I’ll be away for a few days, so posting will be slow.

The MagnaCRM logo is (almost) ready! I don’t have the final files yet, but here is a preview:

Hope you like it! Logo shopping was fun. I’ll write a more thorough post about the whole procedure, after I have the Rapid Signal logo (in a week or so).

WorkHappy.net has resources for entrepreneurs: service reviews, product reviews, pointers to interesting articles / ideas / podcasts etc. In their own words:

WorkHappy.net is a labor of love for fellow entrepreneurs, sole proprietors, freelancers, consultants, lone wolves whathaveyou.

You can suggest resources to them, so if you use any tool others would find useful take a moment to submit it.

NGEDIT software is one of the ISVs whose blog I follow. They just released ViEmu, an add-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 that emulates the vi/vim input model within Visual Studio.

I am not very good at vi (and don’t use VS.NET for that matter), but I find this exciting as NGEDIT software is the first ISV who releases a product after I started following their progress.

Congratulations and best of luck!

The survey was running from June 20 to July 23 and the results are now online.

These are the 7 questions that were asked:

1. Which registration service are you using?
2. Which of the following marketing methods are you using? (Multiple-choice question)
3. What is your monthly AD budget?
4. Which affiliate program service are you using?
5. Where are you from?
6. How old are you?
7. Are you a full time shareware author?

Interesting points:

• Digital River’s market share in e-commerce services is 60% (owners of share-it, SWREG, RegNow etc).
• Only 21% of shareware authors is US based. I thought that number would be higher.
• 73% spend some money on advertising.

I used to play lots of games when I had more time. I remember I had invested ~300 hours into a MUD in a single summer.

Now I play rarely on my PS2 but sometimes I try simple Flash games. Here is the best list of good, tried Flash games I have found. Lots of games that take no more than 15-20 minutes to play. Some are pretty advanced too.

Normally, I use my text editor (UltraEdit) for writing PHP, HTML and CSS. As the amount of CSS I write has increased lately, I wanted to check for a better solution.

Then I remembered TopStyle, an editor marketed as being specialized in CSS. Some months ago I had participated in a PHP contest (by Codewalkers) and had won a copy of TopStyle. I hadn’t tried it until yesterday.

It’s a really good editor, at least for CSS. It has some killer features like integration with the w3c validators and a style checker that validates CSS against different browsers. So you can see the quirks of every browser against each selector and property / value combinations you use. Finally it supports both Gecko based browsers and IE for previewing (offering a cool side by side full screen preview mode).

I know people who are fanatical about backups. I am not one, probably because nothing bad has ever happened to me. Thinking I would like this to stay that way, I decided to revamp my backup policy.

This is what I used to do: Backup everything important to an external hard disk about once a week. This includes my projects (current and past), Subversion repositories, MySQL databases, mail archives etc. Once or twice a month I would create DVDs containing the latest backup. Occasionally I would move one such DVD to an offsite location (relative’s house).

Obviously this wasn’t a very good strategy, so I made some changes today:

1. I created a script to completely automate the backup process (before it was a half done script and manual copying!).
2. I assigned myself a recurrent task to run this script every two days.
3. I assigned myself a recurrent task to create DVDs every week. I intend to move them offsite at once. No point having them sit next to the external hard disk.
4. More importantly I created a script to upload all important files (code, databases, documents) to my host. I will run this every day.

I used simple bat files to create the scripts. For uploading I used the Windows FTP program, and plink for SSHing to my host and executing commands. I wonder how much easier it would be to do it using FinalBuilder. Maybe I’ll give it a try when I next have some time, although it’s a bit expensive ($500).

As a side project I also created a script to deploy the latest MagnaCRM snapshot to my host. That meant some extra work with MySQL and different configuration files but it’s all done now. I can now access it from anywhere, not that it has any significance at this point :)

The new site is up! Don’t expect anything fancy, as the design was done by me and I am not very good at it ;-) I selected MagnaCRM as a product name. I am not exactly thrilled about it, but as they say, if the product is good the name is irrelevant.

Mainly I wanted to put some more information in the web site, so it wouldn’t look so empty. Also I believe more pages make search engines happier. Now I need 2 logos, one for the company and one for the product. I have LogoWorks in mind but I may try DesignOutpost too.

I will then seek professional help with the site design. I have 2-3 designers in mind, but if you have any recommendations please contact me (or post here). I would prefer someone who knows XHTML / CSS but I can convert it myself if I must.

