Christopher Hawkins is back after a long hiatus with an excellent article on when you should fire your clients. I've had to do this once in the past. It's not fun. I was also working successfully with another part of the same organization so it's was a bit tricky, but it all worked out. Luckily the people I had to fire were known to be crazy by everyone else so I was able to keep the other relationships going strong.
JD book tagged me so here it goes.
Total number of books I own:
This one it tough. I'd say at least 100, but those are just readily available. I've given away at least another 40 and there's probably another 40-50 that have just lost their way. I used to work for Pearson Education/Prentice Hall so I had access to alot of tech books for cheap/free.
Last book I read:
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Not bad, not great.
My unfinished book: Too many to count. When you get them for free sometimes it's hard to get motivated. I have an entire series on Java of which I've read about 100 pages of each so I'll say those.
Books that mean a lot to me:
ColdFusion WACK 5 - Ben Forta's classic.
Lord of the Rings Series - Read it way before the movies ruined it. In fact my childhood nickname was Gollum. Of course that nickname is ruined now since everyone knows who he is.
JavaScript Bible - I live in this book.
Alright back to work. I guess I should tag others but I'm not in the mood to copy and paste anymore links. If any of you do one based on this post just trackback it.
" Sending emails seems way more formal and always seems to take longer because you have the overhead of cooking up a title and figuring out how to address it."
From a new article on Dave Winers instant outliner. That article has nothing to do with help desk software but the concept is the same. It's why HelpSpot has no title field. Too much time is wasted trying to figure out what to title something with little to no benefit. Those other help desk vendors have it because they're "supposed" to not because they actually ever thought about it's usefulness.
**HelpSpot does capture and show titles of emails sent to it by your customers/users. Since your customers are sending it you need to read it. What you don't need is your help desk staff wasting time trying to create titles for requests they enter in the system.*
I found an interesting style guide for developing mobile applications over at Little Springs Designs. They seem to know what they're talking about. I found the screen designs chapter to be very useful. Of course you may want to have a pillow handy while you read this because you'll inevitably end up slamming your head against your desk while considering all the differences between competing formats/companies.
Wow this is exciting stuff. I've just been putting the finishing touches on the RSS implementation for requests in HelpSpot. Man does this make keeping track of new requests and changes to existing requests so easy. It's really amazing, I think organizations that use help desk software are going to be blown away.
The people who really stand to benefit the most are level 2 support people who don't spend all day in the help desk application but need to know when something has been assigned to them. Also small organizations which don't get many requests will find using RSS to track new requests easy. And of course since it's RSS you can integrate your feeds and hence your requests with all other types of applications, back end systems, etc.
This is one of those days where it's great to be a software developer.
"Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere." (via Robert Cringely)
Alex King has just released an alpha of Feed Lounge. A new web based feed reader. Looks kind of interesting. A little more competition for our friend Kevin and his product Zesty News :-)
It takes alot of guts to be working on software in the feed reader space right now.
Last night I did a presentation on blogging for the Hudson Valley Technology and Commerce group. I promised the group I'd post the slides for the event up here:
http://www.userscape.com/hvtc.pdf
Through my own carelessness we actually didn't have a projector so they didn't even get to see the slides! That's OK though because we had a great discussion about blogging in general and in the small business environment. It was a really fantastic group with excellent questions. Presentations like that are always enjoyable.
For all of you HVTC members out there please let me know if you start up a blog, I'll be happy to link to it and get you rolling. I'd also like to quickly thank Bill Collier, Ric Dragon, and Daniel Schneider who got me involved with the group. Thanks guys!
It's kind of cool when you see someone start a new blog and they've got 2 people in their blogroll, you and Joel Spolsky.
*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*
Maybe I'm getting closer to where I want to be....
Good luck with it Matt
Joshua Eichorn is compiling a nice little list of AJAX resources.