiasco last Christmas, so this year my wife bought me the Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray Disc Player. And, just like the Xbox, you can’t get a new Blu-ray player without getting a couple new Blu-ray movies. My parents bought me Iron Man and Wall-E.

The great thing about technology is the same as the problem with technology. It is always improving. The Harmon Kardon receiver we had for 6 years or so has no HDMI inputs or outputs. I had been using direct component connections to the TV, but I ran out of those too, with all the different HD devices I have now. So I had to treat myself with a new Sony STR-DG820 A/V Reciever. Yay for 4 HDMI inputs! It only took 30 minutes to set up with my speakers and all the devices.

And with all that technology, I was able to watch Rutgers beat NC State 29-23 in the 2008 PapaJohns.com Bowl. RU Rah Rah!

Not to be outdone, Google announced on October 22 that they were releasing an “Enterprise” feature upgrade to their product. This upgrade includes custom reports, advanced segmentation, an API for developers, updated interface, motion charts, and integration with Google AdSense.

Was Google resting on its laurels, and now feels threatened by the new Yahoo product? Did Google release these new features to combat the release of Yahoo Web Analytics? Could be. It would be interesting to track the number of users of each of these two products over time, just like we track the number of browser users and the number of search engine users.

To be fair, there are two other tools that I use in the web site SEO analysis space. WebSite Grader is provided by HubSpot – a company focusing on marketing for small companies. I have also used a site called XinuReturns, which will help you “Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.”

XinuReturns focuses more on aspects outside of your site, including inbound links, search engine results, and social bookmarking. WebSite Grader gives a high level overview of lots of different aspects of your site’s SEO, both internally and externally, and gives you an easy “grade” to compare results against other sites. The strength of SEO Site Checkup over these other two sites is is that it takes a deep dive into aspects of your web site that you can change to improve your search results. It analyzes your technology and your content, and gives you an action plan for improvement. All three tools are a great way to measure your site’s SEO, but SEO Site Checkup goes the next step further to tell you how to improve those measurements.

I recommend using all three of these tools, in conjunction with analytics tools and other metrics to montiro and improve your site. SEO Site Checkup is a great new tool to add to that arsenal.

Code Coverage

There will always be bugs. No matter how hard you try, there will always be bugs in your software. That does not mean that you cannot try to prevent them. One of the easiest ways to do that is to write automated unit tests to validate your code is doing what is expected. You can write your unit tests lots of different ways, and Steve Cornett’s Code Coverage Analysis paper gives lots of different ways to break down code coverage. A great place to start is to aim for 50% coverage of all of your lines of code. And, as Tony Obermeit says in his Code Coverage Lessons paper, your ultimate goal of course is to always hit 100% coverage. You will need to pick a code coverage tool to help measure your success. In my department, developing in a Visual Studio and C# environment lends itself to the nCover open source solution. This solution works well with our CruiseControl environment. Test Driven Development methodologies and mocking tools can help you get closer and closer to covering as much of your code as possible with automated tests.

Defect Tracking

I use the words defects and bugs interchangeably. This I am sure is something that some people would disagree with, but I think that it is close enough. If it is not working as expected, then it is a defect, and it is a bug. Regardless, defects are identified in the development process, system and user acceptance testing process, and in the production environment. The objective is to minimize the number of bugs that are found in the live environments. To do that, you need to encourage the identification and mitigation of bugs in earlier and earlier stages. This sounds fundamental, but becomes difficult to implement. There are lots of methods that you can do to identify, solve, remove, and prevent bugs. You must have a way to measure that these methods are improving your success rate. And that means measuring the number of defects found in each environment – development, system test, user acceptance test, and production. The easiest set of numbers to get in a corporate environment is production defects. There is always a problem management system or help desk that tracks these kinds of things. But as a software development organization, you need to implement bug tracking throughout the entire lifecycle of your software. You can trend the numbers, and make sure you are finding more bugs before UAT, particularly in development. Tools like Bugzilla, an open source bug tracking tool, can help you track, trend, and manage defects in your software throughout its lifecycle.

Support Ticket Management

Software is not a static entity. It is always changing. Just think of all the patches, updates, service packs, and bug fixes that Microsoft releases on its suite of software. In a corporate environment, it is no different. Software management does not end once it is released. Teams of developers will be constantly updating desktop, web based, and console applications based on new requirements and requests from their clients. Problem Management software can be used to help track and trend all of these requests bydata points such as severity (Urgent, High, Medium, Low), priority (Urgent, High, Medium, Low), assessment (Customer Assistance, Required Modification, Elective Enhancement, Break Fix), difficulty (High, Medium, Low), etc. You can measure success agains more complex metrics such as the number of tickets created, number of open tickets, time to resolution, etc. All of these metrics will help you determine how fluid, stable, usable, sustainable, and maintainable your software is. Do not ignore your software or its users once it is released to production.

Analytics

Web Analytics tools can tell you how many users you have had on your site, how long they visited, where they came from, where they went, how they found your site, did they reach your goal pages, did they convert, and did they return. There are free web based tools like Google Analytics, and over the shelf packages like WebTrends and CoreMetrics that can help you measure site activity. Do not ignore these metrics to help you define current activity, make improvements to your site, track your new results, and continue to improve. They directly measure your clients’ interaction with yoru software, and can identify trends that with simple changes can vastly improve your software and development processes.

Conclusion

So… these are some of the ways that we track the success of our software. There are a host of other methods to measure software, such as function points, lines of code, complexity, interfaces, velocity, etc. What ways do you measure your software? how do you define success? What are your plans for the future?

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

There are lots of blogs about the Pharmaceutical industry. Pharmalot is a blog by The Star-Ledger’s Ed Silverman that keeps up with pharmaceutical industry news. RXBlog also tries to stay on top of pharma industry news. The Pharma Marketing Blog is an op ed for John Mack, the editor in chief of the Pharma Marketing News e-newsletter. CafePharma is another popular website targeting pharmaceutical sales professionals, and has a blog called Pharmagather, that attempts to centralize pharma blog articles from all over the web. These are all great, but are not blogs from the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma companies need to have their own presence in the blogosphere.

Nutra Pharma, a small biotech company, announced that it was re-launching its corporate blog at the ned of February, 2008. Nutra Pharma’s blog has been around since 2006, but has not gotten much attention. Posts are infrequent, very brief, cover a very narrow scope, is buried within its corporate site, and quite frankly are coming from a small biotech company.

Centocor, a company owned by Johnson & Johnson, is going through lots of transformations, both in its pipeline and in its organizational structure within its parent company. It has launched a blog, CNTO411, in an effort to stay closer to its patients, its partners, and the blogosphere. It was launched just this March, has gotten a lot of press, and is leading the way in pharma blogging.

My team and I are currently in the middle of migrating our first major site from one platform to another, and if we are successful there will be many more to come. We need to handle redirects for all the old content, the media pages, the banner advertisements, the existing client side redirects, and the internal analytics tracking pages. Here are some of the resources we are using while managing all the redirects in the site.

• WebConfs – How to Redirect a Web Page
• Search Engine Roundtable – Want To Switch to a New Domain? 301 Redirects vs. 302 Redirects
• McAnerin International – Redirects Using Scripting for SEOs
• WebConfs – SEO Tools : Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker
• SEO Consultants – HTTP Status Codes Checker

Are there other resources you use when dealing with 301 redirects? Do you have any lessons learned about page redirects when redesigning or migrating your site? Leave me some feedback and let me know what you think.

It is always a good idea to benchmark your skills against others. These articles on SEO lifecycle are a great way to understand the progression of your skills as an SEO professional. And the quizzes are a great way to compare your knowledge against others in your field. Take these with a grain of salt, however. There is always a slant or twist to throw you off track. And some of these are just for fun.

• SEO Learning Lifecycle
• The In-House SEO Lofecycle
• The Ten Levels of SEO
• Do You Know Google?
• SEOmoz – SEO Expert Quiz
• WebConfs SEO Quiz
• SEOQuiz.com
• SEO Cartoon Quiz

Direct from their web site, Sermo is “a practicing community of physicians who exchange clinical insights, observations, and review cases in real time — all the time.” Their objective, from my perspective, seems to be to connect doctors to each other, doctors to medical information, and doctors to medical services, all in one place.

Medicine is a cottage industry. Accessibility to see doctors is decreasing – 18% of doctors are no-see, and this is increasing. This is due to lots of reasons – the trend is away from in-patient towards out-patient, the introduction of hospitalists, the end of society / academic / association dominance, and script writers staying at the office to make ends meet instead of going to conferences. Key opinion leaders are becoming more polarized from practicing physicians, the number of pharmaceutical approvals is dropping, and the emergence of consumerism in the pharmaceutical industry are accelerating the number of no-see doctors as well.

Detailing is becoming more and more expensive. It costs roughly between $250 and $450 to detail a physician, and when you start including some of the secondary costs, it can reach up to between $600 to $2000 per visit. E-detailing costs between $100 to $200 on average, but you will run into recruitment problems. Community based e-detailing is estimated to cost between $35 and $65. And since you are “fishing where the fish are,” there is no recruitment costs. Doctors are already there. Enter Sermo.

The popularity of online communities have historically arced. They reach a certain point, and the number of attendees, active users, and advertisers will start to drop off. Sermo needs to find a way to make sure their community doesn’t arc like the others. New media needs new rules. The way they plan to attack this is to make sure there is as much efficiency (or harmony, as they call it) within the community. Ebay is a good example of this – there are buyers, and sellers, and the transaction is not over until everyone is happy.

Sermo plans to focus on the needs of the doctors on a vocational level. They will offer a virtual “water cooler” for the cottage industry – a place for doctors to share news, strange and insightful cases, and the opportunity for discussion amongst themselves. And they will collect and offer hard empirical data about what other doctors think about all of these.

Within Sermo’s postings, they provide Hot Spots that focus on Learnings and Earnings. These are small little bubbles that will appear throughout the Sermo interface when there is an additional content the doctor may be interested in (about a particular drug, for example).

Another feature within Sermo is called AlphaMD. This is a way to collect real time market research from doctors within the community. Data will be collected within each article. Doctors can be targeted based on their surfing habits or their profile information. This research will cost 1/10 the usual amount for this kind of information, and reach 4 times the usual target audience.

Sermo also plans on growing its features, again to prevent the value of its community from arcing. Some of the upcoming features are: DrugCards, which will be like a real-time updated Physicians Desk Reference; eDetailing, which is a frame that doctors can schedule detailing, and will integrate with your in-house detailing application; and RepSchedule, which will be a form doctors can schedule a visit from a sales rep, and will integrate with your in-house CRM.

Sermo is working with the FDA and internal regulatory departments to connect doctors to hospitals, other healthcare professionals, and pharmaceutical companies, in ways that make sense for everyone.

This was a great presentation. The exciting part is that this opens up new doors for our sales and marketing teams. Thanks to Daniel for coming to speak with us, and to Bruce Levin for putting this together.

With an environment like this, managing expectations becomes essential.  Sites need to be streamlined for industrial-strength campaigns involving thousands of concurrent users and possibly millions of site users per month.  From this perspective, DHTML layers is one of the banes of development.  I have broken out why DHTML Layers make me lose my hair into 6 categories: Performance, Metrics and Analytics, Accessibility, Implementation, user Experience, and Search & SEO.

Performance

When using DHTML Layers, your users are now loading multiple pages combined into one, some of which they may not even view, wasting download time and bandwidth.  Pages are slower to download, and are slower to draw inside the browser.  Processing is now heavier on client side, and is heavily dependent on JavaScript, which is known to be a memory hog.

Metrics & Analytics

Layers are not pages.  This is a simple fact, but needs to be stated again for emphasis.  Layers are not pages.  This means that anything that is dependent on the construct of a page will break.  Google Analytics tags, which are designed to fire on page load, will need to be re-engineered to fire on layer loads instead of page loads. 

Accessibility

Mobile users on phones, PDAs, tablets, UMPCs, and other lightweight devices with web browsers will have difficulty.  These browsers are slimmed down versions of their bigger brothers, and do not have all the functionality needed to process JavaScript properly.  Cross Browser Compatibility is very difficult to implement and maintain with DHTML Layers.  You cannot bookmark a layer, either, so your users will not be able to come right back to where they were.  Popup blockers may block the use of DHTML layers, as this is a common delivery mechanism for advertising.  And, DHTML Layers could affect your site’s handicap accessibility.

