Thank you Headspring!

...for 5+ wonderful years of employment! Dustin Wells, you are the best boss I will ever have! I'm sad that today is my last with your company.

Dark clouds loom for Mom and Pop hosting enterprises

At Headspring, we are embracing Microsoft Azure and have, for example, this year moved our web site to Azure from shared hosting. (Thank you Tim Thomas!) This is one of many examples of our reliance on cloud computing, an ever-deepening trend for us.

Is it expensive? Not really. The most extreme example I can think of in which cloud hosting is expensive compared to an alternative is the difference between hosting one web site in a windows shared hosting environment versus spinning up a Rackspace slice in a Windows environment or undertaking a minimum commitment to Azure. The difference is about $600 per year as of this writing. That is the difference between $100 per year for the shared environment and $700 per year for the cloud environment.

What's more, even if this does seem like a big distinction, note that the gap will only tighten up. Clouds are new and their pricing will fall. Network Solutions can't cut back expenses much more to pass a savings on to you. They are running a lean ship as it is.

What is the trend here? Could there come a day when there is effectively no price difference at all and thus all of the Mom and Pop hosting companies that have come and gone in the past dozen years see their era come to a close? Is a new era in hosting dominated by Microsoft, Rackspace, and a few other key big fish dawning? It seems to me that the days in which any small business owner may offer hosting as a service are slipping away.

Headspring Holiday Party

I have just left a Headspring Holiday Party and I have come away with these iPhone pictures of Dustin Wells, Jeffrey Palermo, Kevin Hurwitz, Matt Hinze, Glenn Burnside, and Anne Epstein:

At Headspring, I STILL work with some amazing individuals!

I am proud to work with:

Eric Anderson

Jimmy Bogard

Shawna Boyce*

Anne Epstein

Kevin Hurwitz

Mahendra Mavani

Jeffrey Palermo

Pedro Reys

Christa Tuttle*

*of Launch Marketing, which offices with Headspring

Today, most of us toured the new facility that Headspring and Launch Marketing will move into on Monday, the 28th of June (four days from today). Nick Becker, Matt Hinze, Rafael Torres, and Dustin Wells of Headspring could not attend due to circumstances, but I am immensely proud to work with Nick Becker, Matt Hinze, and Rafael Torres and especially to work for Dustin Wells. After the tour we ate at the Mangia Pizza at Mesa and Spicewood Springs and I took these photos...

Mahendra Mavani speaks on Object-Oriented Programming

On 6/15 Matt Hinze presented on TDD at Microsoft's Austin office for what was the very last workshop held at its MoPac location. Be our guest on 7/20 at the new Microsoft office at 10900 Stonelake Boulevard, Building B, Suite 225, Austin, Texas 78759 when Headspring's Mahendra Mavani speaks on OOP. I will be there and I promise a good workshop. (SOLID, IoC, and more!)

Register.

SEO exposure

I've been trying to learn a little more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) nuisances in 2010 (and earlier). My findings include:

1. The contents of a title tag should not exceed 65 characters while the contents of the description tag should be limited to 25 to 150 characters.



2. http://www.ispionage.com/ and http://www.compete.com/ and http://www.spyfu.com/ and http://www.keywordspy.com/ are tools for gauging what competitors and doing in the name of Adwords.



3. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is good tool for measuring if a potential search term is worth optimizing for and also how competitive it is. We have been using this tool to determine overall traffic for a keyword (within a month's time) and then http://www.google.com/analytics/ to determine how big of a pie slice (within a month's time) we are garnering. The second number divided by the first provides a percentage to track.



4. http://www.quantcast.com/ is a tool for gauging the audience of an existing web site while http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html is a tool for gauging how to reach a demographic by way of social media marketing (use the third slide of http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/ladder.html to interpret the results the tool gives).



5. http://mashable.com/ gives Web 2.0 and social media news.



6. http://www.wordtracker.com/ and http://www.wordze.com/ are keyword tools. Wordze offers a 30 day free trial and also supposedly provides cost-per-click projections with recommended keywords.



7. Canonical tags may be used to make the most of duplicate content instead of having duplicate content become a negative. Something like this <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/> in the header of a page suggests that the page's content should weigh in favor of the other page referenced instead of a scenario in which the two pages compete with each other.



8. http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php allows one to determine a "page rank" for a page and Google has leaked that the better a page ranks the more Google is inclined to allow more pages on a given site to be indexed. Page rank and the number of pages indexed are tied together as metrics.



9. It may be wise to build a search engine at one's site, to record what the public searchs for, and to pay attention to those searches which yield zero results. What are others NOT finding at your site?



10. http://www.cogi.com/ is a good transcription service. Headspring has been transcribing audio recordings form our senior players speaking on their expertise and cleaning the transcripts of the recordings up to feed (eventually blog postings and also) whitepaper content such as that found here: http://www.headspringsystems.com/services/custom-application-development/



11. I now have experience with WordPress, dasBlog, and subtext. If you are going to host your own blog, WordPress is very likely the way to go. dasBlog and subtext are ASP.NET open source alternatives to the one solution which PHP truly excels at. Use dasBlog and subtext when under hosting restraints. dasBlog does write content to files in lieu of using a database which may save one on hosting fees.



12. One may track Twitter traffic using service such as http://bit.ly/ consistently to wrap URLs offered at Twitter (putting a tracking code at the end of URLs).



13. verticalresponse.com is good for email campaigns.



14. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp is good for recording live presentations which in turn may then draw interest at YouTube and Viddler.



15. http://www.attentionwizard.com/ may be used to tell where eyes will go on a landing page. http://www.crazyegg.com/ seems to be a comparable tool as are http://www.clicktale.com/, http://www.usertesting.com/, and http://userfly.com/.

Headspring's Eric Anderson to give a workshop on Version Control and Automated Builds on May 18

http://www.headspringsystems.com/community/workshop/ will allow you to sign up for "Version Control and Build Systems for Growing Teams," a workshop by Headspring's Eric Anderson on May 18th at the Microsoft Center in Austin.

Topics to be covered include:

• Branching strategies in Subversion
• Branching strategies in DVCS with Mercurial
• Continuous Integration with Hudson
• Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.Net