Ho..ho... ho...

Merry Christmas all,

We have certainly been busy in the weeks leading up to Christmas which include a draft document of what MerlinFX intends to do in 2007. There are a number of applications under development, new services for customers, enhanced user experiences and pricing models.

I look forward to revealing them all in due course.

Be safe over the Christmas break, I wish you all the best. Try not too over indulge too much. Well we all know that's not going to happen!

Look forward to dealing with you in 2007.

PageFlakes

Strange name, great web application!

PageFlakes is now my home page. Deceptively simple to use. It's a home page you customise; but you customise it with the content you want.

Add Flakes small little widget-like tools that are free that enhance the experience. Great use of AJAX, with Web 2.0 functionality and design.

With numerous choices of flakes to add, a number of preset RSS Feeds with the option of adding your own. I've set it up with a page for all business and web related content, Google Search, general tab for to do lists, weather, dictionary and so on.

Pages can be public, private or shared.

This is a FREE service and there are no ads or banners anywhere.

I'd suggest you take a quick look at PageFlakes, set up a page and if you like it then create an account. The sign up process in inobstrusive and quick.

It's almost Christmas and I have spent the good part of the day and evening on PageFlakes, customising the way I want it. This an application to keep an eye on. There is some clever talent behind this application and many usability features that are very impressive.

MerlinFX Recognition Award

We were extremely pleased to receive a 'recognition of support' award from the LCC Saints Ice Hockey Club a few nights ago, a local club we sponsor. I cannot take all the credit; as there is no 'I' in team. All kudos to Mark, our guru programmer for helping to create a custom CRM solution for the club.

We used our current WebCRM solution and built into it custom features that are relevant for a club. It tracks members' registration details, contacts etc.

With any club; there are so many rules to follow from host club and club associations. Members skill sets are recorded eg (committee, coaches, goalie, lines person, managers, ice officials, referees, team captains, time keepers etc.

The system tracks who has signed off various legal and medical documentation: code of conduct, working with children and so on.
The solution is extremely customisable and allows us to add extra features as the club grows. There are plans to include Player Profiles and Game Stats.

An Advanced search feature allows any Committee member to easily locate any club member based on pre-set and custom criteria. It allows the sending of rich HTML eNewsletters, quick memos, SMS and print.

The solution is a great tool to use for all inter-club communication. The SMS feature is used to broadcast time sensitive information to players about a game or event.

With all MerlinFX solutions, the brief always says; easy to use.

Thanks again to the LCC Saints Committee.

Microsoft Offers Reference Specs For Building Apps Around Office 2007

Ok what does this mean to you exactly? Well if you are using rich web applications then this will be a boon for users and developers to integrate our web applications into MS Office products. I get this all the time, 'I use Office, how can I integrate with your solution.' Before you would need to export your data to a CSV or TAB delimited TXT file and we'd import it. This release from MS may well be the holy grail of integrating the client application (what is on your PC) to web applications that MerlinFX develops. These are truelly exciting times for web developers; there is a growing arsenal of tools at our disposal that allows us to build powerful easy to use applications, with a low cost of ownership to you.

Been awhile

Hey there readers, it's been a while since my last post. Sorry about that. Lots on, much to do and a family crisis to attend to. Though I have much more interesting things to bring to your attention; bare with me.

Good on you Google!

Google always known for bringing out cool tools, not just search; are using their vast experience and expertise to warn users of potentially harmful content as reported by David Richards on SmartHouse.

'Website search engine giant Google has started warning users if sites they are about to click on could damage their computer.

The move follows a large-scale research project monitoring and cataloguing programmes which bombard customers with advertisements, spy on their web habits or steal personal data.'

Some people might think this is going too far, with the power the search engine giant wields; but I think it is a good thing. Experienced users will know better, newbies will think twice and lets hope they do. It's the cross I bare, :); fixing friends, relatives PC's because their click happy kids have run amock across the web!

PDF – creating them without having to buy Acrobat!

Why spend $500 on buying Acrobat to create PDF's, when you can download a simple, FREE tool that can create a PDF from any application that allows you to print. It's called PrimoPDF. Download it, install it and next time you want to create a PDF. Choose Print and then select the PrimoPDF option in your Printers. Choose a location to save. Done.

Being free you aren't going to get all the useful features that come with Adobe's Acrobat, but most and more can be better achieved with web services anyway.