Implementation

Layers on the site increase complexity, and make maintainability more difficult.  If JavaScript is turned off, any functionality to show or hide layers will not work, so your users will not see it.  Developers will need to spend lots of time to make DHTML JavaScript function with content management systems, particularly when custom functionality is delivered in this way.  And, if layers are big enough, scrolling can become an issue, as the layers may run off the page, hiding content from view. 

User Experience

User Experience is the biggest reason to implement DHTML Layers.  It adds slick new interface to the hum-drum of static pages.  But designers need to keep in mind that performance impacts user experience.  This is an “I want it an hour ago” generation, and waiting even 10 seconds for a page to load will mean your users have left and gone somewhere else.  Layers are a not a standard UI convention for web development, and some users may be intimidated by the change in interface.  And, some folks may perceive layers as “popups”, which is bad for perception.

Search & SEO

Implementing site search while using DHTML Layers is very difficult.  Most search products are page based, and as stated before, layers are not pages.  Your content might not get crawled, or may be crawled incorrectly.  Layers could also cause a problem with search engines.  Your page could end up not getting indexed, or not indexed properly.  Invisible content may also be viewed by search engine crawlers as “gaming the system” or a black hat SEO practice, and may negatively impact your page rank.

Conclusion

When implementing, DHTML Layers, think twice about the impact on other aspects of your site.  Ajax can do a lot of the same kinds of things that DHTML Layers can.  Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s new Silverlight products can also deliver great new user experiences.  All of these have benefits and drawbacks that need to be weighed before jumping in.  You may be providing a slick new experience to your users, but you may be creating more problems than it is worth.  There are lots of other alternatives to explore.

When one searches for dynamic sitemap.xml creators in Google, you get a plethora of sites back. Some are code, some are online based tools. Since we are looking to create our file dynamically from within the site on demand, that helps narrow down our search. I have found a small number of code sources we can use to start with.

There is still the HTTP Handler from my original post. This project, ASP.Net Google Sitemap Provider by Bruce Chapman, is available on CodeProject. You can also read about it in a blog post on his iFinity site. It still looks like the most flexible solution.

There is a great looking solution on the ASP.Net site by Bertrand Le Roy called Google Sitemaps for ASP.NET 2.0. It has been ported over into the ASP.Net Futures July 2007 package. This solution is an HTTP Handler that uses the Web.sitemap file to generate a sitemap.xml file on the fly.

Another interesting idea I found in my searches was some code that shows a site map when a user gets a 404 error. This solution is also implemented as an HTTP Handler, but is only for 404 Page Not Found server errors. This code is also available on CodeProject in an article called Generate a Google Site Map Using the HTTP 404 Handler.

Here are some other sites of note to look at. They have similar solutions to the ones above, and it is always a good idea to see what other people have come up with.

• http://digitalcolony.com/labels/sitemap.aspx
• http://www.bloggingdeveloper.com/post/Generate-Sitemaps-for-Google-MSN-Live-Yahoo-Ask-on-the-fly-using-an-ASPNET-HttpHandler.aspx
• http://james.newtonking.com/pages/sitemaps-net.aspx
• http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?page=5&cid=3DAB2

If anyone has any additional resources, ideas, or suggestions, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

The first demo was of a furniture design web site.  The developer built the back end that integrated with the database.  He hooked up simple tabs and list boxes to the database for dynamic content.  The Developer then picked up the XAML for the site, and styled each of the page elements to make a slick looking web site. 

The second demonstration was of a Silverlight application called the Deep Zoom Composer.  This is an application that helps users add images inside of images inside of images, like the Keynote demo from The Hard Rock Cafe.  In the same fashion, the developer hooked up the interface to implement all the heavy lifting, and the designer modified the XAML to style the application any way he chose. 

This kind of development and design interaction is extremely encouraging, and could cut down a significant amount of time we spend in construction and user acceptance testing of our external brand sites at BMS.  I am hoping that we work with an agency in the near future that is just as excited about trying out this technology.

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 solution
• WebTrends – WebTrends Analytics, hosted solution
• Microsoft – AdCenter Analytics – Beta2 released March 1
• These products track information through page tags or beacons
• With Silverlight (and other RIA platforms like Flash, Ajax, Etc), you don’t change pages.
• You have to create and define pseudo-page views
• 4 Scenarios:
  • Tracking Silverlight Installation
  • Tracking user Interaction
  • Tracking media Drop-off
  • Tracking Media Buffering

Silverlight Installation

• JavaScript file to put on site
• Silverlight.isInstalled method identifies if it is available
• Check for each version, give them an experience for that version

Tracking user Interaction

• Determine actions in your pipeline, funnel, etc.
• Add Event handlers for each action
• Event handlers map to page view equivalents

Tracking Media Drop off

• Add invisible media markers every 5 seconds in the video
• Media Markers trigger events
• Events trigger page views
• You can then monitor drop-off in 5 second increments

Tracking Media Buffering

• Handle  the MediaElement.CurrentStateChanged event
• When State goes to Buffering, trigger MediaBuffering page view
• Correlate bit rate, content, geography, etc.

Analytics can bring you a single goal

• This is through A / B Testing
• Separation of design in XAML and code in JavaScript enables simple A / B design
• In JavaScript or on server, for X% of visitors – show different XAML
• Use analytics service to track difference between results in variation

Wrap Up

• There is a Silverlight sample available – http://xmldocs.net/analytics
• Track Geolocation with these projects
  • Akami Edgescape
  • Windows Live

Market Overview – Now and In The Future

• The advertising market is manual – media is purchased through phone calls & emails
• The advertising market is opaque – there is no pricing transparency
• The advertising market is inefficient – there are loads of remnant inventory that drives prices lower
• Ad networks are the most efficient way to procure advertising
• They can buy them on CPM basis (cost per thousand) and sell at CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition)
• Ad Exchanges – they add transparency, increase liquidity by letting advertisers bid & buy across all networks
• Today – advertiser & agencies come up with marketing goals, the agency will change the mix of ad media manually to match
• In The Future – advertisers and agencies will define a media plan, translate them to business rules, and through automated experiments, an optimization system can evaluate and adjust the advertising mix in real time
• Each impression’s value can be set in real time, adjusted, and shift based on campaign objectives (awareness vs conversions, etc)
• In the future there will be very few analysts, and each of them will be dealing with millions of publishers through automated optimizers and exchanges
• Agencies and Advertisers (Buy Side) will have to be open
• Today – Premium sales force manages most ads, remnant sales force has less
• Future – Automated Systems will take away from premium and leave very low or valueless markets out

Optimizer Architecture

• seamlessly add advertising into any content, application, or device
• seamlessly leverage other Microsoft platforms
• Create ad funded businesses all in one platform

The  Brave New World of Advertising

• Nokia – leveraging the power of nanotechnology
• Hypertargeting, personalized advertising
• Personalized product offerings (like Nike – build your own shoes, custom Mini Coopers, Scions)
• Projectors, OLED, Disposable video
  • Low resolution projectors are really cheap now
  • OLED will become printable
  • Siemens Printable Video Displays – with printable batteries
• Tracking & Measuring advertising offline like online
  • RFID
  • GPS Phones
  • 2D Bar Codes
  • Bluetooth, etc.
  • Neural Scanning

Here are my notes from the session about ASP.Net MVC and the design pattern

• MVC is a new web project type for ASP.Net
• This type of project is more easily testable
• It is not a replacement for web forms
• This is only an option
• SCOTT HANSELMAN IS HYSTERICAL!
• You must be using .Net 3.5 to be able to create ASP.Net MVC Application Solutions
• Select a testing framework (nUnit, WatiN, etc.)
• 3 new namespaces – System.Web.Mvc, System.Web.Routing, System.Web.Abstractions (Now part of ASP.Net)
• The framework plays well with others – NHibernate for Models, Brail for Views, Whatever for Controllers
• Clean separation of concerns – easy testing, red/green TDD, highly maintainable by default
• Extensible and pluggable
• Clean URLs and HTML – SEO and REST friendly URL structures
• Great integration into ASP.NET
• MVP (Presenter) vs MVC (Controller)
• Request into controller, then to the model for data, then send the data to the View for display
• The http handler does all the interpretation
• Routing is kind of like URL Rewriting – define routes, and the URLs will redirect you to where you need to go
• NHaml, Nvelocity – open source view engines
• ViewEngieneBase – extend to make all kinds of views, iCal, vCard, RSS, etc, etc.
• System.Web.Abstraction – Testing without firing up IIS
• RhinoMocks, TypeMock, nMock, Moq – all kinds of mocking frameworks to use with the abstraction namespace
• TDD – write tests first. You want to see them fail, then write the least possible to make the test pass. Write, rinse, repeat.

I couldn’t believe the amount of information Scott covered. He explained the MVC pattern, the new .Net framework, the new namespaces, gave examples of routing patterns, how to use different view engines, how to mock, and TDD. This was by far one of the best sessions for me in the entire conference.

What are the issues?

• Security
• Large horizontals vs niche networks
• Each site behaves as if you have not used any other site before – antisocial
• “Friend” vs “Family” vs “Colleague” – how do you label people
• Privacy, how to give users control over their own data
• Spam issues
• signal to noise problem – how do you overcome that?

Is stalking as much of a problem as the media makes it out to be?

• Companies in this space spend the majority of their time on spam
• Persistent identities prevent the threats
• You can validate they are real people by validating against their email addresses

OpenID

• OpenID begins to persist your identity across sites
• OpenID is useful, and easy to use, but there is no real gaping problem that OpenID solves
• Usage needs to become ubiquitous and under-the-covers to work, like SSL

What about media, photos, events, shopping?

• Entire ecosystems are designed to tie them all together

What about Second Life and World of Warcraft?

• not necessarily a real identity
• there are issues with crime
• users create an alternate reality, rather than extending your actual persona

Casual Games

• These have taken off in Asia
• Games like bejeweled, Tetris, KDice
• They add a social aspect to simple online games

• The discussion of patent infringement and Open Source is in conflict
• The idea of Open Data, for example the collection and sharing of personal data for advertising purposes
• The acquisition of Yahoo – PHP will be injected into Microsoft and accelerate open source ideas, PHP now can run on Windows Server 2008
• Debate that opening source code should increase security vs keeping it closed and leveraging Security by Obscurity
• Not a lot of full open source products – DotNetNuke, Druple, but other Open Source APIs like PHP
• Criteria for using open source?  All?  None?  Blended!
• Criteria for making your next project an open source project…?

There were a lot of questions that were thrown out, so I tried to get the gist of the questions and answers as quickly as I could. Here are my notes. I didn’t get all the questions from Guy and the audience, but I think I got the ones that were most interesting.

1. Q: Why do you wanna buy Yahoo?
   A: Advertising on the Internet will be the next super-big thing. Yahoo is a way to accelerate Microsoft forward.

