- Manually submit your website to the major search engines. Write and submit articles to the article directories.
- Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
- Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
- Add an RSS feed to your blog.
- Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com
- Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.
- Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.
- Start your own newsletter or ezine.
- Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.
- Start a lens on Squidoo Homepage and HubPage
- Upload video’s related to your site on www.youtube.com or a other video site and add your link in the description.
- Network with other people at seminars or other live events.
- Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.MySpace.com.
For sure I can add more but I think 13 is a good number. Maybe next time I write 13 more tips )))
August 16th, 2008
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a framework for describing and managing business and IT assets. At the implementation end of the SOA continuum, the architecture groups software-based services that can be loosely coupled into one or more functioning applications.
Progressive organizations want to cultivate an agile environment in which business and IT are able to collaborate and communicate efficiently with each other and among themselves. IT solutions must be evaluated to understand how they contribute to strategic business objectives. To achieve this, IT must reach beyond business models and technologies and see how their efforts help deliver cost-effective solutions that satisfy numerous stakeholders.
SOA approach can successfully unite business and IT in an agile environment. By empowering historically isolated teams to collaborate in the description and analysis of business strategies and technologies, as well as in the design and implementation of IT systems and solutions, SOA promotes organizational goals and objectives.
August 9th, 2008
The new meaning of this blog’s name could be found on Business of Software 2008 Conference on September 3-4, 2008.
The speakers include:
• Seth Godin
• Eric Sink
• Steve Johnson
• Richard Stallman
• Paul Kenny
• Tom Jennings
• Dharmesh Shah
• Mike Milinkovich
• Jessica Livingston
• Jason Fried
• Joel Spolsky
How is it related to this blog?
The conference will be held in a new format that is called Pecha Kucha.
Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chatter”) applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. Each one is shown for exactly 20 seconds and then flips automatically. At the end, even if you’re almost done and just have one more thing, the mic cuts off and you sit down.
It sounded like a good idea. Speakers have to plan very carefully and rehearse repeatedly to make sure their speech is going to synchronize correctly with the slides, which makes for a more polished speech. They have to edit mercilessly to boil their subject matter down to 400 seconds, which makes it more interesting and dynamic.
I wish everybody to be there.
August 3rd, 2008
As with most things in life, there is no single right or wrong way to approach a problem. There are usually many different ways to tackle the same problem. So, when attempting to design an OO solution, don’t get hung up in trying to do a perfect design the first time. What you really need to do is brainstorm and let your thought process go wild. Do not try to conform to any standards or conventions when trying to solve a problem, because the whole idea is to be creative. Thus, before you start to design a system, or even a class, think the problem through and have some fun! In this article, we explore the fine art and science of OO thinking.
The move from the procedural world to an OO world is not trivial. Changing from FORTRAN to COBOL, or even to C, requires that you learn a new language; however, making the move from COBOL to C++, C# .NET, Visual Basic .NET, or Java requires that you learn a new thought process. This is where the overused phrase OO paradigm rears its ugly head. When moving to an OO language, you must go through the investment of learning OO concepts and the corresponding thought process first. If this paradigm shift does not take place, one of two things will happen: Either the project will not truly be OO in nature (for example, it will use C++ without using OO constructs), or the project will be a complete object-disoriented mess.
Three important things you can do to develop a good sense of the OO thought process:
- Know the difference between the interface and implementation
- Think more abstractly
- Give the user the minimal interface possible
July 23rd, 2008
I’ve found a very interesting article describing a new approach in the project management. The Author (Bas de Baar) tries to implement the modern theory of Panarchy to the software development cycle.
Wikipedia says the following:
Panarchy, a term devised to describe evolving hierarchical systems with multiple interrelated elements, offers an important new framework for understanding and resolving this dilemma. Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.
So applying this idea to the software development we receive this:
Within Panarchy a system is going through four stages: growth (r), conservation (K), release (O) and reorganization (a).
(I have taken the descriptions of the stages from “Assessing and managing resilience in social-ecological systems: Volume 2 supplementary notes to the practitioners workbook“, which can be freely downloaded from the Resilience Alliance - bottom of the page).