After all that is done, I can go back working full time on development tasks!

Pagerank for rapidsignal.com just jumped from 0 to 5. The /blog/ url went from 0 to 3. It’s usually relatively easy to make a site have a Pagerank of 5, but very hard to increase that.

Anyway that’s certainly good news. I’ll upload the new site soon!

A few days ago I read this post by Simon Willison about some funny code in the Google toolbar extension for Firefox. Today I checked it out.

Apart from the funny comments, vars and function names (in pagerank.js) like

var GPR_HASH_SEED = “Mining PageRank is AGAINST GOOGLE’S TERMS OF SERVICE. Yes, I’m talking to you, scammer.”;
and
function GPR_awesomeHash()

it was interesting to see how stuff like the pagerank, autolink and spellcheck work. And since I was there, I changed the Pagerank bitmaps to include a number, recreated the jar file and put it back. So now I can easily see the Pagerank of every site I visit, without rolling over for the tooltip to appear.

While the web site is getting done (slowly), I am also on the lookout for some good icons for the application.

The problem is that many icon designers don’t permit shipping their icons, unless they are compiled in the application. Obviously this is not an option with a web application, so I dispatched an email to 4 companies to see how they feel about it:

Glyfz
Glyfx
Incors
BuyIcons

On the other hand I don’t intend to use many icons (I prefer text links), so custom made icons is certainly an option.

My last thought as I write this, is that I have mixed up my priorities a bit ;-) I really should be looking for a designer for the company logo and site!

I am preparing a more thorough site than the one page I have right now. I have put this off for a long time, both because it’s somewhat boring and because I haven’t decided on the product name (although MagnaCRM is what I’ll probably use).

But I understand the need to have a better site, so this is what I’ve done so far:

1) I renewed the rapidsignal.com domain for another 2 years. I didn’t fear losing the domain since I have it on auto-renew mode, but then I read that Google penalizes domains with a 1 year duration.

2) I added a “Subscribe to the mailing list” box. I used Campaign Monitor for this, because it has a nice web site, clean interface, no monthly fees and lots of people whose blogs I read use it. These are other services I evaluated:

Constant Contact
MailChimp
IntelliContact
CoolerEmail
MailerMailer

3) I read lots of articles on SEO (search engine optimization). Ian Landsman’s article was a good start. Then I researched what keywords I’m after. I mainly used Yahoo! Search Marketing section and Google Adwords to do this. Google Adwords are very useful because you can find related keywords / phrases and see the expected clicks/day. Unfortunately you can’t see the search count for the keywords. I ended up with about 30 keywords / phrases in 90 variations, which I had to filter down to 3-4 phrases. After the first pass I ended up with these:

- contact manager
- contact management (software / system)
- crm solution(s) / software / application
- small business crm
- web based crm

“Contact manager” vs. “contact management”: Google prefers the 1st, while Overture (Yahoo) the 2nd. Other services I checked indicated “contact management” to be best.

“Software” vs. “solution” vs. “application”: Google prefers “solution”, everyone else “software”. I will go with “software” both because it sounds better and because it doesn’t have the plural problem (solution/solutions)

“Small business crm” vs. “web based crm”: I like these both and they are close in ranking, so I will use both. For the product pages I’ll use “web based crm”, while on the company pages I’ll make sure to note we target small businesses.

Now I have to actually write the site pages (which is quite time consuming) and put it online. Expect to see lots of “Web based CRM software [...] contact management [...] for the small business” ;-) I hope I don’t overuse these keywords!

Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon and TopStyle, announced a few days ago that FeedDemon would move to a subscription model, after NewsGator acquired his company.

Most people did not take this very well. So, just two days later, he is announcing a change of plans. FeedDemon will support both models: it will work normally without a subscription, while subscribing gets you integration with NewsGator and probably some other things.

This is amazing news. It is “we listen to our customers” in action. Not only did he listen, but he reacted pretty quickly too. I was always amazed by Nick, not only because he is a great developer but also because he is an all around nice guy (plus he uses Delphi for his programs ;-). I guess NewsGator should take some credit too, since they are probably the final decision makers now.

Google just released it’s toolbar for Firefox!

This is really great, because it has all Google features in one extension. The Googlebar (not created by Google) did not have PageRank (which is really useful) so I was using the Google PageRank Extension.

This is the first post to be spell checked by Google Toolbar. Until now, I was pasting into Word for this!