We enjoyed a wonderful meal this evening with friends. The hosts supplied the main course and we brought drinks and deserts. In essence we built a wonderful meal based on the core product of the hosts. We had a wonderful time, enjoyed everyone’s company and no-one including the hosts spent a mint. Businesses are and should be looking for similar opportunities.
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Immersion Technology Inc. has teamed up with Thriving Artist Press to create an online community for people looking to self-publish their story. This includes writers, experts, and poets. We believe there is a story in all of us and want to encourage you to share it with others. Take a look at ezPublishIT.com.
One challenge that comes up a few times a year for various clients is moving data from a legacy system to a web application. For instance if your billing system or ERP system creates a report that you want to display to your customers online, you may want to send that report to the webapp.
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One of things I constantly stress is backup. When writing web applications we are often focused on the results we want from the application that we can easily forget the underlying infrastructure including the database. Your beautiful Ruby-on-Rails app is only as good as long as the underlying database structure is alive. Keep it alive with good database backup.
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No matter how many great applications there are out there, there will always be apps that would not be practical or serve no other purpose except to laugh your butt off. The idea to do a post on this topic came to me after realizing the hassle of managing two joint banking accounts for up to six weeks whether we used our new bank’s switch service or we faxed the necessary information directly to the respective vendors notifying them of the change of banks ourselves. Life should get less stressful with technology, right?
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Yesterday, Mark Talaba and I had a great conversation about processes and the long term success of businesses. While I mostly focus on how things relate to each other like Shopping Cart→Items, it is extremely important to understand the process. It is the process that is key to a successful relationship with customers and with the overall success of a business.
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Today WordPress announced they are using Sphinx to help developers find plugins faster on their site. Sphnix is an open source search engine for indexing primarily databases and is much faster than the standard full text search feature of most databases. I’ve put together a brief tutorial to help you get started with this application.
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