We’ve upgraded our website and logo as you can see. The old color scheme wasn’t very good and we had received some negative feedback on it. Our site, particularly our blog, is important to us as it drives our business so we’ve gone for a more user-friendly look and feel. Our previous logo was a hatching egg, we felt it appropriate when we initially started last year as it depicted our ideas hatching but it was always temporary. We’ve changed it to something a lot more suitable.

Micro-app Launch

We’ve launched a micro-app called Block-GA. We did this following the popularity of our previous entry “Exclude yourself from your Google Analytic results”. You’ll find more information here.

Announcing Fraports

Our next release, a web based application currently called “Fraports”, is in development and coming along nicely. We’re just started our second development iteration on Fraports, which is a reporting tool for one of the more popular invoicing solutions on the web.

That’s our news for this week, busy times at Ayble.com.

Block-GA is a result of this previous entry that proved to be very popular. It also shares some code from our current project, code name “Fraports”.

In the pipeline for Block-GA is further automation for the GA blocker process, namely you simply enter the website address that you want to block yourself from and we’ll take it from there. Try it out for yourself and if you’ve any comments or feature requests either email us at info@ayble.com, leave a comment here or you could tweet us, we’re @enayble.

1. Create a Google site
2. Create a spreadsheet.
3. Create a form from that spreadsheet.
4. Embed the form and the spreadsheet in the site.

Create the Google Site

Create a new site in Google Docs called ‘Bug Reporting Tool’. On the home page add any information about the project you need too. Then add two other pages, ‘Bug List’ and ‘Log a Bug’.

Create the Google Spreadsheet

This spreadsheet is going to be the powerhouse for the Google site. Create and save a new spreadsheet, then set the following column headers:

• Tester name
• Title
• Description
• Steps to reproduce
• Date
• Severity
• Date logged
• Date closed
• Notes

Create the Spreadsheet Form

Now create a form for that spreadsheet (Form Menu > Create Form). Set your sharing permissions on the spreadsheet. Developers should be able to edit it, and testers and others should only be able to view it. We’re going to set up the form now.

First edit the tester name field and check ‘make this a required question’. Click on done. Do exactly the same for the title field. Now, edit the description field and set the question type to ‘paragraph text’. Make it a required question and click on done. Do the same thing for the steps to reproduce field as you’ve done for description.

For the severity field we’ve set it’s question type to ‘choose from a list’, but ‘multiple choice’ will work just as well. It’s also a required question. Our four options on the list are:

1. Critical – any bug that’s a show stopper. This means that the tester was prevented from using the software.
2. Major – not a show stopper but still prevented the completion of a particular test although the tester could still use the software.
3. Minor – Tester could complete a test but something went wrong along the way.
4. Cosmetic – spelling mistakes, misaligned text fields and that sort of thing.

Date logged is a required text field. Unfortunately forms do not provide a calendar option, which is a pity. Date closed can be removed from the form. Notes is a ‘paragraph text’ question type but not a required question. If you like, set a theme for the form; we left it at the default. Click on save and the form is complete.

Embed the Google Spreadsheet and Form

Go back to your site, and edit the log a bug page, select ’spreadsheet form’ from the insert menu and select the form you’ve just created. Save the page.

Now edit the bug list page. Select spreadsheet from the insert menu to show the insert dialog, select the bug list spreadsheet and click on select. You’ll now be asked to choose some options. Choose view as list and click on save to embed the spreadsheet. Now save the page. Developers will be able to edit this spreadsheet embedded in the page, testers will only be able to view it. Developers can then update bugs as they fix them and testers etc will be able to view the bug list without editing it.

The sharing options are entirely up to you, obviously. For instance, your testing manager or senior testers may need to be able to edit the spreadsheet too or a customer may need access.

That’s it, job done.

If you have any queries/comments/questions please feel free to enter them below.

Having a degree means that you:

1. Know your subject, and know it at a graduate level. That’s quite something.
2. Have received training in what employers need you to do. They don’t want to have to train people how to do it, just how they need it done.
3. Know how to learn, that’s far very important in software development. You’ll continue to learn for the rest your career.
4. Can formulate your ideas and opinions and put them forward in a manner that can be understood.
5. Can ask a question, you don’t get educated without that ability. “How does this work?” is a vital question to ask over and over again when working with a new team and code base. Don’t think this reflects poorly on you, it doesn’t.
6. Can commit to achieving something important.
7. Can get out of bed, show up, and do the work required.

