Best MS Blogger Around

Jensen Harris is my new favorite blogger. He works on the MS Office team that developed the new Office 12 interface. He's been posting about the new interface and giving some really good insights not just into the new Office (which would be boring), but also providing great UI information in general that is a must read for anyone out there doing UI stuff.
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HelpSpot, It’s International Baby Yeah

A little Austin Powers just came over me there

I've been looking at some numbers and it's interesting how international the HelpSpot beta users are. Currently about 25% of the beta participants are non-US. Of those the majority are from the UK (38%) followed by Australia (16%) and then a mix of countries make up the rest (Greece, Russia, Spain, Germany).

One thing I'm really surprised about is how the time difference hasn't really been a hindrance to support. The folks in Australia are 12 hours away, but we've collaborated easily with them. Some of the biggest changes during the beta have been the result of collaboration with companies in Australia. I've also been working very closely with several companies in the UK and that's gone very well also, even though they're about 5 hours ahead.

I've always counted on and hoped for a strong international presence in the customer base and it's looking very good for that so far. It's especially pleasing that the international companies are right in it from the beginning.
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Katrina Relief Mission

My dad just got back from a relief mission to Baton Rouge. The big orgs like the Red Cross get all the press, but so many small organizations are making a big impact down there as well.

"I haven’t had a chance to post for a while since I have spent the last week on a relief mission in Baton Rouge. The United Spinal Association in NYC sent a bus and truck loaded with wheelchairs and other mobility devices to Baton Rouge for people with disabilities who had lost or had their wheelchairs damaged during hurricane Katrina. I went along to do the evaluations, adjust and fit wheelchairs, and help out in any way possible."

Process vs Spec

Good points by Mike

"Recently I was reminded of some wisdom my dad shared years ago:

"photography is not about the camera, it's about process of capturing photos. A great photographer can take incredible photos with the simplest camera. It's not about the camera!"

Now, that may sound simple, and really it is. However, I've observed many people getting hung up on Specs when they ought to be focused on Process"
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Viral Ideas

A great post by Seth Godin about why and how an idea can spread in a viral manner. How do we get our ideas to spread like this in the software industry?
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Adwords Experiment

"If that's indeed what's happening, it isn't illegal and to some might not even be unethical (I guess) but it feels just a little bit EVIL."

An interesting experiment done with Adwords. It appears that if you lower the amount you're willing to pay per word that Google may penalize you.

Conferences?

I feel like there's usually some conferences going on this time of year, but I haven't seen anything interesting. Am I missing something big out there?

The OTHER Reason Your Company Needs Web Based Help Desk Software

Because it's great for your search engine optimization efforts. The things you talk about in your manuals and your forums are the same words potential customers are searching the internet for. By having a web based help desk solution you're increasing your chances they'll find you all while providing better support to your existing customer base.

I'm already seeing interesting traffic come in from Google on the HelpSpot helpdesk.
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HelpSpot Beta, Last Chance

Just an FYI to everyone out there. We'll be closing the beta October 3rd so if you've been waiting to get in now is the time!
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PHP IIS CGI Error

Whew, that's alot of acronyms.

Anway, one of the bugs that's really been annoying me is that when running under Windows and IIS as a CGI HelpSpot sometimes throws these weird CGI errors. In fact this isn't a HelpSpot bug, but rather a problem with IIS, however, that's not the point because at the end of the day it's my customers who will be having the problem.

The problem is complex because it doesn't affect all machines, often on machines with the exact same builds one will send the errors while the other doesn't. It seems that the issue is related to the speed of the machine.

