Right now I am sure that we're all concerned about the economy. I know I am. First it was gas at over $4 a gallon, and now it's under $2. Sure, it's nice to pay less than half was I did earlier this year, but to me it's sending a scary signal - money isn't flowing. If people aren't buying products, then companies can't keep paying their employees, who then have no money to buy products...it's a vicious cycle.
How do you get out of a cycle like that? I can't say "Spend more money" if the money's not there to spend. But everyone still has needs, regardless. As a consumer, I have to eat, so I'm going to go to the store and buy what I need. As the company that makes the food I want to buy, someone is going to try really hard to get that money. But it's a total waste of their time, effort, and marketing dollars to try to get me to buy something I'm never even going to consider. There was a time in my life when baby food was of great importance to me. Now, it just isn't.
So it's about how you target your marketing. You want to reach the right people, and those people only want to see what's relevant to them. The web is a very important form of communication these days. It's how people find products they want, and you establish trust. A great way to establish trust is a personal touch. Blogging creates that personal touch. To get your blog in front of the right people, it needs to rank highly in search engines. I'm not talking about spamming people with things irrelevant to your products, I mean making it easy for people to find you when you have what they want and need.
It's about the mutually beneficial matching of supply and demand. The better you are at it, the higher ROI you will see. Combine that matching with the trust factor of a personal blog, and you can't help but get people what they want.
Posted Friday, November 7, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
So what is a blogging platform, and why is it important?
Why pay for something when there are other things out there that are free? Or why not just do it in house?
For one thing, we have an amazing staff of people to help you through the setup process and keep you on track, but what I'm a part of, personally, is what goes on behind the scenes, so I can best speak to that. We have some awesome features you don't see in other blogging software systems, with more on the way. With our keyword strength meter and keyword cloud, it's easy to see what you should be blogging about. I'd love to talk about a couple things we have in the pipeline, but you'll just have to wait until they go live.
There are systems you could install yourself, but then you have to have someone on hand to maintain it. That's expensive. Our engineering team does work that maintains everyone's blogs, and adds features to all of them. A dedicated team like ours to work on a single company's blog system just wouldn't add up.
Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction when they're in a panic, and they call their boss, and he tells them to relax because "the Wolf is on it"?
That's us.
Why pay for something when there are other things out there that are free? Or why not just do it in house?
For one thing, we have an amazing staff of people to help you through the setup process and keep you on track, but what I'm a part of, personally, is what goes on behind the scenes, so I can best speak to that. We have some awesome features you don't see in other blogging software systems, with more on the way. With our keyword strength meter and keyword cloud, it's easy to see what you should be blogging about. I'd love to talk about a couple things we have in the pipeline, but you'll just have to wait until they go live.
There are systems you could install yourself, but then you have to have someone on hand to maintain it. That's expensive. Our engineering team does work that maintains everyone's blogs, and adds features to all of them. A dedicated team like ours to work on a single company's blog system just wouldn't add up.
Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction when they're in a panic, and they call their boss, and he tells them to relax because "the Wolf is on it"?
That's us.
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
You've had this happen, I'm sure:
You're standing in a crowded room, carrying on a conversation with three other people, blotting out the background static of a dozen other conversations when, across the room, someone says your name. It's clear as a bell. Now you can suddenly hear everything that person's saying, and you want to know what they said about you, and why.
The human brain is an amazing filter of information. Our subconscious minds are constantly rejecting massive amounts of utterly irrelevant inputs. If they didn't, there's simply no way we could even function. (Incidentally, one of the theories as to why autistic people are paralyzed by human interaction is that they are unable to filter properly - everything is relevant to them.)
One of the biggest concerns about blogging is that it brings journalism to the common person. Now everyone has a voice. That's great, because every human should have the right to speak their mind. That said, I'm not going to find everything that everyone says to be interesting. Sorry, but I'm just not. With everyone speaking at once, I'm going to be just drowning in static, with no way at all to hear what I'm interested in.
Unless there's a filter. With a proper filter, I'm going to find the things I'm interested in. That's what search engines are for, and SEO. I don't believe in "gaming the system", which causes spammy results to bubble to the top. That renders the whole thing useless. What I do believe is what's been said many times - "Content is king." A properly designed system can bring the attention of search engines to relevant content.