Tweak Day

Tweak Day was born from my frustration I had in not being able to service our clients with small jobs and requests. What was happening with our job system, was smaller tweaks and requests were being pushed back and done after major jobs or when we had time or after hours. We could never give an estimated time on how long it would take to complete a task. Now, every Friday is Tweak Day. All the small jobs, chasing up the odd matter, ringing and saying hi to clients is done on a Friday. If a job is urgent we have an 'acceleration plan' for that, but most clients are happy to wait the normal course to get their jobs done. This way no one suffers - especially with the acceleration plan. Urgent jobs are usually done out of office hours and incur a higher fee, but it means customers that have current projects underway do not suffer. To us Tweak Day is becoming our customer day - well every day is our customer day - I mean that on Friday's every MerlinFX employee has to wear a clients tshirt or cap etc. All day. So if you have company T Shirts and you're interested in giving them to us, we're happy to wear them for you. Contact me for sizes - I take 3XL - I hope you have one size fits all :) I am a mountain of a guy!

A word about Spam

Is this familiar to you: Viagra now, free games + win cash, \/lagra works excellently for your problem; People are winning Big every day.; Start Winning Now!!; Overwhelmingly important information.

We all see it and we all have tasted the ugly part of the web that is spam. Spam email, sms, telemarketers or just getting hassled walking down the street. Why do they do it, when they know we hate it? Because it works. Send out enough at such a small cost and the chances are someone will bite.

Well I have a few tips that can at least stop those annoying emails and marketing calls.

Whilst SMS spam is not as prevalent yet as email, just be careful when replying to messages you are unsure of. It can cost you a few dollars. Just delete them. If it happens a lot, contact your carrier.

Some tips:

Get more email addresses.
But doesn’t that create more headache? Bare with me. The current email you have now probably gets a lot of unwanted mail. The reason to use a number of email addresses is simple. One for work, one for friends and perhaps one for everything else. I have about 10. All for different things. All on the one mail client all with filters and rules that plonk them is their rightful place. Outlook is better at this than Outlook Express.

Filters
Apart from tweaking your mail client junk mail filters. The later versions of Outlook are pretty good. If you still have the settings set to high and still getting grief. There are a number of anti-spam and anti-phishing programs you can use. I normally just use the Outlook Junk Mail Filter set on High and adhere to the rest of the points here and get bothered very little, if at all with Spam.

Keep the email safe
Don’t go blindingly adding your email to websites when you buy things or enter competitions. Set up a yahoo, hotmail or gmail accounts for that.

If setting up an email account for your work. Eg: myname@mycompany.com.au; try and choose a name that is hard to guess. Spammers use programs to guess email names and then add your domain on the end of it and send mail. They can even check whether the email was received or whether it bounced. These programs will usually guess first name, general names eg: info, accounts, accounting, orders, sales and so on. Try and use difficult to guess names like: mycompany_accounts@mycompany.com.au or myname.surname@mycompany.com.au

Some people use graphics with links to email. Sorry, the spam bots can still read the code. Plus how ugly does that look on a site the text looks different to the rest of the copy. It really looks like amateur hour.

Spam bots
These nifty little buggers (Spam Bots) scan the net for new websites, follow links and read code and locate email addresses. MerlinFX encrypts all email names so whilst a human can read an email, the spam bots cannot read the encrypted code and move on. If you do not use MerlinFX services, insist on having your email encrypted.

India Calling!
Whilst this is not about spam, it’s equally annoying. Well here is a way that is fun and will get you removed from the lists. Now I know someone is trying to make a living here, but my time is precious and rather than hanging up and being rude, turn the tables.

Ask them for their credit card details and/or their accounts dept. When they ask why, advise them that even though they intend to send someone over to make more money for you or streamline your business or whatever; advise them that your time is precious and you charge by the hour. The rate is $xyz (make it $100 for arguments sake) and say it is charged at minimum 2 hours.

This happened a few weeks ago. First I hang up. They ring back a week later. Second time I said this:

Daniel: ‘what’s your credit card details?’
Caller: ‘why do you want that?’
Daniel: ‘If it’s such a great service, you won’t mind me charging you for my time.’
Caller: ‘No, wait, what!, but it’s free!.’
Daniel: ‘I don’t care. My time is precious. I only have a certain amount of it and I intend to bill you for it.’ Caller: ‘OK, sorry for wasting your time.’