2. Q: Is it a zero sum game? Do you have to do Google in?
   A: We have to have a strong position in search and online advertising.
3. Q: Are you hunting down Google?
   A: Microsoft is trying to do 4 things, and there are competitors in all of those spaces – Desktop (Apple, Linux), Server & Enterprise (IBM, HP), Entertainment & Devices (Sony, Apple), Online (Google, Google, Google)
4. Q: What about Apple?
   A: They have some market share, but Microsoft has a bigger footprint in the PC arena
5. Q: What about Facebook?
   A: Serious about online advertising, Facebook is a big platforms for advertising. That is where Facebook comes in.
6. Q: You are one of the richest people in the world… what drives you?
   A: Looking forward to doing more great work, look at Silverlight! I wanna change the world, work with smartest energetic fun people. I love a challenge.
7. Q: What does Steve Ballmer do?
   A: I have 3 types of days – 1) working out of Redmond, work with customers from 7:30 am, 8 at night, 2) Doctor’s in the office – every hour I will have a meeting all day long, 3) There are days where I can think , write, and research.
8. Q: How much email do you get?
   A: 60, 70 emails a day – steveb@microsoft.com
   
9. Q: Where is Bill at? Where is Microsoft post-Bill?
   A: He will be Part Time, Full time in the foundation, working special projects, and taking time off this summer
10. Q: What’s the marketing pitch to a young person to work at Microsoft?
    A: not that different than 25 years ago. really wanna work on things that will change the world.
11. Q: How does Halo 3, Guitar Hero, Rock band fit in the Microsoft Strategy?
    A: These are products that people are passionate about, 17 million Xbox users, 11 million Xbox Live users
12. Q: What’s the plans and long term goal of Silverlight?
    A: As the Internet & PC have grown up, they have forced users to take a fork in the road – use broadly available & easy to deploy applications, or have rich interaction. We are trying to bring those two things together, without compromises.
13. Q: What are the numbers around Silverlight?
    A: It was launched a year ago, we are shipping 1.5 million downloads a day, and there are still lots of opportunities. Windows update already puts WPF on the desktop.
14. Q: What’s the deal with Vista?
    A: The cries from the masses were to focus on security, so we did. Now there are some issues with application compatibility & driver compatibility. We have taken feedback, turned around with SP1, and updated the drivers.
15. Q: How can you do all these things well?
    A: not an option to do one thing, we have to be good at them all.
16. Firefox and IE. What’s happening there?
    A: Firefox is gaining market share, built up a lot of new developer features in in IE8, and there is lots more to come.
17. Q: What about IE on the Mac?
    A: of all the key innovations, that is not the top on the list… teasing… it is smarter for us to apply innovation in other areas
18. Q: Social networking… what’s the Microsoft perspective?
    A: People will be using the Internet more richly. It’s not a fad. The Internet has changed forever.
19. Q: what about opening APIs on social Microsoft?
    A: We are already providing open interfaces on a lot of stuff. There is lots more to come there too.
20. Q: What about Adobe?
    A: Yes Silverlight may be a competitor, but we have integrated PDF into our office apps too.
21. Q: why wasn’t IE part of the evolution of .Net since they are both web solutions?
    A: IE was part of the progression of the OS. Lesson is learned.
22. Q: If Yahoo moves over to MS, what about all the PHP apps?
    A: Microsoft shouldn’t have 2 of everything. if PHP apps are better than a Microsoft solution, PHP will be in production and supported for a long time. Microsoft will become a PHP shop too.
23. Q: What are the synergies with Yahoo?
    A: Scale is an advantage in the search game, more search, more advertising, more bidding on keywords, more revenue, more reinvestment.
24. Q: What about FAST Search & queryless search?
    A: This is in the middle of regulatory review, they have a great technology and a great team.
25. Q: Talk about the acquisition of Danger
    A: Danger provides Microsoft way to do consumer oriented services on Windows Mobile
26. Q: Will Silverlight be used for Hotmail, etc?
    A: This will happen when existing products are re-released. We still have issues getting Silverlight on the desktop.
27. Q: What about Amalga, HealthVault?
    A: Healthcare is the only vertical that we have dug in deeply. It is the least well-served by IT.
28. Q: The format wars. Blu-Ray has won. Now what for Microsoft?
    A: We are not a hardware shop. We will just shift support. Will it really matter? Will rich media may be delivered over the Internet instead of on discs? Maybe.

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 – This is a way to group the different Activities you add – in this example, it is Maps
• Context – text that shows up in the context menu, context is typically “selection”, which will use the text that you have highlighted
• Execute – the actual URL that will be launched, with {selection} in curly brackets to dynamically pass the selection
• Preview – setting this will allow for a mouseover preview – action is a URL, requires parameters for size and selection

WebSlices

• Little purple button letting user know you can subscribe to the WebSlice
• An item is added to the favorites bar
• This can be eBay items, Facebook friends, Stumbleupon, NY Times most emailed articles, etc.
• WebSlices is based on hAtom Microformats
• These are implemented using style classes – some from hAtom (entity-title, entity-content), some are new (hslice)
• You must have a unique ID on an hslice
• Leverages and expands the Windows Feeds Platform shipped with IE7
• Also takes advantage of improved links bar – bold is updated, italics is expiring soon, and gray is expired
• Converts WebSlices into an Atom Feed
• Update schedule in the browser from once a day to every 15 minutes
• Use the TTL  class type to determine time-to-live that will be respected
• You can also define alternative feed URLs, and an end time
• The hover behaviors can be hidden to prevent hover behavior conflicts.  If you do this, it is easy to add a button that will add the WebSlice instead.  The same API can be used for links and feeds.
• If you need a username & password to get to the original content, the WebSlice dialog will ask for it to update the WebSlice
• Feeds should be used for lists of items instead of just a piece of page content

Conclusion

This is a preview of some of the new developer features in IE8.  There will be lots more to come, including new user-centric features.  Based on what I have seen, that should be very exciting stuff too!

Polite Advertising

• Polite advertising is a way of delivering a small banner advertisement, and provide lots more information to the user inline, on demand, when requested. 
• Polite ads should have a fast initial load time and render very quickly
• They should also not block the rest of the page from downloading. 
• Incremental elements should download later, and do so asynchronously
• There are two techniques to polite advertising with Silverlight – Splash Screens, and Xap Loads Xap
• Splash Screen – Static splash screen while larger incremental downloads
• XAP loads XAP – same idea, but you can download other components as needed

Cross Domain Support

• Ads are typically sourced and tracked at different domains from the page content
• The default behavior for servers is to throw an Access Denied error
• By adding Policy files, you allow access to specific domains
• You can use Flash policy files, or Silverlight Specific ones – ClientAccessPolicy.xml

Tracking events

• Silverlight has a rich event model
• You can track activity with mouse interaction, or you can use container state (i.e. size, shape, etc)
• User click-throughs spawn new page, and then send a ping to an ad tracking servers

EyeWonder

• Work with Atlas and DoubleClick
• Leverages their custom InStream Advertising Roadmap workflow
• By providing additional interactivity & tracking in advertising, you gain more information about your customer
• As the add is planned, built, and purchased, EyeWonder ensures the ad fits within the parameters of the host site (ad size, file size, bit rate, etc)

Conclusion

This session provided a lot of new information about the design, development, and deployment of banner advertising, and how it will be impacted by the improvements in Siverlight.  I will probably wind up downloading and watching this session again.

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 links from there
• Ranking – Each page is ranked according to certain criteria – inbound links (basically an endorsement of other sites – either high quality, low quality, or links with penalty); outbound links; note that subdomains are treated very differently than subdirectories.
• Searching – simple process – check spelling, determine intent, fulfillment of search request with results, determine results order

Building Pages

• Use HTML Semantically !!
• H1 (SEO good) vs spans & styles (SEO bad)
• A – used for ranking, test in link is important, use something descriptive
• H1 – only 1 per page, most important page topic
• Title – critical for determining keywords, relevance, and page content
• Meta tags – description is what the user will see… without one, the crawler will have to guess at the page’s description based on content
• JavaScript & CSS – don’t use JavaScript navigation, host css externally

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)

• These tend to look like black boxes to the search engines
• Noscript tags are your friend !!
• Validate your HTML – it makes the job of the crawler easier
• 3 types of pages, based on your SEO goals
• Monolithic – like mail.live.com – don’t want it to be searched
• Linkable – bmw.com – each car is a separate page, with a rich experience on that page
• Crawlable – lots of content, all HTML based

HTTP Status Codes

• 200 OK – Page returned just fine without any errors
• 404 Page Not Found – good for customers, bad for search engines – never removes pages from search engines
• 301 Permanent Redirect – instead of throwing the 404, use this for a moved domain, etc.
• 302 Moved Temporarily – confusing to users and to search engines, don’t use this.
• 304 Not Modified – conditional get, only if search engine has latest version,
• 503 Down for Maintenance – great to use if your server will be down temporarily, the crawler knows to come back
• For more, visit W3C for standards for http status codes

Site Evaluation – Mix Site

• Do a search for mix08 – the visitmix.com site is not the top result
• Across the search engines, you get no title, and no description
• Blogs are beating out mix site !
• The site has a JavaScript redirect – BAD!
• 16,000 inbound links to the index.html page, no server side redirect
• 5700 inbound links to the default.aspx page – a lot less
• www.visitmix.com vs visitmix.com vs visitmix.com/default.aspx – all 3 are different to the crawlers, choose one option and stick with it, use 301 redirects for other two

Other Notes

• URL Rewriting in asp.net – there is a whitepaper by Scott Guthrie
• Soft 404s (a page that gives content or a redirect to the homepage) is great for users, but bad for search engines.  There is a workaround for soft 404
• Case Matters, particularly for apache, mono, etc.
• There is another whitepaper called How to optimize Silverlight for search – read it!!
• A good idea to make XAML understandable to crawlers is to create XSLT to reflect XAML
• There is a Tools Review slide – we are using most already
• Gatineau – AdSense Analytics – a competitor to Google Analytics (maybe this plays nicer with .Net and Silverlight?)
• Canonicalization of URLs – include www or not, and force a redirect server side to stay consistent
• Cloaking is bad
• Sub-domains do not carry pagerank juice like a directory or subpage will
• Underscores are bad (one word vs multiple, usability), dashes are better

Conclusion

I had high expectations for this session, since its title promised Advanced topics in SEO.  Most of the session was review.  Some of the more interesting things I walked away with were the brief tips on Silverlight, and on the importance of canonicalization of your site. 

Basics

• In Silverlight 2, all objects now inherit from the userControls base class. 
• In Flash, X and Y are properties, you could create a “ball” object, and get and set X and Y as properties to make it more like Flash
• The Point object is similar to the mouse object in Flash.  Create a Point and call it mouse, and the C# starts to look a lot like ActionScript in Flash.

The Helvetica of Easing Algorithms

• This is a cool and very simple effect that is used regularly in Flash. 
• Using storyboards and the X and Y properties you just created, you can calculate the distance between the click point and an object (a ball, etc), take a percentage(like 12% or 20%), and continually call the storyboard, making the object move across the canvas. 
• Something like ball.X += (ball.X – mouse.X)*.12 , and the same for Y
• The default frame rate for Silverlight is 60 frames per second, as opposed to 40 for Flash

User Controls that Govern Themselves

• Instead of having the storyboards for child objects in the parent class, you can put them right into the user controls. 
• The ability to remove an item is very easy to do in Flash.  It’s a bit more complex in Silverlight.
• You can just remove it from the canvas’s Children collection, but that is a real bad idea for RIA applications that are data intensive!!  You can instead raise an event and bubble it up to the parent, and let the parent handle it. 

One Function to Rule Them All

• You can have a method in the user control that will add behaviors to the objects on the canvas, such as duration, movement, transparency, etc. 
• The presenter ran out of time, and moved the coverage of the rest of this idea into the OpenSpace sessions

Where did my downloader go?

• This is a big difference from Silverlight 1.1
• There used to be great object to get handle on images, etc. called the downloader object
• Now in version 2, you need to create a WebClient stream object and stream it into the Silverlight object
• Or, you can also use the BitmapImage and import it from the local directory

Conclusion

Even though the presenter did not get to cover all the material he wanted to, it was actually a good session to connect some of my Flash experience and .Net experience and blend it into some Silverlight code.

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 Microsoft’s strategy.  He discussed the shift to Utility Computing – the iea of Business services to have servers in the Internet Clout that host Exchange, SharePoint, Office Suite, etc. instead of in the data center.  There will be a new focus on software’s impact on advertising, which is very exciting.  Another idea that Ray Ozzie discussed was the Web as a hub.  People will move away from the idea of “My Computer”, and towards a collection of devices that are connected and aware of each other via the web.  Software and services will be more loosely joined, to add reusability.   He discussed 5 different areas of focus – connected devices, connected entertainment, connected productivity, connected business, and connected development. 

Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie covered the more technical side of the keynote.  He outlined the topics he would be covering – Standards based web development, and 3 Silverlight topics – UI, TCO, and Monetization.  He also announced a bit of a roadmap for ASP.Net.  New components to come are ASP.Net MVC, ASP.Net AJAX, ASP.Net Dynamic Data.  He also announced a new beta release of Microsoft Expression would be available right after the keynote. 

