Finally! Added a cross-post feature to the blog, so now you don’t have to use old-school RSS, but you can follow us on twitter: @zealus

After taking a rather long vacation from this blog I am back. This fall is promising to be rather interesting as during summer I have picked up a few new business engagements. All in due time, of course, but this is a brief update of all things.

Informal Project Management is always around us – interesting thing, I thought about it exactly 3 years ago, in September 2007. This time, however, it wasn’t a home project, it was a photo shoot, and it had more to do with actually organizing things rather than building (although going from mock-up to beta to release is there undeniably). What has caught my attention this time was how administrative flow of things tend to greatly influence the outcome of the process. You have to gather resources, make sure they present on time and at the place to complete the project, then you get your project going and at the end you have your lessons learned thing, if you are lucky.

Small Business owners still need to be educated – you thought they would know by now everything about Facebook, Twitter and search engine optimization? Wrong! Your average small business owner is having a hard time getting the idea of how these things work. Latest quote: “But I have these 5 domain names, if I point them all to my web site I should be on top of Google, no?”. Yeah, how, exactly?

It’s Upgrade Time – PHP4 is almost dead of old age. How do you make your clients switch on the basis that the technology you have used to build their web sites 3 – 4 years ago is already obsolete and they need to upgrade. Not all of them lease cars, so idea of “new every two” (or three or four) isn’t entirely their motto. And they don’t buy into all this technology talk either. However, what they do buy into are security concerns. Old technology equals less secure environment.

Stop That Gadget Rainfall – personally I am hair away from being fed up with all the new gadgets that revolve around same decade old concept of a shiny thing that you poke with your fingers to watch a tiny little screen show you something. Whether you take iPhone 4, HTC Evo or whatever else will be running Windows Mobile 7 – it’s same old thing nonetheless, limited by “revolutionary” 3G technology. Reminds me of an old game of Civilization I used to spend hours playing. The funniest scenario was when you thought you’re on top of the chain, you have just invented Gunpowder and two turns later you get a visit from some other nation with battleships, carriers and tanks. Same seems to be the case with our wireless technology in US.

If you think the troubles with Advantage Rent-A-Car were over – you’re wrong. We lost another hour on our way back to airport when we brought the car back. Aside from numerous annoying mechanical issues with the car itself (nothing major – just annoying) it turned out that the contract on it was closed, so a new one had to be created. How these people get anything done – is just beyond me. Literally spent between 40 minutes to an hour just dropping off the car. Would have been more, but some manager type said he wants us out of there so the sales rep had to fill out some forms by hand to enter them into their system later.

I remember I was complaining about car rental companies before, but Advantage Rent-A-Car has truly beaten all the expectations of bad customer service.

Aside from that the vacation was anything short of amazing. Had a lot of fun on the beach and in parks, rested a lot and came up with new project for myself.

It looks like ASP.NET is a well under served technology. I do a lot of development in ASP.NET and it turns out there’s just not as much information out there as there is about other stuff. Whenever I get stuck with some complicated JavaScript/PHP/SQL issue – I can find an answer almost immediately. However, when I hit a roadblock with ASP.NET (either VB.NET or C#) – it’s either some guys from India copy-pasting MSDN code samples into their blogs to get exposure or pretend they have experience, or there’s (usually unanswered) cry for help on one of the few main ASP.NET forums. Of course, there’s a chance someone actually covered the topic, but it doesn’t even come close to being as often as other technologies.

So I thought why not start covering some real-world issues. There’s a lot of entry-level stuff you hit all the time that’s just not that obvious and you get stuck with it just because you’re missing one single bit of knowledge on how that specific thing works. Or some advanced-level stuff that gets “ah, that’s simple, I’ll just make it work” attitude, when in fact it’s not. I am definitely not a guru, but if this little bit will help than my goal will be accomplished.

One thing that truly amazes me is what people search on this blog. A lot of spam-beloved words, the reason why – escapes me.

