I was mooching around the Home Document Manager wordpress back end today when a thought struck me – I hadn’t seen any core or plugin updates for a while. After a bit of investigation, I noticed that 2 plugins had enabled themselves (or had been enabled by some other actor); namely “Disable Wordpress plugin updates” and “Disable Wordpress core updates”. I have never used these plugins so was understandably perplexed by their presence.

After disabling them, all maner of plugin and core updates appeared. I’m not sure if this represents anything sinister, but it’s certainly odd. Anyone else noticed this behaviour?

I’m learning.

Like a lot of micro ISV‘ers, copywriting is not my strong point, but, I stumbled across an interesting way to boost traffic to the Home Document Manager blog. When I issue an update, which can be as frequently as once a week, I found I was making a series of posts with repetetive, uninspired titles – “Update Released,” “Minor Update Released” etc. Then, for one of my updates, I wrote a small piece explaining some of the issues with TWAIN. The post was entitled “Ne’er the TWAIN shall meet,” an obvious reference to Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West.”

Suddenly, instead of a dull and uninteresting nuggat about an update, this small, boring post, became the most popular post on the blog. The main traffic sources were people searching for the quote, so it wasn’t highly targetted traffic, but since these kinds of posts would seldom attract traffic anyway, untargetted traffic has to trump no traffic. It can’t hurt my Google standings either, since the post makes a reference to Kipling, as well as the TWAIN specification. The double entendre is an interesting way to get a free traffic boost. Take this post for example, I wonder if it will start ranking for the “Tales of The Unexpected” TV series??

The second unexpected traffic source came from a review I wrote about my new shredder. This too became the hottest post on the blog, and is still pulling in 3 times more traffic than any other post or page. This is different because it is, of course, pretty highly targetted traffic. I’ve gone on to publish a review of one of the Scansnap scanners to see if I can replicate the earlier success. I guess this goes back to one of the first principles of micro ISV blogging – blog about things your customers are interested in.

The Wordtracker SEO Blogging plugin for Firefox is the perfect companion for any SEO conscious blogger. You supply it with search terms or phrases, and it provides you with keywords. You can then add your chosen keywords to a list, and the plugin will monitor how many times these keywords appear in your post.

If like me you struggle with copywrighting, these little free tools can often make a world of difference. I’m using the SEO Bloggin plugin and Zemanta for this post, how am I doing?

Related articles by Zemanta

• SEO Blogging Tools (yoast.com)
• Five Unavoidable Firefox Add-ons for Search Engine Optimization (cutewriting.blogspot.com)
• Zemanta – the Coolest Application for Bloggers I Have Seen (change-management-blog.com)
• How Much Should Journalists Know about SEO? (poynter.org)
• For Love or Money: How to Find the Blogging Sweet Spot (blogworldexpo.com)

After a couple of hiccups, the blog appears to have migrated across from Typepad. Good riddance. What was I thinking? The only thing I’ll miss about this blog’s former host is sitting on the Typepad update stream which flies straight into Google. I’m hoping the great Google Juice will persist now, even though I had 404’s on the permalinks for a  day.

I’m probably not going to port the images across, just because, well, this blog isn’t the highest priority. Day job, micro ISV and my offshore consultancy gigs all take precedance, but I’m looking forward to being able to get back to blogging here again.

If everything goes smoothly, this will be the last post I make to this blog whilst hosted on Typepad. I’m attempting to port it across to Wordpress on Dreamhost to live with all my other sites.

I’ve
used Wordpress a lot recently, and now understand its total superiority
to Typepad in pretty much every regard. My $150 renewal fee is due in a
couple of days, which has focused my mind somewhat. This blog has great
Google Juice, and I really don’t want to give that up, so I’m
particularly keen to keep the URLs the same. There are quite a few
posts on the web about how best to do this, they all seem different

If anyone’s done this recently, please share your wisdom.

See you on the flip side.

Seldom
does a change in day job generate a vast amount of excitement for the
professional freelancer. It’s always interesting to move to a new
project, overcome new challenges etc., but an office is an office and a
project is a project.

I set the backdrop to illustrate by counterpoint just how psyched I am about what I’m going to be doing. As of next week, I will be working for Microsoft Research on the Chem4Word project. I’ll be based in The Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at Cambridge University. My passions for science and software have never clashed like this – I quite literally cannot wait.

In
case you missed its arrival, GetSatisfaction is a really nice web app
focused on facilitating open conversations between businesses and
customers on a level playing field. The essence of Jason’s complaint on
the 37Signals blog is this:

I’m going to use (everyone’s friend) Bob Walsh as an example. Bob’s awesome task management application, MasterList Professional is sold by his company, Safari Software
Inc. Now, let’s say that Dave, a customer of Bob’s pops across to the
GetSatisfaction website. He searches for Bob’s company but can’t find
it. Now here’s the interesting part; Dave can, without Bob’s knowledge,
set up a support site for Safari Software and MasterList, and ask a
question on it.

So what does Bob do? Nothing. Why? Because he has
no idea that this unofficial support site exists, let alone that one of
his customers is asking for help there. Now that doesn’t seem like a
nice state of affairs does it?

That wasn’t the only (or even the
main) problem. On Bob’s unofficial support site, GetSatisfaction might
use Bob’s company name, even his logo, making it seem quite official.
What really rubbed Jason up the wrong way, was the badge that
GetSatisfaction placed on the GetSatisfaction website.


Clearly the suggestion is that if you’re not signed up for GetSatisfaction, you’re not doing open the open conversation thing.

This
has been something on my mind since I started using the service. I do
use GetSatisfaction for Home Document Manager, and I like it. It’s a
good app, and integrates well with product websites. But there has
always been a subtle undertone of ‘participate here or be excluded’.