Internet Explorer 8

Dean Hachamovitch gave a demonstration of the new beta version of IE8.  He had a list of 8 things to share about the new IE8:

1. CSS 2.1 – biggest impact from W3C
2. CSS Certification – 702 test cases submitted to the W3C to verify CSS 2.1 for any browser, Microsoft has made these available under the BSD License
3. Performance – more in line with Firefox and Safari – a huge improvement from IE7
4. HTML 5 support – better AJAX support, connection events for page scripting, and DOM storage
5. New Developer Tools – built in script debugging, style tracing, and much more
6. Activities – new extendable in-browser services, using their new OpenService Specification.  Some examples of activities include eBay, StumbleUpon, Google Maps, etc. Just highlight the text, and activate!
7. WebSlices – based on the new WebSlices Specification, users can subscribe to parts of web pages like an Atom feed, and track and preview right in the Favorites bar.
8. Beta 1 available right after keynote – http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

Silverlight 2

Silverlight 2 is a huge improvement from both 1.0 and 1.1.  Here are the comments I furiously recorded during the keynote:

• Silverlight is downloaded 1.5 million times per day
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is available for download !!
• Partnership between Microsoft and Move Networks to implement Adaptive streaming – determine appropriate bit rate to use based on bandwidth and CPU usage, can switch between bit rates on the fly
• Recently launched Windows Media Services 2008 – available free, will run on Windows Server 2008
• IIS 7 Media Pack – ability to set a bit rate throttle per media type
• Multi-language support – JS, VB, C#, Iron Python, Iron Ruby
• Data Mining Support, LINK, data caching
• Rich skinning and styling
• Robust networking support – REST, RSS, Web Services, socket support
• Small Download, Fast Install, 4.3 MB download, 10 seconds to install. 
• Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and you don’t need the .Net Framework
• New higher level controls are available  – sliders, calendar, Data Grid, etc. – open source for you to download (and modify if you want)
• Unit tests for UI and Non-UI functionality in an open source license
• SharePoint extensions to build Silverlight WebParts

Other Demos

Scott Guthrie took the opportunity to bring up a slew of Microsoft partners to give demos of some of the work they were doing:

John Harris – Silverlight Rich Advertising Scenarios

• Added a Silverlight Ad template in Visual Studio
• Video.show – a blueprint on CodePlex for implementing a video content site
• Integration with Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions Atlas AdManager
• Overlay advertising easily on to videos with lots of functionality

Ari Paparo – VP Advertiser Products, DoubleClick

• Integrate DoubleClick’s Instream product with Silverlight
• Define events in advertising to track user experiences and possibly deliver new content for each of them

Perkins Miller – Sr. VP Digital Media, NBC Sports & Olympics

• Committed to putting 2200 hours of Olympics video online, across 34 sports, for 17 days
• NBCOlympics.com
• Combination of the data and the video
• Ability to do Picture in Picture, Send to a Friend, 4 streams simultaneously when live video
• Commercials are integrated right into the video

Roy Ben-Yoseph and Eric Hoffman from AOL

• Rebuilding their online mail client in Silverlight
• Focus on performance – just make it faster
• Close to 50 million email users
• Functionality is more like a desktop application than a web application
• Demonstrated the plain black & white standard skin and easily change to the Halo 3 video based skin

Sean Dee – VP Chief Marketing Officer – Hard Rock, Scott Stanfield – CEO – Vertigo

• Seadragon Deep Zoom Technology
• Hard Rock is taking their collection to the web – Memorabilia 2.0
• One image is 2 Billion Pixels !!
• Now available on hardrock.com

Marek Reichman – Director of Design – Aston Martin

• Control 3 aspects of the Aston Martin experience – Online, in the Dealership, and Ownership
• Deep Zoom for interior details
• Integration of Web, PC, UMPC, Mobile, and In-Car Computer for an immersive experience

Krista Monson – Head of Casting – Cirque de Soleil

• 6 Resident shows, 9 touring shows, over 3000 employees
• Line of Business HR application – Interviewing prospective performers
• Offline functionality and synchronization
• Review interviews and videos back at the office
• Scott Guthrie doesn’t have a chance as a juggler in Cirque de Soleil

Scott Guthrie – WPF Demo

• Implementation of a Physics Engine
• Complex dynamic changes to images and videos with filters – CPU usage never above 15 to 20%
• Demonstrates the push of work down to the Hardware (i.e. Video Card) instead of CPU usage

Silverlight for Mobile

• Implementation of the same code, assets, skills, and tools for desktop, the Web, and Mobile platforms
• These kind of rich experiences will be everywhere

Darren David – CEO – Stimulant

• Silverlight application called Mixer – Where is the party at?
• Social application for Venues, Friends, and Mood
• Windows Mobile 6 deployed, but written on the desktop

Lee Williams – Senior VP, Nokia

• Nokia will be delivering Silverlight on their phones

Tamir Melamed – VP of Engineering – WeatherBug

• Leading provider of live local weather information – updated locally every 2 secodns
• API available – API.weatherbug.com
• same app on the phone is on the web – silverlight.weatherbug.com
• View the radar, have it animated, hourly forecasts, daily forecasts, alerts
• Add snow to the graphics
• Couldn’t do any of this with Flash Light and have it perform

Wrap-up

This was a jam-packed Keynote, with lots of exciting announcements, great demos, and lots of things to come.  I hope the rest of the conference is this great!.

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 on the tarmac waiting to take off. So we got to wait for an hour while all the traffic ahead of us took off. Ready, set, wait.

The Hotel

Got to the airport and to the Venetian Hotel just fine. Checked in, and the room was just as nice as last year, but they have upgraded it a bit. Everything looked shiny and new, and the CRT televisions were replaced with LCD TVs – three of them. One in the Sitting Room, one in the bedroom, and one in the bathroom (because you have to have a TV in the bathroom). Tested the wireless in the room, and it looked like everything is all set for a great Mix 08.

The Scavenger Hunt

I went to get a bite to eat, and bumped into Rob. After eating, we registered, and went to freshen up for the “Bring Silver to Light” event we signed up for. All we knew is that it was a scavenger hunt, and were looking forward to some fun.

We walked over to the Treasure Island Hotel, and found the Ballroom where the event was. We met the rest of the Blanchefleur team – Kerri Sweeney and Kirti Chandratreya from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, and Michael Iantosca who owns his own consulting group eDefine, and works with them onsite. We poured over the rules, and the items we had to find in the hunt. There were lots of places to go – The Venetian, The Mirage, The Palazzo, Treasure Island, and the Fashion Show Mall. We had 14 photos to take, and 3 bonus items to find. We had to incorporate a sign with the word Silver on it, a Silverlight sticker, and a beam of light from the included flashlight. The folks from Boston had some great ideas, we had some great ideas, and really gelled together nicely. We had a few open questions, like finding a Silverlight Luminary, where can we find Elvis, and whether we would make it all the way to the Fashion Show Mall, but those would play themselves out. We took the list, and headed out onto the Vegas Strip.

Some of the benefits of the gelled team came out quickly – we had a great idea to get a picture of Elvis – Madame Tussaud’s! The manager there let us in with a discounted rate, since we were on the scavenger hunt for the conference (gratuitous pitch to Visit Madame Tussaud’s at the Venetian Hotel).

The most interesting thing that happened to us was while we were walking around the Venetian, I spotted Scott Hanselman coming down the escalator. I immediately yelled out, “Hey! There’s Scott Hanselman! He can be our Silverlight Luminary” He turned around and walked over. We plowed through the awkward moment and told him the whole story of our scavenger hunt. We had to convince him that this was for real. He kept saying, “All I want to do is register for the conference.” He let us take his photo with the Silver sign, and we helped him find the registration booth. Thank you, Scott, for your graciousness.

We took the photos back to the Treasure Island Ballroom, struggled with the Silverlight app that wouldn’t play nice, and had a few beers. We laughed about our experiences, about the other teams that took themselves too seriously, and wondered if we would win the big prize. Either way, we made some friends, saw Las Vegas, got some fresh air, and had a great time.

The Update

The Prizes awarded for winning the Bring Silver to Light Scavenger Hunt included free Microsoft software and a 8GB Zune. Unfortunately, the Blanchefleur team did not win the grand prize. We also did not win the second place prize. And, we were not one of three teams to tie for third place either. We didn’t get anything. But we all had a lot of fun.

Disagree?  What is your most useful programming development tool ever? Leave a comment and be heard.

Mix 07 was a fantastic conference, and Mix 08 looks to be just as great.  Steve Ballmer and Scott Guthrie will be keynote speakers this year.  The sessions look really interesting.  I am hoping to attend the MVC session from Scott Hanselman, some of the Web 2.0 panels, some SharePoint sessions, .Net 3.5 demos, WPF and Silverlight sessions, and some of the UI discussions. 

Last year I documented my trip with blog posts after each one of the sessions.  I hope to do the same this year.  I was criticized by some of my peers last year that my blog posts from each session didn’t really count as individual posts (we have a performance objective to post a specific number of blog entries per year) but as one giant post.  We will see if my online trip report creates as much of a stir again. 

I am really looking forward to Mix again this year.  Take a look at the sessions, and let me know if there are any that interest you.  I can try to attend, attend, and bring back as much information for you as I can.

I bought my wife a Jawbone Bluetooth Headset. She is using that with her Palm Treo 700w, and is having some problems. The headset does not seem to reliably connect to the unit, we have not been able to transfer an existing phone call to the headset, and the voice dialing doesn’t seem to work. If I turn the headset on, make sure it connects to the Palm, and dial directly on the phone (or answer an incoming call), everything works great. The sound quality is really good, and the noise cancellation does a fantastic job. I think I wanna try the unit on another phone before I let my wife go to the Verizon Store for help.

Mary Ann bought me the Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD Player. The first thing I did after all the presents were unwrapped was hook this up to the television I have in the basement. The DVD player came with two movies, and I dropped one in and sat riveted to the screen. I bought my Panasonic 42″ Plasma TV about 4 years ago now. At the time 1080p was way too expensive, so I settled with 1080i. The DVD player is compatible with both 1080i and 1080p, and connected easily to my system. I even tried a standard DVD movie, and the DVD player up-scaled the picture pretty good, too. My complaints about the player are not really with the player itself, but with the format. News that Warner Brothers announced it would be aligning with Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD rocked the CES Conference. The price of the player, less than 2 weeks after Christmas, has fallen from $299 to $129. Blu-Ray has now captured 93% of the Hi Def market share. now my player, and the movies I have received with it, are obsolete, and it is less than one month since they were purchased. I am now a victim of the BetaMax Syndrome.

With the television, audio receiver, cable receiver, DVD recorder, Playstation 2, and VCR to operate, and now adding the new HD-DVD player, I was lost in a sea of remote controls. I did a little research, and found the Logitech Harmony 550 looked to be a great fit. I found it on sale at a local electronics shop, and brought it home. There are a few simple steps to program the remote: 1) install the software on your PC, 2) plug in the remote to your PC via USB cable, 3) enter in each of your manufacturer and models, 4) you choose what activities you want to do (i.e. Watch TV, Watch DVD, Play Game, Play Radio, etc.), and 5) the software downloads all the profiles your remote and programs it. It was easy, and it works fantastic. It was worth every penny.

So, Santa was on top of all of our wish lists this year and delivered a 2007 Techno-Christmas under our tree.

AOL announced on December 28, 2007 that as of February 1, 2008 they will no longer be providing Netscape Navigator.  Oh, how the might have fallen.  I found out about this on Engadget – Netscape finally bows out, browsers no longer supported, but you can read about it on the Netscape Blog – End of Support for Netscape web browsers.  The Browser Wars will continue, but without one if its original participants. 

The book was a quick read.  The author kept my interest with not only the topic, but also with his concise explanations and his witty comments. 

Poundstone describes the history of the intelligence tests, and how it was developed.  They were used by our military to determine qualification for different job roles.  This led to the popular use of intelligence tests in the corporate world, particularly in the use of Silicon Valley.  During the civil rights movement, intelligence tests were determined to have a racial bias in the questions, so were banned as a hiring practice by the federal government.

The ban of intelligence tests did not deter those types of questions from remaining in interviews, however.  Looking for more people with minds like Bill Gates, puzzles made their way into the interviews at Microsoft.  They have popularized the use of logic puzzles and impossible questions.  Poundstone also describes the grueling day-long series of interviews at Microsoft and how you are rated throughout the process. 

My most important takeaways from the book was these nuggets of golden advice –

1. When the technology you use is changing rapidly, you must hire for problem-solving stills, not just for the technology.
2. A bad hiring decision is likely to hurt the company more than a  good hiring decision will help it.
3. If you ask puzzle questions in your interview, make sure they are worth the effort by asking yourself these two questions:
   1. Are you willing to hire someone because of a good answer to this question?
   2. Are you willing to reject someone because of a bad answer?

I highly recommend this book to any hiring manager who plans on asking any puzzle type questions.  I also think the book adds insight into the overall interview process, even if you don’t plan on asking them that type of question.

Have you read the book?  Do you have an opinion on puzzle questions in interviews?  Leave me your feedback and let me know what you think.

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 guide into three sections – a description of the Scientific Method of Debugging, Tips for Hunting for Bugs, and Bug Prevention Methods.

Scientific Method of Debugging

This is a parallel to the Scientific Method that you learned in your grade school science class. The book Code Complete by Steve McDonnell outlines this methodology to debug your applications.