When I started over 15 years ago I worked with people who where good at their jobs but, like me, weren’t graduates. We were all young and the majority of us were working towards degrees in our spare time. We recognized the importance of that education to our careers, our employers fully supported our efforts as they also recognized that importance.

Being “Self-Trained” is something of a badge of honor in our industry, as is sleep deprivation. It simply shouldn’t be. I personally feel this is an extension of the ‘computer whizz-kid’ myth which I’ve touched upon before. Business isn’t War Games or that awful movie Hackers, you need a formal education in either science or engineering to work in this industry. It will also benefit your pay check!

Now this isn’t always a popular opinion, usually put down but those waving the ‘I’m Self-Trained’ badge, but put it this way: If you wanted a office block built, or a house for that manner, would you hire a qualified architect to design it for you or hire somebody because they’re good at D.I.Y? The latter may have indeed built their own home but who do you feel more comfortable handing over checks for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to?

Software development is a profession where skills need to be constantly updated, everybody knows how quickly I.T. evolves, and constant up-skilling is a fact of life for us. As I’ve stated in point 3 above, knowing how to learn is vital if you’re going to do this. Don’t confuse this with self-training, it’s called continuing professional development (CPD) by other professions, that’s what we need to call it too.

I’m not suggesting that we become a closed profession either. There’s loads of people who, like me, started out in a job and educated themselves at night. What I’m suggesting is that the base level of education for people who develop software should be the graduate level. If you don’t have that then start working towards it.

The software development industry needs to be on a par with the architecture and engineering industry when it comes to professionalism. Organizations like the Association for Computer Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society and the British and Australian Computer Societies also recognise this and have CPD programs and professional qualifications to further this goal.

From my own experience of the British Computer Society there is an active membership who are looking at ways to improve the education of computer science and engineering undergraduates through industry placements, and looking at how to improve the quality of the education received by people coming into our profession. I think these two points are something we, as professionals and as organisations, all need to address. Allowing the ‘Self-Trained’ myth to continue is only damaging our profession.

If you are ‘Self-Trained’, and you are really that good, then why not go and get the qualifications to prove it? It shouldn’t be that much of a challenge for you and you may (read: will) learn something new. It will be a benefit to you, your career, your work/life balance, and when you qualify, your profession.

This is a short post for a Friday afternoon.

Sometimes we get comments on this blog that may or may not be spam. Generally, our spam filter catches this but sometimes we get something like: “That’s a great post, it’s something we’ll be certainly be doing from now on.”. Seems genuine enough but rather bland, and as the filter didn’t catch it you cannot be sure, it’s probably not a bot at any rate.

Here’s what we do, we google the URL provided.

It’s simple enough to do, for instance if ‘Carol’ from http://www.ayble.com left something on your blog google the following: link: http://www.ayble.com/. That will bring up all the backlinks to that site that have been indexed by google. If the results contain a number blog posts where http://www.ayble.com/ is commenting with “That’s a great post, it something we’ll be certainly be doing from now on.” you can be sure its spam.

Now a simple solution is to use something like Adblock, the FireFox plug-in, to simply block GA. This works but it removes you from all GA results. However, most sites and blogs I visit also use GA and I don’t want to be removed from their data so I need to simply block my browsers, on my machines, from my domain (www.ayble.com). You can achieve this by setting up filters in GA, this won’t be a full filters tutorial by the way. You can filter yourself out based on IP address but I prefer the cookie method as it works for shared and dynamic IP addresses.

The first thing you need to do is set a cookie on your machine to exclude yourself from GA. Google have a tutorial here but I prefer to do things my own way which is described below.

Creating a cookie

You’ll need to create an HTML page which includes the GA tracking code you downloaded when you set up GA for your site. You’ll also need some javascript code to generate the cookie which blocks you from GA.

So create an HTML document within your favourite text editor. A word processer might also do but if you’re on Windows just use Notepad.

Copy the following code into your text editor:

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}


setExclude = function() {
        try {
            pageTracker._setVar('exclude_visitor');
            alert('Success');
        }catch(err) { alert ('error') }
    }

Set Blocker

Now include your google tracking code in the document head. Find the line that reads var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”); and replace UA-XXXXXXX-X with your own tracking code. Once you’ve done that, save the file with a name like blocker.html, and upload it to the root of your website.