To
participate fully on GetSatisfaction, you also need to get a premium
account, and they’re not cheap. In fact, they’re pretty pricey,
especially for a micro ISV.
Their basic plan starts at $99/month. They used to offer a $49/month
starter subscription, but I couldn’t find it just now, there has been a
bit of a redesign, so it may have vanished altogether.

But
whether the price was $49 or $99 per month, it would still be the
single biggest outlay after my office. And that just doesn’t
seem….right. $49/year and I would sign up in a heartbeat, but $49 is
insanely pricey, for what it is. And $99/month is just….silly.

If
GetSatisfaction are truly comitted to facilitating open conversations,
they should offer all companies a free, single user pro account, so
that small companies can compete on the ‘level playing field’ that
GetSatisfcation seems so keen on. If they got the buy in from startups,
they would no doubt make the income as the startups grew.

They
offer a good service, but I think that a single free pro account to
each company would go a long way to losing the “mafioso protection”
image that Jason was writing of.

…I’ve just added one to Home Document Manager.

.Net isn’t renowned for it’s cold startup times, and WPF
apps start like standard .Net app after a horse tranquilizer. Home
Document Manager has an ever increasing list of assemblies that it
needs to import at startup and that takes time. This is on top of the
whole WPF stack.

.Net 3.5 SP1 introduced a new SplashScreen
class. You can set the SplashScreen by adding an image to your project
and setting its build properties, or you can use the class directly. I
find this new class a little flaky, as it can throw exceptions under
certain circumstances if it loses focus.

It does raise the question of what to show on a splash screen. Just a fancy graphic/logo? Version info? Website info?

I’ve been on the scout for a nice way to capture, prioritise, schedule and track tasks. My requirements were fairly simple –

• Be able to capture tasks quickly
• Be able to prioritise tasks
• Be able to schedule tasks
• Be able to track tasks
• Must integrate with my Blackberry.

I had a look at a few solutions, but the one that really impressed
me was Remember The Milk. Let’s skip past the hyperbole and dig
straight down to why I like it.

Remember
The Milk (RTM) allows you to create as many lists as you like. I have a
quite minimalist approach to lists, but in your Task view, they are
simply tabs:

If tags are more your thing, you can add any number of tags to a task, and there’s a helpful tag cloud for familiar navigation.

Task details are easily set:

RTM integrates with GMail (including Google Apps). This wasn’t a
requirement by any means, but considering that it’s one of my most
visited web pages, it was a most welcome addition.

Tasks are easily prioritised and colour coded.

I
would heartily recommend that you spend a few minutes to become
familiar with the keyboard shortcuts, they will dramatically improve
the speed with which you can use the site.

The RTM web interface
is good and I use it every day, but it’s strength is in its
integration. It integrates with my Blackberry (yay!), Windows Mobile, GMail, Google calendar, iGoogle, iPhone/iPod Touch, standard mobiles and Twitter. You can receive reminders via email, SMS, and instant messenger (AIM,
Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype and Yahoo! are all
supported). In other words, you would be hard pressed to not be on top of your task list.

Some
of the integrated services are available only to pro account holders
(of which I am one) – but considering the price tag – $25/year – I
would say benefit to cost ratio is sky high, so why not sign up for a free account and give it a whirl.

What do you use for task management?

Yesterday I released Home Document Manager to rapturous silence. A familiar phenomenon for micro ISVs
with little or no marketing budget. What interested me was the
difference between the two web sites (www.convert2xps and
www.homedocumentmanager.com). Convert2XPS is a Joomla! site, and Home Document Manager uses Wordpress.

Here’s a bit of a breakdown of the structure of both sites:

Convert2XPS

• Convert2XPS uses Joomla! v1.5.9, which is the latest release.
• I bought a commercial template from JoomlaShack for around $40. A very good company to deal with and a well designed template.
• I installed various boilerplate extensions to add some basic functionality, like Joomap, Linkr etc.
• I also bought a commercial support ticketing system called Billets, by Discouri for around $90 with 12 months of updates.

There’s no blog on the Convert2XPS site [insert headshaking], although there are blogging components available.

Home Document Manager

• Home Document Manager uses Wordpress 2.7.1, which is the latest release.
• Wordpress has an excellent pedigree in the templates division, and
  I customised one of the inbuilt designs. Easy to do, although it’s
  currently mangled in IE6.
• I installed the usual suspects; All in one SEO pack, Google XML Sitemaps etc.
• In place of a support forum or ticketing system, I’ve decided to
  give GetSatisfaction a whirl. I’m very impressed with what they’re
  doing, and the site integration is good. The basic (free) version that
  I’m using at the minute is probably a little too crippled for long term
  use, but rather than install a forum plugin or ticketing system, I’m
  giving it a try.

And as you would expect of any site based on Wordpress, there’s a blog.

Verdict

As
I’ve now been through the mill and produced two ‘OK’ sites, I’ve formed
a pretty good impression of both Joomla! and Wordpress. I think a good
way of summing up would be:

- Joomla! is a solid CMS with blogging capabilities.
- Wordpress is a blog with CMS capabilties.

A bit of a nonesense, but you know what I mean. For a typical micro ISV,
I personally think Wordpress is better suited as a lightweight CMS. As
you can set a page as the site home, and another page as your blog
home, getting it to function as a CMS is a breeze. I’ve found the back
end administration much more pleasant in Wordpress too. The “Turbo”
function (which caches scripts and CSS) is a good touch, and really demonstrates attention to detail.

Whenever you’re going to put your eggs in an Open Source basket, community matters. And I think Matt Mullenweg’s stances on what Open Source should mean have perplexed some, but have undoubtedly benefited to community as a whole.

Next time you build a web site, why not give Wordpress a try as your CMS?