• Stabilize the bug by identifying the simplest test case that reproduces the error
• Locate the source of the bug
  • Gather data about the bug and its behavior
  • Analyze the data regarding the bug
  • Form an hypothesis about the bug
  • Write test cases that would prove or disprove your hypothesis
  • Run the tests and prove your hypothesis, or begin again with a new hypothesis
• Fix the defect
• Test the fix with all of the new unit tests you have written
• Continue to look for similar, cascading, or peripheral errors

For a more detailed breakdown of the Scientific Method of Debugging, read Code Complete by Steve McDonnell.

Bug Hunting Tips

These tips for finding bugs, broken out into different areas, will help you narrow down where your bug is.

General Tips

• Be sure to save the original source code
• Be sure the fix the problem, not the symptom
• Make one change at a time
• Check and Double Check your fix
• Consider the possibility that the bug is generated from multiple sources
• Divide and Conquer
• Check other places where bugs have existed
• Check other places where code has changed recently
• Compile the application again

Logging

• Insert Trace, Print, or Alert Statements to help track the bug
• Create a logging methodology to trace the application
• Check the Log Files of the servers, etc.
• Search the web for the stack trace

Unit Testing

• Design By Contract
• Write unit tests that cause the error
• Try to reproduce the bug in different ways
• Try boundary cases and special cases

More Complex Methods

• Recompile with a different compiler
• Create a mini version of the application
• Sequentialize the Parallel to see if it is a timing or resource issue
• Try the code in different environments (local, dev, test, prod, other developers’ machines, etc.)
• Grab someone else to talk through the bug without looking at the code (explaining the problem may trigger some ideas)
• Do a full, in-depth code review on the broken code

Last Resort

• Rewrite the whole section of code that is causing the bug
• Take a break for a few minutes, or an hour, or until the next day, to give your mind time to process the data

Bug Prevention Methods

These are things that you should be doing during the planning and development of your applications that will help you identify, fix, and test your bugs after you are done with development.

• Identify and track consistent bug types within your own code
• Introduce debugging methodologies early
• Implement loose coupling techniques
• Implement Information Hiding Techniques
• Write a regression test that tests the bug you just fixed

So… these are some different ways to attack debugging. Are there methods that have proven themselves that you have used? Do you take a different, more unique approach to debugging? What have your experiences shown to be your best practices? Please leave your feedback and let me know what you think.

• Don’t guess what the problem is
• Don’t dive into making changes without a plan
• Don’t code right away without a thorough analysis
• Don’t fix the shell of the problem, not the problem itself
• Don’t trust line numbers in compiler messages
• In fact, don’t trust the compiler messages at all
• Don’t ignore the value of automated unit testing
• Don’t delete the original code
• Don’t ignore recent changes to your application
• Don’t ignore resources available to you, like the Internet or the Library

This post is a teaser for the one that is to come – what thins should I do when debugging?  Is there a more formal process for debugging?  What steps should I follow?  What things should I look for?  What place should I look?

My first post about The Lost Art of Debugging is a blogroll of resources, both electronic and print, that developers should read to help develop good debugging techniques. Here are ten great resources on the methodology of debugging.

Web Sites & Blogs

• HackNot – Debugging 101
• Reading Tea Leaves – The Fine Art of Debugging
• Simply Breath Teching – Debugging Solutions – A Framework
• VETTY OFFICER’S WEBLOG – Debugging tips for New software engineers
• Zen and the Art of Debugging

Books

• “Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction” by Steve McConnell
• “Debugging by Thinking: A Multidisciplinary Approach” by Robert Charles Metzger
• “Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging” by Andreas Zeller
• “The Mythical Man-Month” by Frederick P. Brooks
• “Debugging” by David J. Agans

Do you have other debugging resources that you depend on? Have you seen a great article on debugging? Do you have a debugging horror story you would like to share? Leave me a comment with your book, web site, or tale of woe.

70%

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

1. Astroturfing

This is when a false public relations campaign or fake social media in the blogosphere generate increased attention to a site, blog, or wiki.
* Livingston Buzz – Astroturfing on the Dark Side of the Moon

2. Buying Expired Domains

Domains that have expired can carry a large page rank. By purchasing the domain, throwing up repetitive content, and linking to your other web sites and domains, you can use link juice to distribute the page rank to those other sites.

3. Cloaking

Cloaking is when a site is designed to show one set of content to your users, while showing a completely different set of content to crawlers, robots, and spiders. This is considered misrepresenting your content.

4. Comment Spamming

This method is implemented by leaving comments on sites with high PageRanks. These comments can be in the form of blog comments, guestbook entries, forum submissions, wiki pages, etc. The comments are filled with high density keywords, and have links back to the spamming site.

5. Doorway Pages

A doorway page is a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher. This method is dependent on useragent sniffing.

6. Fake CEO / Celebrity Avatars

This is when a blogger or forums user registers as if they are a person if significance, i.e. a CEO or celebrity. These people leave damaging messages that can sway a user in a specific direction about a product or service. This can swing the other way. A Celebrity or high level executive can act as an anonymous user to leave disparaging remarks about another person, company, or product, drive traffic to their site, and ultimately increase sales.
* CopyWrite, Ink – Silencing Crisis: Whole Foods Market, Inc.

7. Google Bombing

This is accomplished by creating links on multiple sites linking to the same page with the same text. The text link may not necessarily be relevant to the linked site, thus creating the Google Bomb. The most common Google Bomb can be seen by searching “miserable failure” and seeing sites for George Bush appear at the top of the results page.

8. Google Bowling

Google is penalizing (or even banning) sites that purchase site-wide links. A site-wide link is a link that is on every page of the entire site. Google Bowling is buying site-wide links as a competitor to get them banned.
* Web Pro News – Google Bowling: How Competitors Can Sabotage You; What Google Should Do About It

9. Invisible Text or Hidden Text

This Black Hat method manifests itself in many forms. One method is to put lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Another method is to embed and overload keywords into unseen places that crawlers look will get you banned as well. Places like alt tags, comments, JavaScript tags, noframe tags, div tags that are hidden, etc.

10. Interlinking

When multiple web sites are built by the same person or company, with similar content, with links pointing back and forth between them, in an attempt to increase each others’ page ranks.

11. Keyword Stuffing

Filling your page with long lists of keywords in an attempt to rank higher for those words. You don’t view this as high quality content, and neither will Google. This method is typically accompanied with the Hidden Text and Redirecting black hat methods.

12. Link Farming

Another name for a link farm is a free-for-all site. The objective of these sites is strictly to generate inbound links to your site at any cost. This will typically work in the short term, but hurt your site (or get it banned) long-term.
These kinds of sites are also known as mutual admiration societies.

13. Redirecting

Redirects are commonly used along with doorway pages, or spam pages filled with advertising. They are designed to take a user to a page that they did not want to go to. These can be both server side redirects, or client side redirects. Vicious redirect pages often get the user into an infinite loop that are difficult to break from.

14. Scraper Sites

Also known as Made-for-AdSense Sites, these pages are similar to spam pages, except that they are designed to scrape search engine results and dynamically “create” content pages. These are also used in conjunction with do

15. Selling PageRank

Sites can explicitly sell “advertising” (read inbound links) to your site. This essentially distributes some of the PageRank to the newly linked site, and its position in search engine results pages. This has been in the news a lot lately. Google has dropped the PageRank of anyone doing this. Both the buyer and seller of the link are dropped in PageRank.

16. Shill Blogs, Spam Blogs, or Splogs

Spam Blogs are when one person is paid to act as a fan for those who hired them. Generating a source of positive feedback and link sharing will increase inbound traffic and PageRank. These methods are similar in effect to a link farm.
* Business Week – Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story

17. Spam Pages

Spam Pages are web pages that rank well for specific keywords, but actually hold no content. They are typically full of advertisements, listings to other sites, or are part of a pay-per-click scam.

18. Sybil Attacks

When a single user creates multiple identities to generate additional traffic. This could be in the form of multiple web sites with similar, if not identical, content. This also could be in the form of multiple social bookmark accounts, multiple comments, etc.

19. Wiki Spam

Wikis, just like blogs, are intended to be an easy way to create and organize content for non-developers (read anyone). But the distributed and open editability of wikis make the susceptible to spamming. By placing links in wikis back to the spam site, you hijack the link juice of the wiki, pass the page rank on, and increase results frequency. The subject of the wiki page is typically irrelevant. This is why large wikis like wikipedia have added the nofollow attribute to all of their links.

20. Resources

• http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/tactics/black-hat.htm
• http://seoblackhat.com/
• http://www.syndk8.net/
• http://websitehelpers.com/seo/blackhat.html
• http://websearch.about.com/od/seononos/a/spamseo.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing

Are there any other Black Hat SEO techniques that you know of? Any other Black Hat resources that you know of? What do you think of Black Hat SEO? Let me know what you think by leaving me a comment.

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 is a collection of tips gathered from around the blogosphere on how to optimize your blog for search engines.

Content

• Content is always king.  Make sure your content is new, fresh, engaging, and relevant.
• Update your blog frequently.  The more it is updated, the more your content will be indexed.
• Stick with your blog – don’t get discouraged!
• Use an interesting title for your blog and each of your blog posts. 
• Limit each of your posts to one topic, keeping your pages focused.
• Keep your posts not too short, and not too long.  This keeps your readers interested and returning.
• Provide a list of your top 10 blog posts on your site.
• Make sure your tags, categories, labels, etc. also make good keywords.
• Use your keywords as often as possible, but only in a natural context.
• Use a blog service like WordPress, Blogger, etc.  These sites already have high content churn, and attract frequent indexing.
• Make sure that anonymous users can leave comments.  You will get more feedback that way.

Linking

• Increase your inbound links from other sites.
• Link to your own posts that have a similar topic.
• Outbound links to high quality sites help your page rank.

Markup

• Make sure your blog’s HTML is W3C Compliant so that search engines can spider your blog easily.
• Make sure your post titles are live links.
• If your blog supports it, don’t forget to use meta tags in your blog template.
• Use your primary keyword in strategic locations:
• Your blog domain
• In the title of your posts
• In the anchor text of links
• In the alt tags of your images
• In Header tags – H1, H2, H3, etc.
• In bold tags

Your RSS Feed

• Be sure that RSS auto-discovery tags are placed in the header of every page, one for each RSS feed.
• Your RSS feeds should provide full text for each post.
• Maximize the number of blog posts provided in your blog feed.  Typical default is 10, 20 or more is better.
• Provide a feed for every category your blog offers.

Post-Publishing

• Join blog networks and blog directories.
• Let other bloggers know about your site.
• Leave comments on other blogs with links back to your site, particularly industry leaders.
• Contact industry leaders who blog and ask them to cover your story.
• Swap links with other bloggers.
• Submit your site to Ping Servers so that your blog gets indexed faster.
• Some blog services will do this for you.
• If they do not, then use Ping-O-Matic – http://pingomatic.com/ .
• Submit your blog to the top search engines:
• Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/
• Yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• Yahoo Directory – http://dir.yahoo.com/
• Yahoo Directory Submit – https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/
• Windows Live Search – http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
• DMOZ – http://dmoz.org/add.html
• Feedburner is a great way to publish your RSS feed.
• Google Analytics is a great starter tool to measure your site’s activity, and it’s free.

Do you have other tips or resources for bloggers in optimizing their sites for search engines?  Leave me some feedback and let me know.

Resources:

• Scott Hanselman – Blog Interesting – 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking
• Matt Cutts – Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers
• ProBlogger – Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
• BlogHerald – SEO Tips: Increase Page Rank By Revitalizing Your Old Posts
• SearchEngineGuide – Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds 
• JohnTP – 8 Simple SEO Tips for Blogs

Blogs have lots of uses.  They are great for viral advertising, news publication, syndication, and collection of public opinion about a topic.  You can have a personal blog to share photos of your vacations, a corporate blog for press releases, a news blog for niche news, and a host of other reasons to have a blog.  Blogs are an easy way for anyone to produce and consume any information about anything from anywhere. 

But blogs have taken off within corporations as well.  That is my interest here.  We have deployed a blogging pilot in the workplace, and I have become a big proponent.  At first it was part of my yearly objectives to help pilot and proliferate the use of blogs.  I have blocked time on my calendar twice a week for a half hour to post to my blog.  Now I am one of the most frequent bloggers in our pilot, and I blog both inside and outside the company.  I do this because I see such a value in the process.  Blogging is such an important tool in my manager arsenal, and I thought I would list the benefits of blogging from my experiences for the team and for the company.