Your brain is a search engine. Your name is one of the keywords it's constantly searching for.
You're standing in a crowded room, carrying on a conversation with three other people, blotting out the background static of a dozen other conversations when, across the room, someone says your name. It's clear as a bell. Now you can suddenly hear everything that person's saying, and you want to know what they said about you, and why.
The human brain is an amazing filter of information. Our subconscious minds are constantly rejecting massive amounts of utterly irrelevant inputs. If they didn't, there's simply no way we could even function. (Incidentally, one of the theories as to why autistic people are paralyzed by human interaction is that they are unable to filter properly - everything is relevant to them.)
One of the biggest concerns about blogging is that it brings journalism to the common person. Now everyone has a voice. That's great, because every human should have the right to speak their mind. That said, I'm not going to find everything that everyone says to be interesting. Sorry, but I'm just not. With everyone speaking at once, I'm going to be just drowning in static, with no way at all to hear what I'm interested in.
Unless there's a filter. With a proper filter, I'm going to find the things I'm interested in. That's what search engines are for, and SEO. I don't believe in "gaming the system", which causes spammy results to bubble to the top. That renders the whole thing useless. What I do believe is what's been said many times - "Content is king." A properly designed system can bring the attention of search engines to relevant content.
Your brain is a search engine. Your name is one of the keywords it's constantly searching for.
Posted Wednesday, October 8, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
You may not be aware of this, but we release new software a lot. By a lot, I mean often - every week.
How do we manage this? We use "Scrum". It's a method of project management that keeps us on track very, very tightly. It's a little bit nonstandard here in that we actually have two overlapping cycles going on at once. We have a one week tactical sprint that we use for bug fixes and minor enhancements, and we have a four week strategic cycle for larger enhancements.
This lets us get things done really, really quickly. We are never far off track.
It's like driving a car. You don't drive a car by just pointing it at your destination and letting go of the steering wheel - there are lots of little course corrections that take place en route.
We're tracking all these changes with product backlogs and Trac, and we have an internal preview to let people know what's coming.
What does this mean to you, outside of Compendium? It means that we are not sitting on our laurels, having already built a great product. Instead, we're improving it all the time. Sometimes the changes are invisible to you, but the system is more robust, faster, more maintainable. Other times it's relevant to our customers, like when our templating system improves and CSS becomes drastically simpler. To our readers, content might become more accessible or more easily found via search engines.
To me, though, it means I'm in a team of professionals who really know and love our craft, and I think that's awesome.
How do we manage this? We use "Scrum". It's a method of project management that keeps us on track very, very tightly. It's a little bit nonstandard here in that we actually have two overlapping cycles going on at once. We have a one week tactical sprint that we use for bug fixes and minor enhancements, and we have a four week strategic cycle for larger enhancements.
This lets us get things done really, really quickly. We are never far off track.
It's like driving a car. You don't drive a car by just pointing it at your destination and letting go of the steering wheel - there are lots of little course corrections that take place en route.
We're tracking all these changes with product backlogs and Trac, and we have an internal preview to let people know what's coming.
What does this mean to you, outside of Compendium? It means that we are not sitting on our laurels, having already built a great product. Instead, we're improving it all the time. Sometimes the changes are invisible to you, but the system is more robust, faster, more maintainable. Other times it's relevant to our customers, like when our templating system improves and CSS becomes drastically simpler. To our readers, content might become more accessible or more easily found via search engines.
To me, though, it means I'm in a team of professionals who really know and love our craft, and I think that's awesome.
Posted Wednesday, October 1, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
A while back, I wrote about thermodynamics and getting your message across to readers, and how our software in particular makes it easier for people to find you. By compending your posts into topical blogs rather than just by author, search engines will index your content better, and as a result there is more relevant content for your readers.
But there's another way our software is really useful. You, the reader, can't see the interface I'm using right now to write this (unless you're already a client), but it's pretty cool. Off to the right is a list of keywords that Compendium wants to be ranked highly in. It is sorted alphabetically by default, but with a single click it can be sorted by number of posts associated with it. This lets me easily see if there are particular keywords that are being neglected, or are popular here. I can also use it for ideas if I'm drawing a blank.
