Category Archives: Web site strategies

Bach recursion

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And now, as Monty Python like to say, for something completely different. I was emailing a friend about acronyms such as PINE and GNU and MUNG, acronyms that contain themselves as part of their abbreviation once you expand them out.

PINE, for example, means Pine Is Not Elm. Both are early Unix email readers that flourished in their day and had rabid fans who disliked the other software. Recursive acronyms are the ultimate insider’s geek track because you have to know enough to understand the joke. But they also play with an important computer science topic, and that is why I am typing this entry this morning, for those of you that are interested in exploring this further.

Of course, Wikipedia has a listing for the topic of recursive acronyms, and a nice list that they have compiled too, some of which I haven’t heard in a long time. Okay, you might say, so time to get a life, Strom.

This got me thinking about Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, a book by computer science professor Douglas Hofstadter. The book is a fascinating look at recursion and self-referential things, tying together some Big Themes such as mathematical expressions, music, and puzzles.

Take for example the Escher picture of two hands drawing each other, or how a fugue is structured to return back to the same musical theme. Then there is the artfully arranged Crab Canon, which is like a palindrome in the shape of a dialogue between two characters that reads the same top to bottom or bottom to top.

And for all you managers, the book contains Hofstadter’s law:

It always takes longer than expected, even when taking Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Think about that for a minute. Or take even longer.

Those of you that got all excited with the various crypto puzzles in DaVinci Code should take a look at this book. I read the book when I was just out of grad school, shortly after it was published and found it one of the more thought-provoking things I have ever read. I still have it on my shelf and look at from time to time, although sad to say my math retention isn’t what it used to be, and I am sure that I would have trouble with some of the theorems now.

NB: I also write a monthly column for the Tokyo-based Daily Yomiuri, and portions of this story were published in both print and Web editions today. I should have credited John Langdon for being, as he says, “The missing link between
Hofstadter and Dan Brown.” His book, Wordplay, has both a contributor from Hofstadter and Langdon claims it also inspired Brown to use his ambigrams in Angels & Demons. You can find out more about Langdon’s wonderful constructions here. 

Being master of one’s domain ain’t easy

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Working with some beginning podcasters has made me realize that collecting all of what you need for protecting and
promoting your own cyber-brand isn't easy these days.

By now, most of us have the dot com routine down when we
want to establish a new brand: We go to our favorite
registrar (mine now happens to be GoDaddy.com), and
reserve that domain name the moment the idea crosses our
craniums what the right name should be. Amazingly, there
are still a few dot com names left these days.

But you might not be aware that there are other names that
you should purchase as well as the dot com. Podcasters
should probably also get a .TV domain name (those folks in
Tuvalu are happy about this), and there are also .BIZ and
.INFO names too that make sense under certain
circumstances. And if you are really desperate or have
some extra cash, you can purchase a .NET or .ORG too. I
would steer clear of the .US domains, they have never
taken off and are too much trouble to type in.

I have maintained for years that the best domain names are
aurally-pleasing, meaning that you can say them to someone
and they can remember the name and more importantly,
remember how to spell it without you having to spell it
out for them.

If you use another registrar, make sure you check out
their Web control panel interface before you plunk down
your cash on these new domains. I have seen some pretty
miserable interfaces that make it difficult to do basic
tasks such as forwarding your domain to your existing Web
site, and adding email addresses that also forward to your
existing accounts. What I like about GoDaddy (well, maybe
I am just used to their setup) is that these tasks are
fairly straightforward, and they don’t charge extra for
the forwarding details (some of their competitors do).
They also make it easier to make bulk changes without
having to go through repetitive steps.

Being master of your domain isn't the only thing you have
to worry about these days. The next issue is how you make
use of email lists. You want to make sure that you
register your brand name with as many of the popular free
service providers as you can, and certainly at least with
Google and Yahoo Groups. It doesn’t cost anything, and
took about two minutes apiece to get them set up. Both are
great places to host your mailing list and keep track of
your clients too. While we are talking about email, you
might want to sign up for a free account with Google's
Gmail service and use the same name as your brand for this
identity too. You'll need to find a friend who can send
you an electronic invite or else sign up from your cell
phone. This is all about extending your brand, and making
it easier for people to find you. I will have more to say
about Gmail in a future edition, but I have been very
happy with their service for the past year and have really
gotten to like it since being out on my own.

While you are at it, even if you haven't started blogging,
you might want to reserve your brand name ahead of time in
this arena as well. Two of the more popular blogging
service providers are Blogspot.com and WordPress.com.
Again, these are free services, and it takes just a few
minutes to sign up and register your name, but you might
as well grab this piece of cyber real estate before
someone else does.

I have been using WordPress for my blog, of course.

How to do tech support the right way

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Since I do a fair amount of new product testing, I also spend a fair amount of time on the phone and emailing vendors' tech support folks, trying to get their products to do what I think they should be doing. And over the years I have found that this department is often neglected, under-staffed, or has limited resources. If you have neglected your own tech support department, it might be time to read Rich Mironov and Marcia Kadanoff's screed called Crowding out tech support, and taking heed of their excellent advice. While it is nice to have all sorts of online resources for customers to solve their problems, there is so substitute for hiring and keeping the best "people persons" around to help your customers solve their problems and win their undying loyalty.

Questions to ask your Web hosting provider

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Normally, I don't link to 11-year old articles, but this week while I am on vacation I thought for some amusement I would dig up a piece from my archives called "Hanging Up Your Shingle — what questions to ask your Web hosting provider."

One of the great things about the Web is that your stuff can live forever, if someone has taken the time to archive it properly. Back at the dawn of Web time, I did some work for an O'Reilly publication called Web Review. The guys and gals behind this effort did a fantastic job of creating one of the more thoughtful and interesting pubs back in the middle 1990s when we all didn't really know what we were doing. 