Knowledge Sharing

Blogging inherently is a way to share information with its readers.    The writer composes the message, and it is consumed by many readers in the blogosphere.  These messages are (obviously) either bottom-up or top-down.  Bottom-up messages are written from the perspective of the line workers and low to mid level managers to express ideas or experiences they have had.  Top-down blogs are a way to deliver executive messages, such as strategic direction, corporate status, and announcements.  Blogs act as a written memory of events, lessons learned, experiences, successes, or announcements.  Blogs can also be a way to share expertise on a specific topic, such as data management, service oriented architecture, design patterns, or search engine optimization. 

Idea Solidification

The writer has to take the time to think about the message they want to deliver, collect their thoughts, organize them, and express them clearly.  That way the readers can read a focused message that delivers a clear and understandable message.  Blogs can also be a way to develop, solidify, and evolve an idea by posing a question, idea, or concept, and collect and narrow an idea through constructive comments. 

Project Management

Using a blog to document a project and its progress is a bit unorthodox.  Typically a wiki or another more collaborative environment is more appropriate.  But blogs are so easy to use, they make for a good medium to capture progress and communicate them easily.  Again, they act as a written memory of the project’s progress, successes, and lessons learned.

Cross Team Communication

Blogs are a great way to provide a medium for dynamic networks of conversations across teams.  These teams could be local or distributed, days, nights or weekends, and it will not matter.  A shared blog space will allow for ideas to be spread, information to be distributed, questions to be asked and answers to be shared.  Blogs crisscross people, departments, silos, grade levels, and experiences.

TeamBuilding

The simplest thing that blogs do is to bridge the boundaries of distance and culture by being always on, able to be shared and viewed at any time.  When launching a blog or posting a comment, a person takes themselves in written form and puts a bit of themselves out for everyone to look at, examine, scrutinize, comment on, and critique.  Successful corporate blogging creates an atmosphere of trust, so that people are not threatened, intimidated, or frightened to expose themselves.  Successfully sharing and collaborating this way fosters a spirit of participation that encourages people to continue to contribute their thoughts and ideas.  This leads to team learning and growth across the team, from within the team, and makes them stronger together. 

So what is your perspective on blogging within corporations, or blogging in general?  Is there value?  Is it a waste of time? Leave me feedback and let me know your thoughts.

Resources

• BCOM 522 – Corporate Blog Use: Internal, External and Beyond
• SearchEngineLand – Managing Search Marketing Campaigns With Social Media Tools
• Read/WriteWeb – Internal Corporate Blogging
• Global PR Blog Week – Internal blogs: How to design powerful conversations that open possibilities for action and collaboration within blogs
• Better Business Blogging – Internal Blogs: Benefits and Uses of Team Blogs 
• BlogTronix – Types of corporate blogs – Internal Blogs

The CodingHorror web site outlines why they think software development departments should perform code reviews in their article called “Code Reviews: Just Do It.”  Jared Richardson also describes the value of peer code reviews on his blog.  The basic reasons for implementing code reviews are obvious: reduced bugs, reduced rework, cross training, quicker ramp-up time, sharing of ideas, developer growth, mentorship opportunities, and team building.

Karl E. Wiegers has written a great article called “Seven Truths About Peer Reviews” available on processimpact.com that outlines a number of different methods to conduct your peer code review.  Some of the peer review methods methods he describes are inspection (both Fagan Method and Gilb/Graham Method), team reviews, walkthroughs, pair programming, peer deskchecks, and passarounds.  It’s a good read, and you should take a look.

Peer reviews do not need to be long, drawn out, complicated processes.  Jason Cohen describes some best practices for peer code review on his web site, SmartBear.com.  He has written a great looking book called “Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review” that you can order free on his site.  He recommends only reviewing code for five to ten minutes at a time, to keep everyone sharp, focused, and on point. 

You should definitely walk into your peer code review with a plan in mind.  Here is a Code Review Checklist for Macadamian that will help you organize your approach and keep you focused.

Finally, peer code reviews can be rough on the ego of the developer.  Here are “Ten Commandments of Ego-less Programming” based on Jerry Weinberg’s book , The Psychology of Computer Programming, from 1971.  This article describes how peer code reviews result in shorter project completion times, lower defect counts, and how developers had to set their egos aside to make it happen.

I am sure that code reviews will be good for my team, our projects, and our clients.  The hurdle is making them part of our development routine.  What do you think of code reviews?  Do you use them in your technology department?  What results have you seen?  Leave me feedback and let me know.

Do you see any other uses for a class like this?  Are there other products like this?  What are your thoughts about htmlSQL?

• Keeping the amount of code on the page low helps overall site maintenance and usability, focusing on your content. 
• Including CSS and JavaScript in external files increase content-to-code ratio as well as making your site easier to maintain. 
• Having validated HTML code will help the crawlers understand your site , as well as make your code compliant for maximum browser readability and performance.

For more information:

• Phoenix Realm – Why Clean Markup Matters To Your SEO 
• All Your Web – HTML to test Ratio
• SEO Workers – Isn’t the Code to Text Ratio Important for SEO?

My requirements for this feature are pretty simple:

• Something built in C#
• Something we can include in our projects
• Something that can be run as part of our build process
• Something that can be completely hands-free

So far, the only thing that I have found is the GoogleSiteMapProvider on the CodeProject web site. This project:

• [Is] instantly useable with the majority of ASP.NET applications
• [Is] a full ‘binary’ solution – no integration of code or compiling – just drop in a binary, modify the web.config and go
• [Is] extendable so that more complicated ASP.NET applications could redefine the provider without restriction

It seems like this is a great fit for our architecture. The solution was to have a single assembly with three main types:

1. An HTTP Handler which would return the XML on request (called GoogleSiteMapHandler)
2. A Provider Type (called GoogleSiteMapProvider)
3. A Controller class to glue the Handler and Provider together

This is a great place for us to start. The source code is available, it seems to fit my needs, and is simple to use.

Anyone else using something different? Do you have any other ideas? Have you found any other tools that might be useful for this? Leave a comment and let me know.

• Firebug – A great way to debug JavaScript, view the HTML source of the page, examine the page’s CSS, step through the page’s scripts, navigate through the DOM, and view all the HTTP requests the page has made.  Invaluable for any web developer.
• HTML Validator – “A Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.”  Great to easily see if there are any HTML validation errors, and what they are.
• Page Validator – “Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab.”
• IE Tab – “Easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.”
• User Agent Switcher – “Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.”  This is great for testing any user agent specific code for your site (for web analytics purposes, for example), i.e. spider filtering, crawler filtering, etc.
• Download Statusbar – Similar to the built in download statusbar, but is only visible when necessary, and is extremely compact along the bottom of the window. 
• PlainOldFavorites – “Use Internet Explorer Favorites directly from Firefox. No need to import, export or synchronize – the same Favorites appear everywhere.”
• del.icio.us Bookmarks – “This extension seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web.”
• Smart Digg Button – Uses the Digg API to determine if the current web page has been submitted to Digg.  If it has, it displays the current number of Diggs of the page. Click, and it takes you to the submission. If there are no Diggs, clicking takes you to the submission form.
• StumbleUpon – “StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.”

One of the other cool features built into Firefox is the ability to apply skins, which change the look of your browser.  Here is a list of my favorite skins:

• Classic Compact – “A very compact version of Firefox’s default theme, which minimizes vertical space consumed by menu, tool, tab, find and status bars as much as possible without hurting overall appearance.”
• Vista-aero – “The most IE7-like theme with Vista Aero style! Clear and cool! Based on myFirefox themes.”  Just in case you miss your Internet Explorer 7.

So what are your favorite Firefox extensions?  What do you think of Firefox in general?  I figure that between Firefox the Browser Wars winner and this list of my favorite Firefox extensions, I should get lots of comments.

SkillSurvey

So I got an automated email last week.  Big surprise, eh?  If you are like me, you get dozens of these a day.  This one was a little bit different.  It was from a company asking me to provide a reference for one of my old consultants.  That piqued my interest.  I opened it up, followed the link to SkillSurvey, and filled out the questions.  The simple instructions walked me through the process, and reassured me that my comments were anonymous and would be aggregated.  There were less than 10 questions, and were simple radio button scales.  I had the ability to put in freeform comments, and send it off. 

360Metrics

 Every other year, I have been encouraged by my management to do a 360 degree review of myself.  I log into 360Metrics and choose up to 3 direct reports, clients, peers, and managers.  Each of them receive emails to complete a set of predefined questions that rate and rank my skills on on a set of core values.  They are periodically reminded over the course of the review cycle.  When the review period closes, I receive an email and can generate an aggregate report of my ratings and comments. 

BrainBench

Every time I open up a requisition to find a new candidate for our team, I get a flood of resumes.  Eighty percent of those resumes have some sort of certification.  Most certifications we see are from Microsoft.  But some certifications come from BrainBench.  They offer certifications for individuals on a wide variety of specializations from Computer Software to Management, from Aptitude to Office Skills, from Communication to Industry Knowledge.  Obviously, the ones we see most often from BrainBench are technical in nature.  BrainBench also provides Pre-Hire Testing and Employee Development services to Employers.

Benefits

• These tools are simple to use
• The questions can be asked and are easy to analyze quantitatively
• The same questions are asked of all candidates, so the questions and the delivery are consistent
• They have open ended questions that allow you to analyze free-form text
• Since these tools are web based, they can be leveraged (both from the candidate and from the hiring manager) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Drawbacks

• The tools may not be measuring what you are looking for
• It is not difficult to “game” the system to produce phony or inaccurate results
• The perception of these tools is that they measure which candidate is “better” than another
• Some of these tools may give an advantage to good test-takers
• The process may be too objective, and not interactive enough

Conclusion

I think that these tools can be a big help, and a great time saver.  Tools like SkillSurvey leave the evaluation up to the hiring manager, and help facilitate and focus the collection of critical hiring information.  However, the risk of relying on tools like BrainBench is that you take the interpersonal aspect out of the process.  You may miss an enthusiastic, bright candidate who is a bad test-taker, or who has the right attitude, but a different set of experiences. 

I am sure that there are lots of other tools available in this arena.  What tools have you used?  What have your experience been with them?  How do you use them in your process?

• 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 out sites that use illegitimate or malicious SEO techniques
• Dramatically Improved “Snippets” – The site summaries have been improved and expanded in the search results page
• Much Bigger  Index – The index has grown to 20 billion pages – 4 times larger than before
• Smart Logic to interpret some keywords – for example NW and Northwest are the same

Take a look and see if you notice the difference.  Leave feedback about your Live Search experiences here.

This has some really interesting implications for Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics, and Web Site Development.  Optimizing a site to have each of its pages appear in a graph like this could have its site map generated dynamically.  Having a Web Analytics Dashboard where you could click on each of the pages, or series of pages, and view data relationships between them would be very powerful. 

Check it out and let me know what you think. 

• “You put tables in the head tag.”
• “Bold tags.  Bold tags go in the head tag.”
• “Dynamic content goes in the head tag.”
• And the only answer that we have gotten that was accurate… “the Title goes in the Head Tag.”
• None of the items (which I will not list here) that go in the Head tag were ever mentioned.

Typically, the delivery of this question is the Interview Killer.  People realize that this is an easy question, and that they should have answered this without problems, and get nervous, and the interview takes a dive from there. 

Do you have a question that is an Interview Killer?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman have also written two great articles in the Continuous Integration arena. ScottGu’s article was regarding Automating Environment Specific Web Config Settings. Scott Hanselman wrote an article about Managing Multiple Configuration File Environments With Pre-Build Events.

Take a look at these articles They are great reads.

The class was moderated by ROI Revolution.  They are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and AdWords Qualified Company, and offer webinars and training classes for Google products.  You can find more information about them on their web site. 

Essentially, Google Website Optimizer is a tool designed to track results of content changes to your web site before you commit to them.  It works in a similar way to Google Analytics – you tag your pages, your content blocks, your action items, and your goal pages.  Google Website Optimizer will then randomize your content or your page to test it how you choose. 

