ericm’s Web Resources Blog

I have been reading recently that content is no longer king in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google is still the king of search and we have heard nothing from them to indicate that this is the case. I can say from experience that to get listed by the search engines is what brings the initial traffic in. But the web is and has always been about people. If you have a sight that offers information that people need they will continue to visit. They will also tell their friends. Content is still king and will always be.

It takes years of hard work to grow and build a site. Build and maintain a site because you have a passion for the subject matter. If you are just in it for some “get rich” quick scheme forget it. Your chances of success are nil.

With the explosion of mobile technology and the digital revolution we find ourselves living in a time right out of the pages of what was merely science fiction a generation ago.

These are times where the technology exists but our imagination is waning. Slowly we creep forward in terms of what we deliver to the plugged in world while the technology continues to fast forward.

It was not that long ago that we paid twenty dollars for blank video tape that allowed us to record up to three hours. It was marvelous and now it is obsolete. Many of us have/had parents and grandparents that grew up in an age before television. Now we live an era when you can watch a movie on a device that fits in your pocket.

…An age when the telephone is also a gps, a music player, a mini computer, oh, and a phone. Come quick watson…  

Dick Tracy wrist watches are here and what do we do with them? We text others while we are driving, we instance message the answers for world peace. Calls are free, but ‘how r u’ costs us .28 cents plus state and local taxes and surcharges.

Technology is grand, exciting. It holds so much promise. It also now employees so many of us. It is hard to remember just what it is we did before we all owned a laptop. How unproductive we must have been. What it was once like standing on a mountain top watching the sun set without the possibility of our ass ringing.

In twenty years in the software profession I have seen alot. In all this time I would have to say that a comment trend across the years is people not using the correct or most productive tool for the job.

One should not wait or expect their employer to buy them their tools. Now before you get all huffy over this consider the follower. When a carpenter shows up on the job site he/she is expected to bring their own tools. Conversely, carpenters would not want his shop dictating (within reason) the tool they use.

What I meant by “within reason” are things like you can bring and use whatever circular saw you want, but for productivity reasons you need a circular saw as a handsaw just will not cut it today.

Certainly business should let us use the tools that make us most productive. A business that restricts the software its staff can use is making a huge mistake. I use UltraEdit for my text editor. I use dbOrchestra when I am doing database development in Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL. I really don’t want anyone telling me I can’t use my own tools. Tools like these should fit you like a glove. They are also robust and have a sizeable learning curve. I would likely not take a job in a shop that did not offer me some flexibility over the software I was allowed to use to get my job done.

Yes, we need to look to long term solution to reduce our dependency on oil and foreign oil. Duh! But today we can seriously and significantly minimize the problem today.

Go to Stop Oil Speculation website and fill out their form to email to your congressman. Url, http://capwiz.com/sosnow/issues/alert/?alertid=11571321 . Do not let them asking for your phone number deter you. I you don’t want to supply one just make one up. This is too important an issue to sit on the side lines for.

Also, please pass this information to others!

If you want more scoop airline customers received a letter with very solid information on the subject. I have excepted below…

“Twenty years ago, 21 percent of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66 percent of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.Over seventy years ago, Congress established regulations to control excessive, largely unchecked market speculation and manipulation. However, over the past two decades, these regulatory limits have been weakened or removed. We believe that restoring and enforcing these limits, along with several other modest measures, will provide more disclosure, transparency and sound market oversight. Together, these reforms will help cool the over-heated oil market and permit the economy to prosper.”

i am in the throes of writing a webapp to allow contributions to one of our sites. We have five active sites so i also had as a goal to be able to apply my efforts readily and quickly to the other sites.

Now any of you that have written business applications know how hard this can be. Business apps are challenging if merely for the fact that it is hard to abstract design that tends to be unique to a specific business problem. i remember the rage of insanity in the nineties over products like Rationale Rose. The industry claimed any knucklehead could draw some stick figures and workflows, push a button and a working app would magically appear. Well we all saw how well that worked. In any case, it did not work all that well because it is just plain hard to abstract code in a way so it can apply to a myriad of varying business functions.

Of course when we fail at achieving an optimal and rapid development methodology we do what any self-respecting development people do…we dime out the technology we are using as being inadequate. But is this really the case?

i mean how many times have you heard a master craftsman say “that table wouldn’t look like such a piece of shit if i had better tools to use. Are the tools we use really inadequate…or maybe we could use a good look in the mirror?

i know i spent the past three weeks writing the data entry segment of my app four times, only to throw it four times on the proverbial scrap pile four times before i got it right (or at least the way i wanted it).  It would have been real easy to have thrown in the towel and compromised. Heaven knows i wanted to on multiple occassions.

In the end (at least for this round) it was clear that the technology was more than adequate. Rather it was the user (that would be me) that wasn’t properly utilizing it.

While i would agree that there is great deterioration of content quality past page five, there are some real unknown gems out there. Below are some still relatively unknown sites. I would be interested in hearing about other quality content sites that are not well known.

Personal Finance

www.EveryDollarMatters.com

Technology

Misc - www.AnglesAndDangles.com

SQL - www.SQLInfo.net

Java Education (so far) - www.Java-J2EE-Development.com 

I use a laptop that cost me under $600.00 for a lot of my computing. It is by far the most powerful machine I have ever had.

This revelation caused me to to drag a 1992 Computer Shopper out of the attic. The title “SNEAK PEEK! Microsoft Windows 3.1″ … “Notebooks Priced To Go - Eleven 386SX PCs Under $2,000″.

A 386SX desktop could be had for the bargain price of $1,400 and included

• 2mb RAM
• 105mb hard drive
• 1.44 and 3.5 floppy
• 14″ SVGA monitor
• Windows 3.0
• DOS 5.0

Buying a new 105mb drive would set you back around $350.00. Yes, mb is correct. And, yes for the RAM mb is also correct and if you wanted to upgrade would set you back around $150.00. CD rom players were new on the horizon and we won’t even go into what you had to pay for a 4x read-only drive.

:-)

Yet in many cases it is the implementation that deserves the blame. The fate and perception of database enterprise applications more often than not rests upon facets of the implementation (tailoring, training, general migration from the old software to the new, etc…).

I have been guilty (as an end user) of bashing software that did not deserve the bash. I remember complaining about how pathetic PeopleSoft ERP was a few years back. A person I was with at the time Frankie L. called me on the carpet. He said PeopleSoft ERP was good stuff and that we apparently did a pathetic job in implmenting it.

He took each of my specific gripes (won’t trouble you with the details) and showed me how the problem was implementation and not the product itself.

I just can’t help but have this love hate thing going with open source software. I suppose open source just lends itself to this kind of attitude. Today I was thinking if there was a company out there that gave away free TV’s what the rest of the TV market would look like.

I do not know if you have ever seen or used the open source software Open Office. It is free, very robust, and for at least 95% of us users out there provides the same functionality and ease of use as Microsoft Office. It has been around for awhile as well. Yet Microsoft still dominates the Office Software (Spreadsheet, Word Processor, Presentation) market.

Getting handicapped children to carry bombs into public areas, and then detonating them remotely.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6889106/

How noble can ones cause be that they could ever justify doing something so awful?