Setting the cookie

Now visit the page with your browser (I’m using FireFox). Our website is http://www.ayble.com/ so I had to browse to http://www.ayble.com/blocker.html. Once you done that click on the Set Blocker link and you should see a message dialog saying “Success”. If so you’ve done the technical bit, if you get an error you’ve done something wrong so you’ll need to repeat this.

You can verify that the cookie has been set by viewing cookies in your browser. In FireFox 3 go to the Edit menu and select Preferences ->Privacy Tab and click on the Show Cookies button. For other browsers you should check the browser’s own documentation. Once you’ve opened the cookies dialog select your domain and look for a cookie called __utmv. Its content should include a number followed by .exclude_visit. Is that there? Well done.

Creating the Google Analytics filter

Now setup a filter in GA, by following these steps:

1. Log on to GA.
2. Click on Filter Manager in the bottom right hand corner.
3. Click on ‘+ Add Filter’.
4. Give the filter a name.
5. Select Customer Filter below that.
6. Select Exclude.
7. In Filter Field select ‘User Defined’
8. In the Filter Pattern field type exclude_visitor.
9. Set Case Sensitive to No.
10. In Apply Filter to Website Profile add the sites you want to apply the filter too.
11. Click on Save Changes.

That’s it, you should now be excluded from your own analytics reports. If you have any staff that you also want to exclude, they should follow the setting cookie section (ignore the Creating the Google Analytics Filter section). Once everybody is excluded delete the file from your website but keep a copy of it. If you do need to block anybody else you can upload it again.

Update 20th March 2010

We’ve released a micro-app that automates the tasks in this tutorial. It’s called Block-GA.

Make sure that staff are aware how to approach potential customers on-line. Make sure you’re all singing off the same hymn sheet too, that’s very important. Here are some pointers:

• Be upfront about involvement in a product or service. Don’t go on to web forums or blogs and pretend to be a customer or user of the product or service. If you get caught out this looks dishonest, probably because it is dishonest.
• If you are on sites make sure the owners of those sites are okay with your product being put forward. A lot of web forums make money from advertising and may consider your posting as an attempt to advertise for free.
• If the owners of a site, or somebody acting on their behalf, react to you unfavourably the best thing to do is apologise and enter into a dialog about how they’d like things to be done. This will get them on your side.
• Forums and other places where people gather on-line to discuss and chat will generally have an existing community. Try interacting with that community and gauge how they’ll react to a sales pitch (taken that the site in question will allow you to pitch in the first place).

A very simple strategy may well be “If you’re not the marketing department it is not your job. If you see potential somewhere discuss it with the marketing department.”

I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. You own a web tools company and you’ve developed a content management system. Your target market are web designers and developers. A staff member, in their enthusiasm, joins a forum for web designers and developers and starts singing the praises of your product and how great they found it. They don’t disclose their involvement as they think that posing as a genuine user looks more authentic. They’re right too, it does. They generate some site traffic and possibly some sales.

At this point you’re unaware of what is happening.

Some of the other forum users are hearing these praises a bit too often and raise their suspicions with the moderators (this does happen all the time by the way, that’s how these people get caught). That user gets outed and banned. This makes that individual, and your company, look dishonest. It’s projecting a bad image of being untrustworthy to your potential customers.

If the staff member had discussed the potential with you or a marketing manager then the site owners could have been contacted and a new revenue stream realised. Most sites owners want to make money and will welcome being approached.

I’m giving this example as it is exactly what happened on one of the forums I moderate over the weekend. Some members of our community were furious at having the wool pulled over their eyes. To make matters worse after the initial banning a second staff member came on to the forum, declared who he was, and starting singing praises for the same product. This resulted in a second ban and an even angrier community. Eventually the company owner contacted us and smoothed things out with the moderation team but the damage was done. The company staff are now banned and the community see that particular company as totally untrustworthy.

If the company owner, a very reasonable fellow too, had put a strategy in place this would never have happened. I’m sure the company will do great but forums do get indexed by the search engines; It would be a shame if a search for his products produced this sorry tale.

1. DO NOT get it done by a friend or their offspring.

The days of someones kid or their best friend being a whizzkid at computers are gone, if they ever existed. Yes they may be brilliant and may even be studying computer science or web design but, at the end of the day, your business is more than a few lines of work experience to be added to a new graduate’s resume.