They have not called back. :)

I have a friend working on an anti-telemarketing device. That’s one of its features. I will keep you informed as new developments happen with this.

Warranty, Tweaks, Bugs, Maintenance & Support

What a mouthful, but I think as our business grows and the levels of complexities in the software and web world increase, MerlinFX will do its best to educate its clients as best we can. This blog for example is the perfect way to keep you informed of what we are up to and what technologies will affect your business.

We are finding that to provide a valuable service, sometimes the line that seperates warranty, bug fixes, maintenance and free consultancy –are very much blurred.

Let me explain. A MerlinFX Warranty is where for a period of time after a project has been completed, exhaustively tested by us and you that everything is working as it should to the design and technical specification document and the final proposal. After this period, if changes / tweaks are required that were unforseen and falls outside of the warranty – we have a right to charge you for the time to resolve this.

If it is a bug that we did not pick up, we will fix it.

If for some reason you require a certain process, function, activity etc to be changed, we refer to these as tweaks, where you will be charged. Other forms of tweaks could be major additions – which also have a timed charge.

Maintenance, mentioned in a previous post, is the changing, updating of the application as required by feedback from the users, changes in technology and integration with other systems. This all takes time and will be charged accordingly.

Support covers pretty much all the above and on many occasions we do help our clients with software and computer issues that fall outside of the scope of our original agreement. This could be answering questions on why Outlook doesn’t work to fixing a network issue. Whilst we can help you with these issues, the bigger we get the more customers we have – the harder it is for us to service. We do it because we’re such nice guys. Providing this service for free takes us away from working for the clients paying for jobs to be done.

Unfortunately for us this is not good business practice, great for you because you are effectively getting free support. Sadly this has to come to an end, but it’s not all bad news for you. Like I said, we’re nice guys! We are endeavouring to add a knowledge base of common issues and allow you to proactively learn and seek a solution to your IT issues that fall outside of our agreements. If you do not have your own IT department, this is the next best thing.

You can decide to pay for Support on an hourly basis or purchase Support Blocks for various amounts with discounts attached. You can save even more by logging your job via our new Job System. Every feature that will be included in our system will be available to you as a full web application you can use in your own business. If you are a client of MerlinFX, access to the knowledge base is free.

So yes, you can create Knowledge Bases for your business. Suppliers, contractors, investors, clients can all log in and view your content, procedures etc. There is a lot more to it, but that’ll be giving too much away!

Consultancy. The bane of our creative existence. As web professionals we stay ahead with the latest web trends and once we get a handle on your industry, your business and how your customers like to work with you – then we can provide solutions. This can take the form of spending numerous hours preparing documents, technical specifications, research, travelling and more importantly providing ideas for you. Some of this cost is reaped from the job cost, but lengthy, complex solutions require many meetings / consultations. It is impossible to project how many meetings it will take. Adding a cost to this will allow you to prepare adequately for meetings, keep to a strict agenda and effectively reduce costs – for both of us.

Much of the time our clients enjoy free consultancy. This is about to change as well. The catch phrase of yesteryear, ‘free quote’ may work for the electrician; but building a complex ebusiness web application to suit your business and clients and then making it easy to use – isn’t done in 3 minutes. The other benefit you get is our experience in our industry. The web is in a consistent state of flux. What took 50 lines of code now takes 5; what was in is now out; what was expensive to implement is now cheaper. As web developers we have to stay in touch with the latest. We spend a portion of each day researching the latest web developments in software, hardware and how these will make our products better or create new ones. We send our programmers to training courses. We integrate the latest technologies into our own systems before we pass on the benefits to you in the way of ideas. Often we tweak the products at no cost you as well.

Depending on the size of the project and/or frequency of meetings, liaising with the client, if it falls into the area where we are providing you with solutions and ideas before a project or the next stage of a project begins, it may attract a consulting fee.

We will keep you posted on these developments.

