Photo is from our companies 2y anniversary newsletter - I just love this cupcake

Lately I haven’t been writing much into my blog as I was working on our company website. I know the basics around social media marketing, but its just coming all together now in my head. I’m writing new content for our new homepage (its not released yet), creating twitter account, facebook page for company. Filling that with content and contacts… and that’s just start of all it. I still have to write some blog posts (as we will have blog in new website) and create LinkedIn page (and I get error all the time and support doesn’t support me). I went through different web development companies websites, got some ideas of keywords, descriptions and titles of pages. And then this weekend I have meeting with designer, who has his unique ideas about our website (and he is best designer I know, no offense). This is why I’m sorry for slacking on my own blog. I know that it’s about time to release new event list and I will do that… just give me some time.

p.s. if anyone is free enough to help me with some English texts, I would really appreciate it!

Two days ago I received DM on twitter from one of my followers to join their Mafia family. I have seen this application over facebook and it seemed interesting. When second person DM me over twitter that I should join their “mafia family” I actually went and joined. Game itself is very lame. You click to do job, click to get respect points, but there is nothing interactive really. After 10 min playing, I returned back to work.

I was very, very surprised that I started to get DM and replies from my followers that everything I did on game was posted on my twitter feed. I was spamming all my followers with posts like :

“@gita_m has just done a job in Drug Deal in #MobsterWorld http://bit.ly/A9N4Yabout 20 hours ago from Mobster World”

And this feed was really, really long… So then I decided not to play this game any more.

Today I received DM from few people saying that this Mobster World is direct messaging all my contacts and asking them to join my Mafia family. I went into MobsterWorld again and there wasn’t anything telling me how can I stop it. Even “Contact Us” lead to the gmail e-mail that got no response.

Finally with help from my twitter fellows (special thanks to @brenstrong @antgalvin) I found that in Settings > Connections tab you can “Revoke” application access to my account. Thanks god its gone for good! Now I should do the same on facebook as I did accepted some gifts from friend of mine there and it might be spamming my friends

So the bottom line:

Please ignore all DM I sent to you and don’t play this game! You gonna loose all your followers.

If you see anyone else “playing” this game then tell them its not worth it.

Synergy Centre holds 1 lunchtime and 1 breakfast seminar every month for startups and SMEs. We were invited to talk about SaaS applications on 10th of August.

Here is the presentation of saas-lifecycle. Send me mail if you want to know more about:

• how new features kill your applications and why
• why scalability planning is important from the start of the project
• why relaying on existing software / frameworks isn’t always the best solution
• why applications are rewritten every 3-5 years
• how we make web apps the way users like it

Last Wednesday I attended MIX Essentials conference organised by Microsoft. Overall attendance wasn’t really great as most employers can’t afford their employees waste one day on conference.

I’m not a Microsoft fan as I do love Apple more, but it is always important to know news from competitors. I do love testing so seeing what’s new in IE8 was very valuable for me. It was also interesting to see their new search engine Bing.com which I still haven’t tried. If you want to know more about IE - try their blog.

Let’s make quick list of new things that seemed important to me in IE8:

• Standards compliance - their new IE won’t be compatible with previous IE however it will now follow all standards - CSS, HTML, ACID2 and DOM
• Rendering website to previous IE versions. This is a big benefit to all developers and testers. Finally we don’t have to install numerous IE versions to make sure our site looks good on all of them. It is also possible to set a meta tag for website to make it allways be generated as one previous IE versions.
• Web Slices - follow only the part of site you are interested. E.g. in independent.ie there is section of latest news. You can slice only that section and see it almost like bookmark (hard to explain it, I know). All you have to do is add to the < div > tag text class=”hslice”. To be honest is very similar to Apple Web Clips which have been around for quite a while. There is still no standard for Web Slices.
• Accelerator - it is possible to add pop-up menus for different words on sites. E.g. if I select word Paris, my pop-up menu might contain hotel deals, flights or search for it in Google.
• Be a Search Provider - IE8 allows you to use different searches from websites. E.g. not only Google search, but also independent.ie search. You can do this with simple XML.
• IEAK - build your own IE8 with settings you want your users to use and let them download your version
• As usual there is a lot of improvements in security - anti-phishing, data protection, XSS filters, InPrivate browsing and InPrivate blocking. And I hope they won’t do the same mistake as before where there was more security than usability.
• Improved Performance allowing more threads and connections as well as JavaScript improvements
• New Developer tools - JavaScript debugger, HTML&CSS debuggers, JavaScript profile

Second presentation was made by Sabrina Dent. I have been looking at her blog before and I really love design.

Her presentation was meant to start with Froggie ad from 1955. However, there was connection problems so we missed it. We received few really great tips on how designer should work.

1. Eliminate choices. If you give customer too much choices of design, he gonna pick what he thinks important from all of them. So at the end you will get good for nothing design. 90% clients will be happy with first version you send to them.
2. Like Yoda be - to be honest I didn’t got this point
3. Just say No and don’t explain. If client wants some small changes (from his perspective) and you know it will take few days, say No. He took you do the job and he shouldn’t teach you how to do it. You don’t teach dentist how to fix your teeth, don’t you?

After this presentation I really understand why people love Sabrina. She has really strong personality and does what she loves to do.

See more at the presentation slideshows here

Seems topic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) wasn’t as popular as previous ones at Dublin ALT.NET so there was only 15 people attending. Only 1 person in room had experience with it and few others have heard about it. It seemed pretty complicated and was hard to get my head around it.

Following paragraph is my summary of what I understood from the evening. Please correct me if I’m wrong at some points.

As I understood ESB is message layer that communicates between components within enterprise system. There are asynchronous ESB listening processes that handle each message request and distribute them. It is good for scaling, but ESB integration needs big money investment, constant monitoring and it has large learning curve. This is one of the reasons it’s not usually implemented in small systems / small organisations.

You can read more about ESB at Wikipedia or buy a book about it

Saturday I went to OSSBarCamp and apparently Girl Geek Day was in the same building. I didn’t stay for a long though, but I got insight of both of them.

I would argue that OSSBarCamp was really bar camp. In real Bar Camp sessions are proposed and scheduled by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. Most of the talks was scheduled beforehand and there wasn’t much discussions what people want to hear. If we say it was conference then it was presented marvellous. Thanks to Jaime and Laura for organising it.

I heard 2 great talks in OSSBarCamp. First talk was about introduction to Ubuntu. I’m not really familiar with it so it was interesting to listen to it. Second talk I went to (there was 3 parallel talks all the time) was about green party’s IT policy. We got to the few suggestions on how make people use it and implement it in practise. Great way to actually impact what will be going on in IT world in future. Can’t wait to see real policy, which will be created in next few months.

Girl Geek Day was organised by Laura and supported by Martha Rotter from Microsoft. We got really nice dinner from Celtic kitchen and talked about different difficulties what women get working in IT. Girl geeks are minority in IT so we work harder and it’s difficult to achieve things. And sometimes we do feel lonely because people don’t take us serious.

I had to run away so I didn’t stay for the rest (drinks afterwards and few more talks), however I did enjoy it. All photos taken by my camera are blurry again (I really should buy new camera), so no photos this time.

Update - got photos from Girl Geek Day

Finally there is new version for WordPress called Coltrane that just came out on 11th of December. I loved the preview and customising screens seems similar to me as BBC or Facebook sites. When I get new version I gonna re-organise my first page as sometimes I think it is quite hard to view. And that will happen when my administrator will have time. And if what they written is true, next time I won’t even need to trouble my administrator.