There are 6 different types of tests that you can use:

1. A/B Testing – this is essentially a test to determine if one page layout is more effective than another
2. Multivariate – this tests if different content blocks (copy blocks, headers, images, etc.) are more effective than others
3. Split Path – this will test if content changes will affect the navigation through your site
4. Multipage Multivariate – this test will measure if content changes on one page will affect navigation on other pages, and if there are any other cross-page interactions that change
5. Linger – this test is good for sites that have no clear conversion, and will measure time on the page instead of number of conversions
6. Anything – an open ended type of test, particularly if your site has multiple conversion points

There was also a brief demo on how you can intertwine Google Website Optimizer, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords to measure how changes in your page affect your AdWords advertising campaigns.

Did anyone else attend the session?  Has anyone used Google Website Optimizer?  Is this a tool that you would think is useful?

They recommend testing it yourself.  if you search for “search engine” and search for “search engines” you will get completely different results. 

I poked around some more, and found this great article on searchengineguide.com about plural vs. singular keywords.  Sumantra Roy outlined how each search engine handles the difference between singular and plural keywords.  And all twelve search engines reviewed have different results for singular and plural keyword searches. 

So there you have it.  When building a list of keywords, include singular and plural versions of keywords. 

From their web site:

This 60 Minute Free Webinar on Google Website Optimizer Will Cover:

• How to overcome the odds — continual website improvements you can do to slingshot past your competition.
• How to set up a test with Google Website Optimizer in 3 simple steps.
• 6 tests to run on your site with easy to follow example layouts.
• Key questions to ask yourself in order to use Google Website Optimizer for valuable improvements.

Special Google Guest: Tom Leung
Tom Leung is Google’s Business Product Manager for Google’s Website Optimizer. He was also a Business Development Manager for Microsoft from 2002 to 2004, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Don’t miss out on this special opportunity to hear Tom Leung speak live about the Google Website Optimizer tool!

Space is limited.  You can sign up on the ROI Revolution website.  I have.  It’s free.

You can also check out the Google Website Optimizer Beta Tool.

ASP.Net Controls

Tony walked us through the controls that we have not seen since our last volume release. He walked us through the Excel, XPS and PDF Exporters, with support for formulas and multiple tabs. There is also an Excel Importer control. I think we will have a lot of use for these controls in our internal projects. They explained the Calc Manager, which is an easy way to add Excel functionality (like a mortgage calculator) very simply to the page. They also gave us a demo of the new WebGauges graph controls. The demo he showed was 101 different variations of the radial gauge and the linear gauge. In terms of their roadmap, they will be supporting .Net 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 in the future, with both their native Ajax platform and with the ASP.Net Ajax platform from Microsoft.

WinForms

Since we do not work a lot on WinForms, we spent only a few brief moments on the new controls released since our last purchase. There has been a new WinDesktopAlert control (think “Toast Control”), which is a small popup window control, similar to the Outlook mail notification window, in the lower right corner of your screen. The second control they discussed is a new Ribbon control, which works within the ribbon functionality in Microsoft Office 2007.

XAM Showcase

Their XAM Showcase is the sandbox work that Infragistics is doing with WPF. They gave us a preview of their Carousel Control, Data Carousel control, and WPF charting controls. You can see some of their preliminary work at http://xamples.infragistics.com . These work with XBAP (or XAML Browser Applications), the browser based application model for WPF. MSDN has put together a great WPF XBAP video about it. And, if you are wondering what is the difference between XBAP and Silverlight, read this great forum chain on http://silverlight.net .

Silverlight

There are dramatic differences working with Silverlight 1.0 (which is still not released) and Silverlight 1.1 (which is much more exciting). In a nutshell, Silverlight 1.1 will come with its own lightweight version of the .Net Framework. This will provide more possibilities to the developer. And so it is with Infragistics. They are ramping up to leverage Silverlight 1.1. Their first set of sandbox controls will be a text box control, a graph control, and a scrolling toolbar panel control.

The meeting was very exciting, and I see lots of possibilities for future development. The controls I am most excited about are the Excel Exporter controls, the WebGauges, and the soon-to-be-developed Silverlight controls. What excites you about these new controls, or about the Infragistics roadmap?

• 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 Lawyers – It’s a Joke

Plus, here’s a bonus one I found… not really SEO related, but it pokes fun at Google and its search results. 

• Google Mistakes

Do you have any sources of SEO / Search Engine / Web Analytics Humor that I missed?  Post a comment and add it in!

Enterprise Product Roadmap

Office Suite

• The focus in the mid nineties was on productivity. Now that vision has been achieved, the focus has shifted:
  • Collaboration
  • Content Management
  • Search
  • Business Intelligence
  • Streamlined Processes
  • Portals

Windows Mobile

• The Windows Mobile team is working on delivering the following new features and functionality for the Tablet PC, Pocket PC, and Smartphone platforms:
  • Maps – Pocket Streets, MapPoint
  • Development Tools – Visual Studio, .Net CompactFramework
  • Security – ISA Server
  • Data Management – SQL Server CE, Notification Services
  • Content – MS Reader, Media Player
  • PIM and E-mail – Exchange, ActiveSync, Outlook
  • Thin Client – Terminal Services
  • Business Solutions – Great Plains, Microsoft CRM
  • Web Services – MSN Mobile, Pocket MSN, etc

Server System

• The Microsoft Server System is expanding, with a focus on providing solutions in these areas
  • Security Infrastructure – Refocus to make sure that security is first and foremost in Microsoft Server software.
  • IT Operations Infrastructure – Operations Manager, System center, want to manage software on the server, both applications and OS, after launch, for the enterprise.
  • Application Infrastructure – SQL Server, BizTalk Server
  • Collaboration Infrastructure – Exchange, SharePoint, Live Communications

Visual Studio

• Visual Studio 2008 is currently in Beta, and the improvements in the next version have been focused on the following trouble spots:
  • Team Collaboration
  • Performance and Analysis Tools
  • Secure Applications
  • Integrated Quality
  • Real Time Visibility

Business Solutions

• There are so many different silo and matrix products that Microsoft is working on that they were too numerous to deliver. Here is a list of a few that were mentioned briefly:
  • Axapta
  • Great Plains
  • Navision
  • Solomon
  • CRM

Partner Solutions

• Microsoft has connect with other suppliers, leveraging their experience and deeply embedded applications in their industries.
• They have worked out consulting services with these partners to leverage their experiences with Microsoft products

People Ready Business

• This is Microsoft understanding that they are not delivering their products and services to corporations, but to the people in those companies. Microsoft’s vision is to leverage their software and services to:
  • Advance Business with IT Solutions
  • Deliver Services Oriented Architecture
  • Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility
  • Protect Information and Control Access
  • Productivity Evolution

Enterprise Developer Roadmap

.Net Framework 3.0

• The next version of Visual Studio more tightly integrates the New Framework 2.0 Classes – WPF, WCF, WF, and CardSpace.
• It is not really as big a leap forward as the .Net 3.5 release will be.
• Why a small improvement gets a full release, and a big improvement will be a small release is a mystery except to the developers.

Visual Studio 2005, Team Studio, and Team Foundation Server

Visual Studio Team Studio has only been released since 2005, and will be getting a major overhaul with the next version.

• Transparency into project Status
• Manage Distributed teams and collaborate more easily
• Lightweight, agile process
• Integrated automated unit testing and improve software quality (similar to nUnit, nCover, FXCop, LoadRunner)
  • dashboard for results
    • bug discovery rate
    • code churn
  • database change management
  • integration
  • database unit testing
  • Process Templates – Agile and CMMI
  • Team Foundation Source Control – database based, not file based
• VS Team System 2008
  • Integration for Database professionals
  • AJAX support for web tests
  • Continuous Integration and build
  • improved testing performance
  • Newer code metrics (i.e. cyclomatic complexity, maintainability index)

Enterprise Library and Software Factories

• This is where Microsoft sees their biggest innovation. Writing software that will write software is not new… but implementing that idea on this scale is an interesting idea.
  • Reusable code library
  • Part of Patterns & Practices
  • Application Blocks
  • Wizards, Templates, Recipes
  • Metropolis Concept – Software Development mirrors Manufacturing
  • Templates
  • Software Factory is a way to leverage all of these pieces to generate tools, applications, web sites, etc. like a manufacturing plant

Popfly

• This is a cool web site that allows you to integrate a suite of services in new and interesting ways…
  • Service Mash-ups
  • Microsoft’s focus of software + services
  • The demo linked a Yahoo Image Search service with a Whack-A-Mole display service, and within a few clicks we were looking at a Whack-a-Terrell-Owens game
  • Can it be used Internally (Enterprise) as well as External (Internet)

Summary

This was definitely a long meeting! It was great to have Microsoft come in and walk us through their roadmap. This gives us great insight as to what is coming up next.

For me, a portion of the content was a repeat from the Microsoft Healthcare Conference in Atlantic City and from the Mix 07 conference in Las Vegas. Those conferences each had a Roadmap session, and discussed the future of Presentation, Communication, and Workflow Foundation, CardSpaces, and Silverlight. The Enterprise Product Roadmap that David covered was new material for me, and I was glad to see it. The idea of software factories was very interesting from the first time I heard David mention it a few months back, and hearing more piqued my interest again.

The most interesting topic to me, though, was the collaboration and continuous integration improvements in Team Studio. It looks like it is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was, and I would love to be able to pilot that with my team. Maybe that sounds like an objective for 2008… hint hint…

1. Introduction

Someone should meet the candidate at the receptionist’s desk. It is a good idea to have the hiring manager do this. Look them in they eye, introduce yourself, and shake their hands firmly. On the walk to the interview room, share some small talk about the weather and the drive. This gives you an idea if they will mind how far they will have to drive to work. It also gives you the opportunity to check out how they dress and how they carry themselves. Once you are in the interview room, let them know that the interview will be about an hour long. Ask them if they would like something to drink, and to get more comfortable. Introduce them to everyone that they are interviewing.

2. Discuss the Open Position

Once everyone has introduced themselves and gotten comfortable, the hiring manager should ask how much they know about the open position. It is good to discuss the company’s goals, the division or department you work for, the specific project they would be working on (or describe a typical project the department works on), and describe the requirements of the position.

3. Review the Candidate’s Resume

Be prepared with questions about job positions or projects listed on the candidate’s resume. Open the floor, and let all those participating in the interview ask questions. This may be about specific technologies or techniques of interest, corporate culture differences, or specific challenges that were overcome. Give the candidate the chance to show what they have done.

4. .Net Trivia

This section of the interview should be driven by your technical gurus. Getting the people involved that your candidate would work with, and giving them ownership of the interview process, gives them buy-in on the decision. The purpose of these questions is to judge the specific experiences of the candidate. They are not intended as the be all and end all of measuring knowledge, but should be geared to give you the interviewer a good handle of what the candidate has seen or done.

5. HTML / JavaScript / CSS Questions

It is not uncommon for .Net developers to be lacking in experience when it comes to HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript. Any good web developer will need to know these thing, however. If you are hiring for web development work, be sure to cover the basics, and make sure they understand how these all blend together.

6. General Interviewing Questions

In most cases, your candidate will not be working alone. Understanding how they work on a team is critical to their success, and yours, after they are hired. This is your opportunity to ask non-technical questions that focus on personality, teamwork, flexibility, communication, project management, leadership, and responsibility.

7. Whiteboard Questions

Ask your candidate questions that make them get up in front of a group, diagram their ideas, and explain why his ideas are the right approach. This will show you what the candidate is like when speaking in front of other people, like clients or project managers. You see their communication and persuasion skills, as well as their technical ability and diagram skills.

8. Puzzles & Riddles

This is a fun part of the interview. Be sure the candidate is relaxed, and make sure they understand that they are not expected to get the questions right. You give them a riddle or a puzzle, and have them talk through their thought process. This will give you an opportunity to see their creative, out-of-the-box thinking potential.

9. Questions from the Candidate

Expect questions from the candidate. If they have no questions for you, there may be cause for concern. They are not thinking very hard about what you have told them and about what might be coming next for them.

10. Wrap Up

Thank the candidate for their time. If possible, give them an idea about when they or their consulting company will hear back from you. Walk them back to the receptionist, and ask if they need any directions. Again, this will let you see how far in advance they have thought, how much hand-holding they will need, and how much they can think independently.

So what do you think of these steps? Are there things that I have missed that should be covered? What do you do differently (or the same) that you find valuable?

1. Define a Process

As an interviewer, one of my objectives throughout the interviewing process is to provide as much consistency as possible. Define a process that is consistent and repeatable. Then, when comparing one candidate to another, you will be comparing them win the same questions, with the same process. It will also mean that you are always prepared for the next interview cycle with little effort.