Students, family members and even the neighbour who works in I.T. do not have the resources to develop a polished, finished, tested system. Companies do. When you’re starting up a business its important to save money but a savvy computer or web design company will realize the value of repeat business – if you’re on a budget then look for a company that will work to fit in with it.

2. DO talk to that friend though.

I don’t want to dismiss your neighbour (or whoever) who works in I.T. They have a level of expertise that you don’t; talk to them about your needs, they may be able to give you a more unbiased opinion than a sales person trying to make commission.

3. DO NOT design your own website.

The temptation to put a website together yourself may be too great to resist. Personally, I believe this is because the web is so young and it was only a decade ago that with a smattering of HTML code you could have a website up and running in no time. But here’s a number things to consider now in 2010:

1. Not all browsers are created equal. Just because it looks good in Internet Explorer doesn’t mean it will look good in a previous version of Internet Explorer, or FireFox, or Google Chrome, or Safari. That’s the lions share of the browser market right there – you have to look good in all of these. Experienced web designers will know how to do this. Do you?
2. Search engine optimisation – that’s SEO if you’ve been researching online. Again, web design agencies will have an in-house expert or will outsource to one they know and trust. Do you know how to optimise your site? Do you have the time to learn?
3. Professional designers versus you. Look at your competitors’ sites. Can you do that good a job? If not, that’s a win for them if you try. If they look like they’ve done it themselves then that’s a win for you – go spend a little money.

I could write a list of 25 reasons not to design your own website and wouldn’t have begun to even scratch the surface of why it’s a bad idea.

4. DO get all your marketing material sorted from the start.

I’m talking brochures, business cards, company logos on invoices, and those funny squishy animal things you give out at exhibitions that are all part of your marketing material. These need to project a professional, unified image. Does a downloaded website template fit with this? When you’re choosing these materials don’t forget about your website – trying to make a website fit after you’ve spent money on branding can be difficult and expensive.

5. DO invest in I.T.

This post was born of this thread on http://www.boards.ie (I’m Irish and hang out on Irish sites). It’s about point of sale (POS) systems so I’ll use that as an example. You’re going into retail selling widgets and you pay $1,600 for a POS system developed by *somebody* you know who works in I.T. Not going with an expensive solution from a specialist company saves you $6,000. There’s a Christmas rush on widgets, you’ve 12 customers standing in line, you’re ringing up a sale and suddenly you get the error message ‘ActiveX cannot create component’. The *developer* is at a sister’s wedding that day. Do you know how to fix it? Time passes and customers waiting to pay start putting back their widgets and walking out.

Another scenario: You get covered in the national media as an up-and-coming company and your website goes down because it can’t handle the sudden number of visits. That is something that could have been orchestrated with your web agency in advance. The kid next-door can’t do that.

A specialist company has the experience to deal with issues as they arise. If a POS solution costs $7,600 and the company have 2 thousand installs well they’ve over 15 million dollars worth of installs. That buys an awful lot of Getting It Right. Two thousand customers speaks of lot of a company.

6. DO invest in technical support.

Pay the extra for technical support. Decide how important a system is to you; if it’s a retail website selling golf equipment then the website IS your business. Good technical support will be worth every penny. If you’ve a laptop, what do you use it for? Is it the end of month accounts or something that has to be done everyday? If it’s end of month then next day support will probably do, if it’s everyday then same day support is what you need. Same thing applies to all your technology. Which leads me to point 7.

7. DO get a service level agreement.

A service level agreement is a contract that outlines what exactly you’re entitled to and what you can expect from the I.T. services you are purchasing, from network support through to website maintenance.

8. DO look at initial saving Vs the long term impact.

Probably the reason most new business owners do some of the ‘do nots’ on this list is to save money. But an initial investment (read expense) into quality I.T. will save you money in the long run. Whatever kind of business you’re running, you’ll be using I.T. to run it.

To sum up I guess what I’m saying is don’t cut corners for the sake of saving money. Just as the shortest route isn’t always the quickest, the cheapest route isn’t always going to save you the most money. You don’t have to break the bank but do spend where you need to.