- During the growth phase the system finds an abundance of resources available. Expansion and exploration of new opportunities are key concepts within this stage. “When new ecological spaces open up - due, for instance, to forest fires, or retreating glaciers, or many other things- resources needed for other species to grow are made available. There’s more light reaching the soil surface when large trees are toppled, or burned to the ground, for example.”
- “The r phase is transitory, and as the system matures, it is replaced by the K phase. Eventually slower growing, long lived species or entities enter the system. Resources become less widely available as they become “locked up”… The K phase is sometimes called the conservation phase, because energy acquired goes into maintaining or conserving existing structure, rather than building new structure. In this phase, a few dominant species or companies or countries … have acquired many of the resources and are controlling the way they can be used.”
- “Often systems rapidly pass into a phase called omega. This is also referred to as the release (or creative destruction) phase because structure, relationships, capital or complexity accumulated during the r and K phases is released (often in a dramatic or abrupt fashion). … Plants may die … or a company may go bankrupt, releasing workers and decommissioning factories or offices.”
- “The fourth, or alpha phase, is a period of reorganization, in which some of the entities previously released begin to re-structure but not necessarily as they were before. This phase can mark the beginning of another trip through an adaptive cycle … Many new entities may enter the system, and innovation becomes more probable.”
The adaptive cycle describes a system that has periods of stability and period of heavy change.
By the way I have almost no idea how this theory can be used in real software development projects…
July 22nd, 2008
Agile became a kind of a brand and I meet software development companies that state that they according to Agile principles but have no idea what they are speaking about.
So I decided to return to Agile manifesto and find that principles. Here they are. Hope this was useful:
1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
- Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
- Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
July 21st, 2008
Portals are usually more complicated that sites. Even the sites of big companies and corporations. So, here are some factors that can lead to collapse of even good portal project:
- Leaving Maintenance Planning for Post Production
- Designing from Back to Front
- One Stop Shopping
- Too Much Too Soon
- Complexity for the Sake of Consistency
- Misallocated Outsourcing
- Random or Pure Agile Approaches
- Looking Inward for Direction
- Politics
- Combining SOA and Portal Initiatives
July 18th, 2008
Programming and Sex are very alike. Here are some statements that can prove this:
- One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
- Everyone acts like they’re the first person to come up with a new technique.
- Sometimes it’s fun to use expensive toys.
- You can do it for money or for fun.
- Once you get started, you’ll only stop because you’re exhausted.
- One little thing going wrong can ruin everything.
- It’s a great way to spend a lunch break.
- Beginners do a lot of clumsy fumbling about.
- You’ll miss it if it’s been a while.
- There’s always someone willing to write about the only right way to do things.
- It doesn’t go so well when you’re drunk, but you’re more likely to do it.
July 16th, 2008
Computers used in business applications have changed. In the beginning of IT- era they were room-sized centralized mainframes, now they turns into small client-server systems based on a microprocessor. The characteristics of these systems also have changed: from bites to terabytes. Today it’s hard to believe that some decades ago the computer marketing brochures listed below were astonishing and innovative.
1. SDS 900 Series: A new generation of low cost general purpose digital computers (1962 year)
2. 16K Ram Card that turns your computer into a working giant! 
By the way prices were giant too: from $495 to $795 for different models.
3. Cool Executerm I. You could buy this remote data terminal for the time sharing computer between 1970 and 1979.
4. Super 16 Bit Microcomputer.
Two bytes are better then one. Really
5. Email. The beginning of the great way.
July 8th, 2008
Some basic advice about how to optimize for search:
Make sure your keywords appear on your site, and do what you can to encourage others to link
Regulars to Internet developers probably know the basics well. But with many people engaging in small businesses, with little time to research outside the needs of their operations, the need to know about SEO could fall outside the daily to-do list.
A good advice is to make sure the main keywords make it into the title and description tags; modern web development software helps one fill in those blanks. The keyword meta tag, a one-time staple of being indexed, receives little weight in the engines these days.
Don’t get carried away with the keywords; two or three mentions on a page will be enough. Too much may flag a page negatively for keyword stuffing, putting one’s site rank at risk.
July 2nd, 2008
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