Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
Deborah Christie: Annual Website Maintenance Checklist Since I’m currently writing a bunch of procedures, this reminds me I’ll need to do these cleaning tasks on a formal basis at some point. A good site is supposed to more or less maintain itself or at least monitor itself and warn you about problems, but we’re not [...]
Baseline: New Balance: Shoe Fits Good case study if you’re interested in how IT can support business planning and retailing.
My buddy and (sleeping yet awake) business partner John "summer cold" Engler asks me to explain how I handled our change in URL structure last month at Up2Speed (2004 update: now called MarketingVox), so here we go. My first goal was to change our URL structure for individual archives from: http://www.up2speed.com/archives/name_of_entry.php#uselessnumber To: http://www.up2speed.com/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/name_of_entry/ You’ll recognize [...]
Jon Udell: "Take a test-driven approach, and your engineers will better design software and engage in risk-free refactoring. [...] TDD solves a different set of problems. It does so by proposing that before you write any nontrivial piece of production code, you write tests that the code will at first fail, and then when written [...]
In: best & worst practices|building online products|management & operations
24 Jul 2003BlackBeltJones neatly charted the whole process from idea to live web site neatly so I don’t have to.
In: best & worst practices|building online products|management & operations
10 Jul 2003Adaptive Path: "Every Web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities and implementing processes for design and development. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams I’ve encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct [...]
Heiko Hebig: "Inktomi Enterprise Search is now called Verity Ultraseek (as much as Raider is now called Twix). So far so good. Why bother? Well, the inktomi.com web site used to be the host of all support and FAQ pages for the search product. And no one at Verity seems to care that all support [...]
Jon Udell: "It’s all about transparency, of course. There’s no reason not to share this information with travelers. I suspect, though, that the decision to do so did not come easily. Was there internal debate about whether passengers should really be allowed to see all this realtime data?" Jon explains how Delta does a great [...]
Check out this MSN8 screenshot. Look at the ratio between real content and useless cutesy bloat. Actual content is actually left with a minor part of the screen. "You can customize all three columns on your page". No kidding? Can I remove all the visual junk too? Microsoft tries to deliver a task-based Internet package, [...]
In: best & worst practices|building online products|living worldwide
8 Nov 2002Compare Canon’s web site about digital cameras in the USA and in Europe. We Europeans have to suffer through this long page that makes it almost impossible to tell apart products from each other, while the US site gives a good overview of their two consumer ranges, plus a small upselling option to the SLR [...]
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.