Google vs Microsoft vs Firefox

It is interesting to watch the global struggle of companies that once had a strangle-hold on your browser, office tools etc start to see the cracks in the delivery of their systems. What I am talking about here is Google releasing a beta version (yes another beta something) called Google Spreadsheets. Sure Microsoft are working on Office Live, a hosted Office solution, but will it have the simplicity and ease of use that Google is renowned for. Microsoft is also getting into search with its' beta: Windows Live. You thought Google was simple. Microsoft is bringing cool technology to search and enroaching into areas of search that traditionally Google has been in. Windows Live looks very promising. Also the Firefox browser which now has a staggering 11% of the browser market looks to become a dominant competitor with the current majority stake holder, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

I am beginning to really love this browser. There are so many plugins and developers building tools that extend the normal functionality of the browser - all the time. I forsee that in the not too distant future, the browser will become a quasi new OS for computers. PC's will just become storage devices (with the web eventually taking over that component too), applications will be hosted online and all your content will be easily accessed from any location at any time either via pc, pda, blackberry, mobile phone or ipod (yes why have they not developed a wireless or web ready ipod - I want to have my entire music or video collection on tap anywhere I am - my own private radio station).

Certainly interesting times ahead for the web which can only mean exciting hosted web applications for customers.

Introduction

Well this being the first post an all for the MerlinFX blog, I thought I'd make mention who we are and what it is we do. MerlinFX is a Sydney based web developer specialising in ebusiness solutions and web applications. Sometimes we do the odd traditional website. So what does that all mean?

It might seem rather silly to say 'traditionally this' or 'traditionally that' about the web seeing it is still in its relative infancy with regards to time, but the rapid pace the web changes with new standards, coding systems, hardware and the blurring of many of the lines of communication; time in the web world is certainly a lot different in the normal day to day world.

So traditionally the web sites we built had some content (copy and images). Obviously the web has had a history prior to this and is for discussion another day. Then came along shopping online, payment gateways, eNewsletters, Bulk SMS, Content Management Systems (CMS) and so on.

Now we rarely build websites without their own CMS. This is where you take control of your content and update your own site. Leave the technical stuff to us - usually called maintenance. More on maintenance in a moment.

We use talented designers, copy writers, seo (search Engine Optimisation) experts to build a solution that suits your business, but it is a lot more sophisticated than getting your 'neighbours son's best mate who lives down the road who's good with computers and surfs the web a lot!' Sound familiar? If I can paint an analogy for you, would you get a student who has just finished school with architectural aspirations, no industry knowledge and his pencil case of tools to design your home or would you hire an architect with the latest computer modelling software, years in the business and many clients to get testimonials from? I know where I'd be spending my money. The last thing I want is costly changes and going over budget beause it wasn't built properly. Like the web today, you can get professionals or get amateurs.

MerlinFX via its partnership with WebSuite offers great web design and userability, and using the latest web technologies and standards to create hosted web applications. This is taking existing tools that resided on client machines and/or converting processes into easily managed web applications that look like local client software but run on your web browser.

For a small business, it's not just about getting your products out there on the web. It's about integrating your office systems, integrating with other web solutions to spread your reach and manage your business or parts of your business more effectively.

Why purchase servers and pay exhorbidant licensing fees for all your workers only to use a low percentage of the application? You can use a hosted subscription model that costs less to run and offers you peace of mind. You only pay for the parts you use. Need a feature tweaked or changed? Let us know and we'll change it - to how your business runs. Try calling Microsoft or Macromedia and asking them to change their software just for you.

For example: a client of ours, buyprinters wanted to sell more printers online. So working with WebSuite we were able to get them to integrate ShopBot and ShopFerret into their WebTrader online store solution. These two sites like many others are comparison shopping sites. Now each time buyprinters edits their site, it is reflected on the fly with ShopBot and ShopFerret in their listings of Xerox printers. There are plans to increase this integration with other comparison sites. They need not do anything, it is automatic.

Unashamedly a plug, but I do not give them without merit, I have known Mike and his team at buyprinters now for over 10 years. If you need a quality printer, value, a great price, trust and oodles of industry experience - you will do yourself an injustice if you do not buy your next printer from them.

Onto Maintenance. Site or Application Maintenance has for a long time conjured the image that something is broken and needs maintenance. Unfortunately this is a term we are stuck with, but in IT the term maintenance means updating, tweaking and changing the application based on users experiences, requirements , adapting the application to new technologies or integrating with other web solutions.

I will make note that as a web designer with web development tendencies, I am a partner and owner in the WebSuite company. WebSuite is an ebusiness web application developer that supports and supplies eBusiness tools, consultancy to established web developers, designers etc. WebSuite does not deal with the end client and only provides resources to its partners, for example MerlinFX. MerlinFX enjoys the same rates and fees as would any other web designer, developer, print designer etc. So when I refer to any eBusiness tool it has been created by WebSuite, but managed and/or designed by MerlinFX.