Another cool feature is a keyword strength bar. It starts out red, with a value of zero, which makes sense. As I write, it dynamically finds keywords in my content, the number goes up, and the bar shifts from red to green. There's also a one-click spelling checker integrated into the editor.
So what exactly does this have to do with thermodynamics and pain points? Pain is a barrier to doing something. When barriers are lowered, that thing becomes more likely. If you want people to blog, make it easy. Some people just really don't like to write, but if it's less painful, they will do it more. Giving people tools that give them ideas along with immediate feedback on their post make it a better experience.
Technology like this is useful, cool, and fun to work on. That's a big reason why I'm here.
But there's another way our software is really useful. You, the reader, can't see the interface I'm using right now to write this (unless you're already a client), but it's pretty cool. Off to the right is a list of keywords that Compendium wants to be ranked highly in. It is sorted alphabetically by default, but with a single click it can be sorted by number of posts associated with it. This lets me easily see if there are particular keywords that are being neglected, or are popular here. I can also use it for ideas if I'm drawing a blank.
Another cool feature is a keyword strength bar. It starts out red, with a value of zero, which makes sense. As I write, it dynamically finds keywords in my content, the number goes up, and the bar shifts from red to green. There's also a one-click spelling checker integrated into the editor.
So what exactly does this have to do with thermodynamics and pain points? Pain is a barrier to doing something. When barriers are lowered, that thing becomes more likely. If you want people to blog, make it easy. Some people just really don't like to write, but if it's less painful, they will do it more. Giving people tools that give them ideas along with immediate feedback on their post make it a better experience.
Technology like this is useful, cool, and fun to work on. That's a big reason why I'm here.
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
We are in the process of doing some real improvements to our software, and in the process of testing it we decided we needed a *lot* of screenshots under a wide variety of browsers. That's inherently a really tedious process, and let's face it - I'm a programmer because I hate doing things by hand.
There *had* to be a better way.
So, Google being my friend and all, I looked. And looked. There are several pay sites out there that can provide this, but none had an API, and the browsers offered are really limited. Then I came across Browsershots.
That rocks.
Go there. Seriously. There are a *ton* of browsers supported, and it's free. Ok, there's a small catch - apparently it's not actually free if you want to use the API. I'm ok with that, though, as it's not expensive at all, and it's ridiculously useful.
Now, the downside - sorry, Johann - the documentation for the API is painful. It took some real work to realize that it's not talking about XML-RPC types at all, but Python types. We don't use Python here, we use PHP5, so I had to go through 2 layers of translation to get a working client for it, and authentication was unpleasant.
But we made it work, and thanks to my prototyping and Blake's code-fu, we now have a very handy script that takes screenshots of a bunch of our sites with all the browsers we support, plus a couple we don't.
Another very cool thing about Browsershots - it's open source. If you want to help his project by allowing your system to take screenshots, you can install a "shotfactory", but even cooler, if you want to do the whole thing yourself and not kill his server and bandwidth, you can install a "shotserver" and create your own browser shot farm.
Thanks, Johann. You rock.
There *had* to be a better way.
So, Google being my friend and all, I looked. And looked. There are several pay sites out there that can provide this, but none had an API, and the browsers offered are really limited. Then I came across Browsershots.
That rocks.
Go there. Seriously. There are a *ton* of browsers supported, and it's free. Ok, there's a small catch - apparently it's not actually free if you want to use the API. I'm ok with that, though, as it's not expensive at all, and it's ridiculously useful.
Now, the downside - sorry, Johann - the documentation for the API is painful. It took some real work to realize that it's not talking about XML-RPC types at all, but Python types. We don't use Python here, we use PHP5, so I had to go through 2 layers of translation to get a working client for it, and authentication was unpleasant.
But we made it work, and thanks to my prototyping and Blake's code-fu, we now have a very handy script that takes screenshots of a bunch of our sites with all the browsers we support, plus a couple we don't.
Another very cool thing about Browsershots - it's open source. If you want to help his project by allowing your system to take screenshots, you can install a "shotfactory", but even cooler, if you want to do the whole thing yourself and not kill his server and bandwidth, you can install a "shotserver" and create your own browser shot farm.
Thanks, Johann. You rock.