After looking around for weeks I think I've found a workaround. It's not a fix really, but a setting you can apply to Windows which seems to instantly solve the problem. If you've experienced this issue with HelpSpot or other CGI apps (seems to be an issue with PERL as well) on IIS you may want to checkout the workaround here:


http://www.userscape.com/helpdesk/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=20

I finally found this answer buried in this bug discussion:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=9852

Unfortunately for the guys who create PHP the discussion isn't very flattering for them. They basically respond with the standard "well use open source products" answer instead of any actual help. The bug is from back in 2002 though so hopefully they've matured since then.
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The Last Days for Legal Music

We could be witnessing the last days for legally downloaded music. I think it will be extremely interesting if the music industry manages to kill off their last hope by trying to bully Apple. What they don't get is that they can't stop it. Even if they pull their music from the iTunes music store they'll only kill themselves. I'll still want an iPod only now it will have illegal songs on it instead of legal ones. Combine that with what would surely be a huge growth in "podsafe" music/audio and you have the end of the traditional music industry. Well let's hope it happens. They had their day, they've made their mony, don't feel bad for them. Their time is over.

Searching in Podcasts

Podscope is pretty cool. You can search the spoken words of a podcast and even play the snippet that mentions the word (click the + for that option).

Checkout this search for help desk
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How I Got My Scoble Back!

I love Robert Scoble's commentary on the tech industry. He's got great insights and he's plugged into everyone so he's tons of fun to read, BUT. His posts about Microsoft annoy me. I know it's his job to evangelize Microsoft and he does a good job of it. I'm sure there are a bunch of readers out there who love it, but it's just not for me. Unfortunately I realized today that the tediousness of having to filter through all the Microsoft posts has lead to me not reading him everyday like I used to.

Then it hit me, hey I'm on a computer! They're really good at filtering through stuff I hear. So today I took back my Scoble by creating a smart subscription in my news reader. It has 3 conditions so far. First is that it only filters his RSS feed. Second, it doesn't show any posts with the word Microsoft in them. I thought that would be enough but then I got hit with all these tablet PC posts and those are the most annoying of all. So I added a third to remove the table posts.

Overall I'm really liking it, not bad at all for a quick hack. I wonder what other feeds I can rescue from oblivion in my news reader ...........

Why Are the “Experts” Still Saying This?

"Yahoo Email Delivers That Desktop Feel Most Users Expect"

http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050922.html

I haven't used the new Yahoo mail so I don't know if it's true or not but I have a problem with the statement in general. Is it really true that "most" users expect a desktop experience? I don't know the answer, but I don't think it's true for me.

I'm also pretty familiar with a group of users I call college kids. Most of them have had very little interaction with desktop apps, but lots of experience using the web. In a few years when they reach professional age will they really be looking for a "desktop" experience on their websites?


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Virtual Plague

"The trouble started when Blizzard programmers added a new instance, which is a separate area connected to the outside world that players can enter and attempt unique quests. One of these instances, Zul'Grub, contained the god of blood, Hakkar. Hakkar was a powerful foe that could cast spells of his own, including a spell called Corrupted Blood. This spell did a large amount of damage to any player within the vicinity of the casting, and the effects lingered on after the spell was over.

What happened next was something Blizzard did not expect. Some of the players who had gone into the instance emerged back into the main world of Azeroth, and started spreading the Corrupted Blood disease to others who they came into close contact with. The infection soon spread into many of the cities and towns in the virtual world. Since the disease was intended to be a danger to powerful players, it tended to kill those less than level 50 almost instantly.

Game masters (GMs) tried to quarantine certain players from moving into new areas, but they kept escaping the quarantine and moving on to infect other people. A patch was issued to try and mitigate the damage, but it did not have the desired effect."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050921-5337.html

- I must admit that I have no idea how they are unable to control this problem, it seems that they could just remove the "disease" from all users, but it's interesting nevertheless. This is a game right?

Running Your Help Desk via RSS Rules

Since launching the HelpSpot beta last week I've really come to depend on the built in support for RSS feeds. This is one of the key features I usually point to when other ISV's ask me if HelpSpot is useful for their small business. While HelpSpot is designed to handle fairly large help desk installations, it also works remarkably well in the MicroISV/Small business environment.