From the outside world this blog is being bombarded by queries like “outlook 2007 to thunderbird” or “outlook 2007 thunderbird” or “export outlook 2007 to thunderbird” (all within top 10 of queries). The answer is here: Outlook 2007 to Mozilla Thunderbird conversion.

Another big bunch of people are searching for SitcomTV.com domain. Well, it is for sale if the price is right. Click here to contact me. Alternatively, you can offer a donation that would make the web site (about sitcoms) up and running. Either way – we all win.

Last, but not least bunch is divided by two interests – HTC Advantage 7501 (truly amazing device, but a bit too bulky for every day use – learned it the hard way) and people who are looking to install Pandora on Windows Mobile devices (an amazing service, pretty much the only radio I would like to listen all the time). Preferably for free.

Newcomers this week are attracted by new posts dedicated to .NET technology that I’ve been using for a lot of time now. Since this seems like a great interest – there’s more where it came from. Stay tuned.

As pretty much any other blogger, at the end of the year (or before another one starts) – here’s the recap of what happened during a year.

January – 66 posts written (I think this is the most posts I have ever written in a month). Most prominent are Small Business Survival (crisis is still here, might still be worth reading), Home Surveillance System (part 1, part 2), the whole series on blog editors (now a little outdated though) and Hacking WordPress theme (with all the updates). There were a lot of other interesting posts as well, but these are the essense.

February – 19 posts written. Among interesting – Samsung BlackJack, January Search Trends (this is when I actually started following them), Gadgets As Conversational Pieces, Live Tech Support services review (part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4), the Late Night Post About Clients (the web site that had never took off as of now) and two on browser wars. Now, with introduction of Google’s Chrome it would be interesting to return to this in the next year.

March – 5 posts (boy, I really was slacking off). Conference Center Wireless Trickery (still valid for some places) and two articles on Administering Web Store Databases. With the infusion of cloud-based services this might become obsolete faster then I thought. On the other hand, since we have these huge “clouds”, but unreliable and slow broadband, it might be more useful then clouds.

April – 4 posts (slacking continues). Generally Speaking With A Client is the only worthy read.

May – 5 posts (the only defence I have is that these are large posts). Sexy Girls and Hot Cars, Retire Your iPod, and Land Line Is Doomed are there for your enjoyment.

June – 2 posts (it was hot out there!). Cheap Hardware? That’s Expensive is a good read in times of cutting costs on everything.

July – 3 posts (I don’t like to write in Summer). A post on Starbucks Experience and contemplation on new domain zones are worth it.

August – 8 posts (see, it’s getting better!). Job Offer Spam, one more Small Business Don’ts, a post on social media influence on read-world politics and how modern politics trying to influence the social media by targeted trolling and infuses of false and misleading information and a post on Blackberry vs. iPhone.

September – 12 posts (oh, the improvement!). FiOS vs. Cable, customer service at Staples, Small Business Will Step Up… Later and a rant on oncoming netbook revolution.

October – 6 posts (the weather was too nice outside!). How to fix our economy (part 1 and part 2) – too late for that, I guess, but the idea is still good and valid, and one more advice for businesses how to benefit from crisis.

November – 3 posts (I have a good excuse – I was getting married). Post Halloween Web Trends is a good read for retailers who somehow depend on that holiday.

December – 9 posts (including this one). Las Vegas Learning, review of Cheap Web Conferencing service, our generation’s choosing of Internet over sex (I still don’t believe it though), Buying Domains On A Smartphone (trust me, this issue will go on forever) and AT&T’s squeezing money out of Pandora listeners who don’t happen to be iPhone owners are good reads before the year’s out.

All in all it was a good year, given the crisis and all. I definitely see the room for improvement – both for my company, my life and this blog.

Right! Back from being sick, tending to sick close one, crashed server and back in business on a new one. It’s been quite a busy time, but I think I managed to take care of all the emergencies that just kept popping up one after another (or sometimes simultaneously). By the way, Dreamhost is the slowest host I have ever been on, but even something with shell access is better then nothing when moving half-gig web sites…

We’re starting up a new project. It’s going to be about recruiters and job market recruiting, so if you are on a job market or recently been there – get your stories together, we’ll need them soon. Stay tuned.