Lucky for me, Jennifer Robbins, the graphic designer of the publication, keeps one of my stories on her site. What I find interesting is that apart from the names of some of the companies (remember when Prodigy offered Web hosting? Digex?) and protocols (gopher anyone?), the piece still holds up well and has a lot of great advice.  

How to be a better blogger — and still keep your day job

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There has been much written about corporate blogging, but not a lot about the more practical, nuts and bolts type of advice to be a better blogger. So when I was asked by the editors of Computerworld.com to write such a piece, I jumped at the chance.

Of course, the interesting story here is how I assembled the article. Usually, I spend a lot of time emailing and making phone calls. I was determined to do this one a bit differently, and sent out a note on my Web Informant mailing list asking for help. Computerworld also posted a request on their Web site as well. Of course, I got flooded with information and plenty of tips — not unlike what happens in the real world with blogs themselves. While there are still no hard and fast rules, there is some general consensus on what to do and what not to do, including to tell the truth, always, no matter how painful. Second, find your voice and stick to it.  Above all, be professional at all times. It is OK to have a personality, but remember that you are representing your company. Allow comments and read and respond to them carefully. Craft your corporate blogging policy now, and make sure it covers all posts by your employees including those on personal sites. Finally, understand the mechanics and know your tools.

You can read the entire article here.

BTW, for my private consulting practice, I do offer a series of coaching programs on how to be better bloggers and podcasters. Contact me if interested.

Big Sunday full of spare parts

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Yesterday was Big Sunday here in the city of angels. What is that, you might ask? No sporting event, but a day for folks to volunteer at several dozen different projects happening all over the city. My stint was working at ReDiscoverCenter.org, a rather interesting place that takes donations of left over commercial and industrial materials and turns them into spare parts that can be used by youngsters to assemble their own art projects. Think of a gigantic storeroom filled with all sorts of stuff like reams of paper, retail byproducts, spools of thread, and stuff like that, and having a bunch of five year olds descending on all that and making inventive craft projects out of it. I was helping with some manual labor to get their stuff organized. It was a fun morning, although my shoulders are sore today. At one point, a group of us were taking apart several gross of furniture legs. I kept thinking about the folks in China (or wherever these legs were from originally) putting them together. I guess that the order of things, and it certainly will be more useful to have several bins of spare parts rather than something else to fill up our landfills around here.

While I wasn’t doing anything crafty — the point of this post isn’t about me really — but talking to the volunteer coordinator there I was reminded of this wonderful museum in St. Louis called the City Museum that takes the same idea and expands to an entire museum. If you have never been, it is almost worth a trip on its own. You can get something of the feel from their Web site, but it is really like taking the idea behind the found art assemblage of the Watts Towers and adding a truckload of stuff like found at ReDiscover Center.

At least 25,000 of us volunteered yesterday. It probably is the only time that people in LA are doing something fun outside of their vehicles, and interacting with strangers (other than post-quake meetings on their front lawns).

Can blogs pay the rent?

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Only if you are Jason Calacanis, or perhaps Alan Meckler. The two mega-egos have a “conversation” here. (They exchange emails, which still doesn’t work for me as a way for two people to really engage each other.)

The best line from Alan:

Perhaps I should sell Jupitermedia and become a full-time blogger? With you repping me my life would be much easier!

Best line from Jason:

Look at MySpace, they are the number two site on the Internet but they are making $13 million a month. They probably have the lowest RPM in the history of the Internet!

Lessons I have learned from this dialogue: To be a great blogger, you need! lots! of exclamation! points! when you write stuff!!

The End of Active X and the Microsoft Internet

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Microsoft’s attempts to take control over dynamic Web content are officially over. My proclamation comes after hearing from Marty Focazio, who works for ScribeStudio.com. The company offers a service for users to quickly create, package and publish their own dynamic content, such as e-Learning Programs, video seminars and multimedia presentations.

Marty is just one of many people that changing their Web sites over from Active X and popups to display dynamic and interactive content. I’ll let him explain.

While I was not here when that decision was made, I am faced with dealing with the downstream effects of having a service that won't run on Firefox, occasionally requires the installation of an Active-X control, is Mac-hostile and requires people to explicitly allow pop-ups. So what's the alternative? In a word, Ajax.

In many ways, we have to go Ajax, just to reach our corporate customers, because we're seeing flat-out bans on Active-X, a pretty substantial move away from IE, and an increasing number of Mac systems. Not to mention that a site that uses unrequested pop-ups, whether it's our own or the US Postal Service, can't be around that much longer. So we're fixing these issues. It's not pleasant and it's not fun.

The reasons for the use of Active-X and Pop-ups were essentially that the user needed to be able to interact with the server and stored data in a way that wasn't really possible without Active-X, or at least not to the level of interaction that's more like a "local" application, in terms of things you can do with the data on your computer and on the web server.

For example, we have a really nice text editor - word processor, really, that is pretty much the same as the Writely product Google recently bought. But again, that's an Active-X control, not an Ajax-y thing, so that's gotta go. That's the root of the issue -- our application lets people create online versions of their courses, events and presentations, and there's a huge amount of data interaction involved, so the ability to extend the user's computer into our servers and vice versa is at the heart of the matter.

In the end, it's kind of the whole "network is the computer" model that's making Ajax compelling for us. Yeah, that's old news, but when you treat a web browser as a "sandbox" for your application, and you have what feels like live data interaction, you can begin to do what Java promised and never delivered. Instead of slow-loading, jerky applets with annoying interfaces and horrendously pokey jsp servers, with Ajax like development, I have a "never stop writing, run almost anywhere" environment which is less sexy than "Write once, run anywhere" but is more pragmatic and fits the reality of the market.