RSS feeds are a great example of this. In a large help desk most of the time the RSS fields will not be a primary notification method because the front line help people will be in the system all day. In a small business however, where you're trying to do 10 other things the RSS feeds are fantastic. They allow you to go about your day and easily check in on your requests by flipping over to your news reader for a second or during your normal news scan. Since RSS feeds are available even for your filtered views you can really track everything going on in HelpSpot entirely via your RSS reader.

Blogging Gets Complicated

Isn't it interesting how things evolve. Scoble points to "project comet" the next version of Six Aparts TypePad product. On quick glance it appears to be something of an MSN Spaces clone, but done nicer.

Why do companies think that making blogging more complicated with "friends" and "recent media" and all this crap are going to bring it mainstream? Blogging IS mainstream. In my opinion it's reached mainstream because it's so easy. I log in, there's a big empty box. I fill it and click submit. Bam! My thoughts are online.

Of course there are markets for a more complex product, but it just bothers me that the heading on the comet page says that this is the product to bring blogging mainstream. Mainstream means it needs to be easier and more accessible not more complicated.

Nice Logo

Mike has a nice write-up about his latest logo work.

Dell Ditty

"Sit back and recall, with tremendously smug satisfaction, a decade’s worth of tech industry punditry holding that superior design would never get Apple anywhere, and that Apple should instead, you know, be more like Dell."

Daring Fireball

Ecommerce, Rails, Merchant Accounts Oh My!

So I'm trying to get the ecommerce end of things up and running for HelpSpot. As discussed over here, there really aren't any good off the shelf options for a small software startup so you're basically on your own.

Before I started serious work on the ecommerce system, store, and download system I wanted to get my merchant account and credit card gateway setup. Of course I could have chosen to use one of the hosted systems such as regnow.com, godaddy, esellerate or some of the others mentioned in the link above.

These are excellent options for consumer software and if that was the market I was in I would most likely go that route. However, in the B2B arena there are some additional needs that I feel can only be addressed by fully integrating the store into my site. Of primary concern was the situation where people would be adding more licenses or support after an initial purchase. This is fairly complex to do with the existing services because they all want to know about a "product" ahead of time. In my situation this is tricky because under some circumstances I might need to charge an arbitrary amount, which won't be known ahead of time.

I was hoping to find an integrated merchant account/gateway solution, but this actually isn't too common. I also had an additional constraint in that I wanted to use Ruby on Rails for the development of the store and administrative systems. Amazingly there is currently only one payment library system for Rails and it only works with Authorize.net. Of course I could build the gateway integration, but honestly I don't have that type of time, nor am I that interested in doing it. Again this is all software I need to write to run my business, but is not part of my core product.

So I was hoping to go to Authorize.net and sign right up. Alas, they don't want my money. Instead I have to go through one of their "resellers". Heh. Every single one of them have names that make your skin crawl and when you get to their websites you're greeted with a site created from a default frontpage template. Needless to say I wasn't feeling good.

In the end of all the companies on the list there was only one I had heard of, Wells Fargo. At least this is a big publicly traded company. Another plus in their favor was that they had an integrated registration where you signed up for both the merchant account and gateway all at once which was nice. In the end I went with them.

To be honest the entire process was pretty obviously created during the dotcom. In fact the copyright on the registration pages was 2001! Yet another area where a small company should come in and make a compelling product.

Another benefit of going this route is that it's just cheaper. esellerate for instance has a 15% transaction fee. I've worked too hard to give 15% to them. Doing it this way should cap my costs at no more than 6% even under the worst conditions and with extra fraud protection.

Now it's on to actual construction. I've got version one of the store spec'd out and I just started it out tonight. Man Rails is cool. It doesn't read minds, but it does make getting started much easier. I have a feeling this is really what all the hype is about. At the end of the day I don't really think I'll have less code or it will really be much less complex BUT I 'll feel like I jumped in at the middle instead of drudging through the beginning and that's big, really big.

More updates are sure to follow so stay tuned.