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
As I mentioned, I got my degree in 1999. I have a PhD in Chemistry, which sounds like a really strange thing to have as a background for writing blogging software, so that's a story for a different time. Just bear with me, though, as that piece of information is important background for what I'm going to talk about.
I tend to think in terms of science. Chemistry, physics, thermodynamics. Not stuff that most people sit and ponder, and I'm usually pretty ok with that. I was thinking about web traffic, and how it relates to what I already know, and I came up with an analogy. Imagine that you have a big stew of chemicals. All kinds of random stuff thrown into a vat and mixed up. There are going to be an incredibly wide range of reactions taking place in there, some of it good, some of it bad. Some of it will be stuff that you actually want to have happen. As your original reagents get used up, eventually the reactions wind down and you get a bunch of products. The reactions that went on in the vat were competing with each other to use up what you started with. Maybe two totally different sets of products needed the same building blocks, and one won out at the expense of the other. That's called competing pathways.
Now throw in a catalyst. A catalyst is something that itself doesn't get used up in the reactions, it just changes how fast a particular reaction goes. Maybe you can throw in a catalyst that helps the reaction you want, and it can use up the building blocks it needs faster than the competing pathway, and you wind up with more of the product you wanted. It doesn't have to slow down the other reaction, just speed up the one you want.
I'm a big fan of win/win solutions, but I'm also very aware that we live in a finite world. There's a limited amount of time, and a limited (but growing) amount of web traffic. You can build a great website, but that by itself won't necessarily drive traffic. There are a lot of eyeballs out there, looking at the web, and you want to get as many relevant ones looking at your site as possible. Those are your building blocks. Good tools can act as a catalyst for this. You don't have to damage anyone else's business to do this, you are just making it more likely for people to find their way to you, and enhancing your share.
That's what we do. We provide a catalyst.
I tend to think in terms of science. Chemistry, physics, thermodynamics. Not stuff that most people sit and ponder, and I'm usually pretty ok with that. I was thinking about web traffic, and how it relates to what I already know, and I came up with an analogy. Imagine that you have a big stew of chemicals. All kinds of random stuff thrown into a vat and mixed up. There are going to be an incredibly wide range of reactions taking place in there, some of it good, some of it bad. Some of it will be stuff that you actually want to have happen. As your original reagents get used up, eventually the reactions wind down and you get a bunch of products. The reactions that went on in the vat were competing with each other to use up what you started with. Maybe two totally different sets of products needed the same building blocks, and one won out at the expense of the other. That's called competing pathways.
Now throw in a catalyst. A catalyst is something that itself doesn't get used up in the reactions, it just changes how fast a particular reaction goes. Maybe you can throw in a catalyst that helps the reaction you want, and it can use up the building blocks it needs faster than the competing pathway, and you wind up with more of the product you wanted. It doesn't have to slow down the other reaction, just speed up the one you want.
I'm a big fan of win/win solutions, but I'm also very aware that we live in a finite world. There's a limited amount of time, and a limited (but growing) amount of web traffic. You can build a great website, but that by itself won't necessarily drive traffic. There are a lot of eyeballs out there, looking at the web, and you want to get as many relevant ones looking at your site as possible. Those are your building blocks. Good tools can act as a catalyst for this. You don't have to damage anyone else's business to do this, you are just making it more likely for people to find their way to you, and enhancing your share.
That's what we do. We provide a catalyst.
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2008 by
Aaron Stanton
Hi. I'm Aaron F Stanton, a new Senior Software Engineer at Compendium. I'll be using this space to talk about ideas I have on information, communication, economics, and blogging itself.
A bit about me: I am an Indiana native, having graduated from Purdue with a PhD in Chemistry in '99. As a result, you'll see a bit of a scientific slant to some of my ramblings.
I have opinions on religion and politics, but I'll try to keep them out of here - this isn't the place for that, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure you can find me on the web if you're interested, but I'll tell you that I don't review computer games, nor did I ask if Google can hear me.
Enjoy.
A bit about me: I am an Indiana native, having graduated from Purdue with a PhD in Chemistry in '99. As a result, you'll see a bit of a scientific slant to some of my ramblings.
I have opinions on religion and politics, but I'll try to keep them out of here - this isn't the place for that, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure you can find me on the web if you're interested, but I'll tell you that I don't review computer games, nor did I ask if Google can hear me.
Enjoy.