2. Write A Great Job Description

The Job Description that you write is what will let your recruiters, consulting companies, and candidates know exactly what you are looking for. It is important to list everything that you are looking for:

• Technical skills (i.e. – Visual Studio .Net 2005, ASP.Net Ajax, SQL Server 2005, etc.)
• Specific Education Requirements (i.e. – Bachelor’s Degree Preferred, etc.)
• Certifications (i.e. MCSD, PMP, etc)
• Methodologies (i.e. – SDLC, Agile, SCRUM, etc.)
• Years of Experience (i.e. – Junior level with 2 years experience or less, etc.)
• Project Management Skills (i.e. – 3 years managing projects with a budget of $1M or greater)
• Communication Skills (i.e. – Written, Verbal, Able to work with clients to collect detailed requirements, etc.)
• Other Intangibles – (i.e. – Energetic, “Do It Right” over “Get It Done”, able to work on multiple projects, etc.)

3. Offer A Competitive Rate

You need to know what the people you are looking to hire are worth. If you are not offering a competitive rate, then you will not be able to attract, obtain, and retain the talent you are looking for. If you can, research market rates for your open position, particularly with your competitors.

4. Follow A Proven Recruitment Process

Whether you have a business process for recruitment, have a third party company that manages it, work with recruitment and consulting companies, or post resumes on Dice and Monster, you need to get the work out about your open position and collect those resumes. These sources need to align with the types of candidates you are looking for. Some sources are for specific technologies or skills, so be sure what you are looking for and what your source can offer match.

5. Screen Your Candidates

Once your open position is posted, you will be flooded with resumes. With all the other things you are busy doing, it will be difficult to keep up with the influx. You will not be able to schedule face-to-face interviews with everyone. The best way to whittle down your pile of prospective candidates is to phone screen the candidates. Prioritize your candidates in the order in which you want to interview them. Then you phone screen them in groups of three to five at a time. The phone screens should be short, ask a wide variety of questions, and be sure the candidate meets the minimum qualifications. Be sure you stay consistent – ask the same questions, and stay with the same people screening the candidates. As you find candidates you want to see more of, schedule them for a face-to-face interview.

6. Script Your Face to Face Interview

You should have a planned script that outlines your face-to-face interviews. Knowing exactly what you want to cover in advance and following the script will keep the process consistent and make it easier to rate the candidates. The steps we follow to conduct an interview will be the topic of another post.

7. Plan your Questions in Advance

In the interview process, it is a good idea to have more than one person interview the candidate (it would be even better if you can interview your candidate all together). Write down your questions in advance and assigning certain sections of questions to each person. You can compile your questions from my .Net Hiring Managers Resource, or from your own resources. Make a worksheet of the questions, with space to jot down notes about their answers and your thoughts during the interview. It might help to come up with a rating scale of 1 to 10 to rate the answers you get. Again, this will make rating the candidate objective, consistent, and easy to gather and summarize the opinions of all the interviewers.

Have I missed anything? Do you disagree with anything here? What process do you follow? Do you have a best practice that you depend on that is not in these steps?

His recent post announces “Gatineau beta access request form online.”  Now you can go to his online form and request access to Gatineau Beta.  You will need to have an adCenter account.  If you do not, don’t worry – you will be able to register for one as part of the Gatineau Beta, but you will need to pay a $5 one-time fee. 

I have signed up for a beta account, and want to try it out on my blog Pixelated Views.  It will give me lots of great insight as to how it works and what its impact will be on Internet Marketing and Web Analytics. 

White Hat

SEO experts that follow the path of the White Hat are abiding by the recommendations laid out by the search engines, such as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines , Yahoo’s Directory Help, and MSN Live Search Site Owner Help.  By following these guidelines, your site will slowly climb through the ranks , and there will be no risk of being de-listed.  Most techniques for optimizing content, keywords, and meta tags fall into this category.  Typically White Hat optimizers focus on content and customer first, then optimization second. 

Black Hat

Black Hat SEO is on the other end of the spectrum.  These techniques, if discovered by search engines, will have your site removed from their index.  You will need to make changes to your site to bring you into compliance with their guidelines before they will accept your submissions again.  Black Hat Techniques may move you through the search engine indexes much quicker, but at a higher level of risk.  Techniques for Black Hat optimizers typically leverage techniques such as Google bombing, cloaking, and redirecting. 

Gray Hat

This is not quite what one would expect, i.e. the hat in between.  Gray Hat optimizers are a lighter shade of black more than a darker shade of white.  They are taking advantage of techniques that are not as well defined as Black Hat, or are too new to be well defined as Black Hat.  These SEOs are accepting more risk and using questionable or discouraged techniques, but are not banned by the search engines.  Techniques such as link farms, automated blogging, and gaming social media and web 2.0 sites. 

Your Hat

So the real difference between the different SEO hats is the amount of risk.  If you think about it, the hats are better explained as more of a continuum, with many Shades of SEO.  What are your thoughts about the risk vs. reward of SEO Hats?

1 and 2 – From Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman has two fantastic articles on .Net interview questions. One is called ASP.Net Interview Questions, and the other is called What Great .Net Developer Ought To Know, and the subsequently posted list of answers. This is basically version 1 and version 2 of the same idea. His second post breaks out his question ideas into increasing degrees of complexity and different job function specializations. The comments on these posts are almost as valuable (and some more so) than the articles themselves.

3 – From Marc Andreessen

If you are opposed to the idea of a list of technical (trivia) questions, here is a great article by Marc Andreessen called How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. If the name sounds familiar, it should… in 1992 while at NCSA he co-authored Mosaic (the first widely used web browser), and in 1994 he co-founded Netscape Communications. Marc focuses on the less technical traits that make a good candidate great. He discusses the importance of drive, curiosity, and ethics. He then discusses the importance of a process for hiring, and outlines six steps to find great candidates. This is an article you should read, re-read, and re-read again.

4 – Worse Than Failure

Worse Than Failure is a web site that collects, “Curious Perversions in Information Technology.” It houses a collection of really bad code snippets, bizarre error messages, and best of all – accounts of really bad interviews. Reading these continues to remind me why we have such a complex interviewing process. So far, my most favorite is this account of a telephone tech screening. The shame of it all is that this has happened to us in our department. A lot.

5 and 6 – From Amazon.com

Here are two great books that cover the gamut of good, hard, uncomfortable interview questions, and the kind of answers you might expect to see. The first is 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions. The second is Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions. I have chosen some great questions from these books when I was the interviewer, and have reviewed these books myself to prepare for an interview when I was the interviewee too.

7 – Brain Benders

Sometimes, depending on the type of candidate we are looking for, we like to ask the candidate to solve a number of puzzles or riddles. This is (or was) a common practice at Microsoft and Google. If done right, it can shed some light on the thought process of your candidate, even if they do not get the puzzle solved correctly. One source of these types of questions is a really great book called How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle – How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers. There are lots of other sources for this kind of material, both online and in print.

Which ones did I miss?

These are not the only good resources for interviewing by any means. These just happen to be the ones that our team and I can’t live without. What resources do you rely on to find a matching candidate for your needs?

1. The SEOMoz article Beginner’s Guide – What is SEO outlines the following topics: why a company would need SEO, how search engines operate, some basic design and organization mistakes to avoid, a discussion on relevance and popularity, some top content tips, the anatomy of a hyperlink, paid placement, Overture, keyword terms and targeting, usability, design, content authoring, community building, metrics to watch, pro vs. do-it-yourself SEO, and an enormous list of resources.

2. Big Oak Inc’s series called 52 SEO Tips releases a tip a week for all of 2007. Topics range from tech tips, tools, reviews, content guidance, SEO community terminology, techniques to avoid, and new perspectives.

3. SearchEngineLand wrote 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques on June 28. The article is targeted at small companies, and covers lots of simple yet effective do-it-yourself SEO tips that will help shoot your pages through the SERPs. Some tips include how to leverage site map pages, building SEO-friendly URLs, opening a pay-per-click account, and copywriting tips.

4. SEO And Your Website by Digital Web has 10 basic, solid tips on how to make your HTML content better suited for SEO. This article covers spiders, spidering, robots.txt, title tag, meta tags, JavaScript, page body content, page titles, mouse-overs, tables, bold tags, and strong tags.

5. ifergan’s 7 Advanced SEO Tactics include syndication, translation, ROR Sitemaps, keyword phrases, GoogSpy, internal content links, and how to leverage your server log files.

6. Entrepreneur’s Journey – The Top 16 Yahoo SEO Tips From A Yahoo Insider, written specifically to target the Yahoo search engine. This article covers whois and domain registration, dashes in your domain, inbound links, content update frequency, Yahoo Site Explorer, press releases, run of site links, SEO blog resources, tool usage, and long term planning.

7. Hobo – SEO / Internet Marketing Tips Round-Up has 10 additional tips articles and great articles on the Hobo web site to read and hold on to. These articles cover things not to do, valid HTML concerns, Google’s Supplemental Index, ethical marketing, and multiple browser testing.

All of this research would seem to indicate the downfall of Google, as this is their primary source of revenue.  Google is not in trouble.  A balanced approach to Search Engine Marketing is necessary for a healthy site, and I will show you why.

The Differences

To understand the difference between organic and paid search, read this great article by Adido Solutions, and this article by eWhisper.  They show you how to tell the difference on Google’s Search Engine Results Page, define what each of them are, and outline their advantages and disadvantages.  This article by iMedia Connection outlines the financial implications based on results. 

The long and the short of it is that SEO costs less, takes lots longer to work, and is less predictable.  PPC costs lots more, can start working for you in a very short amount of time, and has much more predictable results.

The Similarities

These articles do a great job of outlining the difference between SEO and PPC.  What they fail to do is show you the similarities between the two. 

Both advertising methods do just that – they advertise for you.  Whatever you want to advertise, whether it be web site or storefront, SEO and PPC advertise for you on the Internet.  They complement each other – where one drops off, the other picks up.  The big problem is that they both appear on the same page.  Why should I pay for both when they could appear together?

The Blended Approach

The key is to allow SEO and PPC to live together in harmony, as this article describes.  At the outset, your site has no search engine rankings.  The easiest way to drive traffic to your site is through paid advertising.  This is when you will lean on PPC the most. 

As your site matures, SEO will slowly improve, and so will your page rankings. Social Media and the PPC you bought will help your site along, and soon you will be listed highly in the Search Engine Results Pages.  Now you have momentum, and don’t need to depend on your PPC advertising as much.  You can decrease your PPC budget, and use it in other places of your company. 

Studies have shown, however, that if you are tops on organic search and tops on paid search, they work together and increase your traffic even higher.  This is for groups who have the ability to sustain a large online advertising budget.  Together, organic and paid search will push your traffic higher than ever before.  

1. Pick a specific topic

Your blog should already have a general topic.  Now you must narrow your topic and deliver a persuasive blog post.  Ways you can employ to be sure your post is by following these steps:

• Ensure your post adds value
• Make your post stand out in the crowd with a great hook and headline
• Ensure you go beyond the what and give the reader the how
• Use lists to deliver materials as they are easy to digest
• Tell you persuasive story as a problem with a solution and positive results

2. Pull them in with a great headline

Great headlines take time to write.  You should write your title first.  It is the lynchpin for your post.  Or, instead of writing your own, you can use swipe files (a common practice in journalism circles).  There are lots of great examples out there:

• Internet Marketing Tutor – Headline Swipe File
• Rent-A-List – Attention-Grabbing Headlines
• Rent-A-List - Sit Up and Take Notice
• CopyBlogger – 10 great headline formulas
• CopyBlogger – 7 more headline formulas

3. Write an opening that grabs them

The headline may be what draws in a reader, but it is the opening paragraphs that keep the user reading.  Great ways to open your blog are:

• With an intriguing question
• An anecdote or quote
• A mental image the reader can associate with
• An analogy, metaphor, or simile,
• An interesting statistic. 

4. Structure your post logically

Structural elements that will break up your posts into logical pieces will make them easier to read.  Clear subheadings are great ways to section off your posts into smaller ideas.  Bulleted lists or numbered lists are great ways to convey information that is easily understood.  People will scan your posts, so you must convey your idea quickly and keep their attention.

5. Transition smoothly

Keep your ideas in your blog posts running smoothly from beginning to end.  Use transitional words and phrases to connect one sentence to the next, and one paragraph to the next. 

6. Convey your message

You can convey your message many different ways.  Clear and concise copywriting is critical to get your message to your readers.  But you can use other techniques too.  Metaphors are like images; show just as much as they tell.  You, too, can lev