Additionally, if any of the readers are interested in blogging about Russian food and any related topic – please get in touch. If not – bring somebody who might be interested.

Looks like there is another vulnerability discovered in WordPress, that’s why I have to upload all 3.1MB of files again to all the accounts I have WP installed. After backing up the account and downloading backup.

Maybe I am being too quirky, but I would just post files that need to be updated – just like other PHP projects do – Joomla, Invision Power Board and so on.

On the other hand – maybe (just maybe) it’s time to move to SVN way of managing the multiple installations…

Most of WordPress bloggers know that there are hundreds of themes to make your blog different from others. Some bloggers create lists, contests and other blog theme promotion events. Of course, the presentation is important, there is no doubt about it.

What is, actually, puzzles me is that while we, bloggers, spend tremendous amounts of time tweaking and twisting quite a number of themes – most of the people read blogs through subscriptions – RSS or e-mail. All the beauty of
tweaked theme with endless hours invested is lost on the most loyal part of the audience.

Most people aren’t attracted by the theme the blog is using. They aren’t here to watch how masterfully blogger managed to blend AdSense with content with couple of banners and with affiliate links. They are here for content. They see the blog for a minute or two, or maybe even five, to determine if the blog is worth subscribing for.Then they proceed to subscribe to the feed. That’s about all the time that the theme is watched.

Sometimes the blog’s theme is so cumbersome, overloaded with ads that the content is almost lost. Yet, we can see quite a number of subscribers. They read the blog through the RSS or e-mail. They have something to say.

Strange, isn’t it? Bloggers overall make a hefty sum (that includes those who makes six figures and those who make six cents) off of the ads and affiliate links posted in the blog itself. Maybe, subconsciously, we reward loyal bloggers with absence of ads-in-your-face. Just as a way of saying thank you.

So, if you already reading this blog via any kind of subscription – thank you

At the earliest convenience registered myself at some other paying services such as ReviewMe, Smorty, Zookoda, TNX. Research shows that you have to have established blog with good pagerank if you really want to get any real money off of paid posts. However, links in those posts matter much more then actual content. The real problem, of course, is that Google doesn’t like paid links. So, there is a real dilemma – how to get good writing gigs without damaging your Google score (that is PageRank).

Some interesting ideas have been flowing through recently. We’re designing a software utility that will automate certain things in blog management, as well as create some unique opportunities in Search Engine Optimization. More on that later.

Sometimes something weird happens – I demand something that isn’t available. With software it’s easy (that’s how I got into computers), you dig in the code and you tweak and hack around until it does what you want.

When I just started this blog on Blogger quite a while ago, there was this feature that allowed to set up a link for your title – in case if you don’t want the title of the post to link to external resource. Why would you do it – whole another story, but it was just possible. With WordPress, even matured to version 2.3, it is still not.

I have decided to dig in and figure out how to do it with as least effort as possible. I have no idea how to build a WordPress plugin yet and I didn’t really have time to figure that out. So I decided to go hacking. Through various resources on the web I figured what needed to be hacked and how. Initial idea was to leave core files untouched and hack the theme only, so any time you upgrade your WordPress installation the feature remained untouched.

The only two places you will need to touch are functions.php and main index file of your template. This is such an easy process that almost any can do it in under 15 minutes.

In your WP admin open the Presentation -> Theme Editor screen and click on functions.php – you should see something like the following screen:

Open the attached hack file and copy everything from it into functions.php, then click Update File. When done, click on Main Index Template or on index.php – you should see something similar to the following screen:

Replace the line that says
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

with the following:
<?php print_post_title() ?>

Now, whenever you feel like let your post title leave your blog and point someplace else, just scroll down in your post writing screen, create or select a custom key named url1 or title_url or url_title and put that external URL in value box.

UPDATE: This still works for WP 2.5 and WP 2.6, read more in the update.