We reviewed a number possible approaches, we started with what I’ll call a classic web development platform which is developing a solution and hosting it on an account with an Internet host provider. We also reviewed Cloud based platforms. Particularly we paid attention to the GAE and to Microsoft’s cloud offering Windows Azure. A cloud based solution just means that the platform is hosted on the Internet, in software development diagrams the Internet is depicted as a cloud, hence we have cloud solutions.

We had three requirements starting out:

It had to be stable.

This is a vital. Our, and your, data needs to be in a good data center. They need to have redundancies in place to handle unseen events, such as a server going down or a power cut in the local supply grid, so your data isn’t lost. Google and Microsoft have data centers around the world, these are state of the art and have huge redundancies in place. Should an entire data center go down then the other centers will step in a do its job for it. The upshot for users is that you’re never aware of this happening, your stuff is always available.

It had to be scalable.

Businesses grow and their I.T. infrastructure has to grow with them. An application has to work with 1500 people as well as it did when there were only 15 people using it. For us, going with a cloud based solution means that our apps scale with demand, we don’t have to purchase additional resources before the fact to ensure an uninterrupted service.

It had to be cost effective.

Again, cloud based solutions mean that apps scale with demand, you’re only paying for the resources used. The python programming language was also cost effective for us, I’ve explained this further below.

So we decided cloud based platform was going to be the platform for our development, we then had to decide between Google’s and Microsoft’s offerings. Note: Amazon Web Services were also reviewed, we felt that the skills available with Ayble.com right now weighed heavily in favour of the other two choices.

What won us over to the GAE was it’s primary programming language which is called Python. For us it was a lightweight development language, let me clarify what lightweight means at Ayble.com. Lightweight means a short turn around time, this allows us to respond to clients’ demands quickly. We can respond to market demands quickly too, so if a new feature is required, or an existing feature needs to be enhanced we can turn that around rapidly.

Lightweight also reduces our time to release. Applications can be developed, tested and delivered quickly. A smaller code-base of our applications reduces the learning curve for developers new to a project and keeps our over all maintenance costs down. All of these lightweight features give us a significant advantage over our larger competitors who produce more bloated code. Python gave us all of these things.

The GAE also supports Java and with Azure we would have gone for C#. These are fantastic languages, I’ve worked with both in the past, but for us the didn’t give the lightweight advantages of Python.

Finally our applications would be built from the same stuff Google’s own applications are built from. This sealed the deal for us. That’s why we chose the Google App Engine.

We use Google Apps because its web based so regardless of whether we’re working on a Windows, a Linux, or an Apple computer everything is still available. All we need is a web browser (which is what you’re using to read this). Because its web based there’s only one location for our documents which is on the web. If a laptop goes down then the documents are still available from any other device with web access in the world. So our stuff is available on the go from anywhere, at any time.

There’s no upgrades. There won’t be a release of Apps 2010 next year with a discounted upgrade version available for Apps 2007 customers. We always have the latest version and all the latest features, this keeps things nice and simple which is what we’re all about.

Google mail handles all our email for us, it took about 30 minutes work to set up and that was that. We don’t have to worry about supporting an email server as Google mail is the email server. It integrates with any of the popular email clients like Firebird or Outlook but we just access it using our browsers.

It’s cheap. For example Microsoft Office Standard (2007) will cost you $399.95* for a license, shop around and you’ll probably get it cheaper, I recommend you try Amazon.com. Exchange server will cost $699.99^† for the standard edition, $3,999^† for the Enterprise edition, plus CAL licenses for end users …. we can go on. We could upload a spreadsheet to calculate the cheapest solution for you and your needs but that’s getting much too complicated. We’re paying $50 per user, per year.

Put it this way, if you want Office Standard (That’s the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook productivity suite) for a 10 staff company that’s going to cost you $3,730^‡. Office 2010 is just around the corner too so you may have to include upgrade costs at some point in the future. However, with Google Apps you get your productivity suite, along with Google Calender, Google Mail (no more Exchange licensing costs) and Google sites for 10 people at $500 per year. It will give you 7 years of the latest version for the cost of Office 2007. That’s quite a saving, and remember there’s no upgrades as you always have the latest version.

In our next post we discuss why we use the Google App Engine. The Google App Engine is the technology both Google Apps and our applications are built with.

* Microsoft’s recommended retail price.

^† Again Microsoft’s recommended retail price.

^‡ Price quoted on the Microsoft Volume Licensing site on the 17th December, 2009.