Summersault Weblog

A friend recently noted that 4 of the 5 web-based applications he uses on a regular basis to manage his life are officially still in “beta” status. While I think this has become a fairly standard practice for many web application providers, I hope it’s one that we still treat with some healthy skepticism and concern.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:
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Just today, we’ve received two reports of our clients getting mailings from organizations claiming that payment is needed in order to maintain or renew services related their hosting account or domain, and in both cases, the mailing was just a scam. These mailings often come in the format of an official order form that appears to be important and time-sensitive, and so it scares the unsuspecting domain owner into sending a check rather than risk losing their website.

We’ve written here before about the horrors of domain management on the Internet, but this is a particularly troublesome practice, and adds a whole other layer of complexity and hassle to an already difficult and complex system. In another recent case, one of our customers did have their website go offline briefly because they’d sent payment to the wrong organization and ignored the notices from the real domain authority - yikes! Here are a few tips to avoid being swindled by these notices:
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I recently found a neat little application that has been useful both at work and in my at-home computing. It is called Prism, and what it does is allow you to run your favorite web applications (Remember the Milk, Facebook, Google Calendar, etc.) as if they were desktop applications. Because it was built on the Firefox engine, it will run any web applications you can run in your Firefox browser.
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I’ve been waiting for a while now to see what Google was going to do with their acquisition of JotSpot, the collaborative wiki site that a number of non-profit organizations I’m involved in has used to organize our internal information. In my opinion, the long wait was a big risk to take on Google’s part…I used to send people to JotSpot all the time. when Google acquired it and stopped accepting new accounts, I still sent people there, saying “I’m sure it will reopen soon, it’s worth it.” Eventually I stopped sending people there at all, and encouraged them to use other tools or to go to the trouble to set up their own intranet with software like Mediawiki, the tool that powers Wikipedia.

Well, as of today, I’m pretty sure I know where to send people for creating free, powerful internal websites: Google Sites, the new incarnation of what was JotSpot.
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No matter whether you have a huge advertising budget or you’re a one-person marketing department, viral marketing can play a significant role in helping you get the word out about your company or organization.

Viral marketing…
1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

What are some examples of viral marketing? Blogs, e-newsletters, files that can be downloaded and YouTube videos are just a few examples of current viral marketing vehicles. Be creative, be useful and be interesting and your message will be shared - free of charge.

Creating an engaging website that keeps your users coming back over time can be an exciting challenge. One way to take on the challenge is to add a feature that encourages real-time human connection: a live chat room. Assuming that meeting in person isn’t possible or logistically easy, a chat room on your website can help bring your community of users together, allows you to be more efficient in your conversations, and creates a sense of freshness and relevance on the site itself.

This weblog entry will help you get a chat room installed on your site for free. Getting a feel for how to best manage a chat room once it is up and running…well, that’s a weblog entry for another day.

There are three main technical approaches to putting a chat room on your website:
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As the Internet continues to grow and change at a rapid pace, new and innovative website design possibilities become a reality everyday. For our company that means keeping up with the newest innovations in website design and programming, and for our customers it means a broader spectrum of opportunities to reach their target audience.

But more than that, this is a crucial time to understand and support Net Neutrality. Without the guiding principals of Net Neutrality to protect us and our customers from crippling restrictions imposed by large telecoms and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), today’s innovations in web technology may soon be out of reach for companies and individuals without industry connections or deep pockets.
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When Mac OS X Leopard was released in October 2007, there was significant outcry about a number of changes made to the built-in firewall. One security consultant even went so far as to call the firewall “a mess…so simple as to be nearly useless”. Apple soon released a few security updates that fixed a number of complaints about the firewall, but for me, a general sense of brokenness and distrust prevailed. Now we’ve upgraded some of our Macs in the office to Leopard, and recently my negative perception of the new firewall has changed.
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In a service business, it can sometimes be difficult to measure the true level of satisfaction that our clients experience. The testimonials they offer say a lot, and even after all these years its still surprising that so many of our clients consider working with us to be a relief from the norm of some poor customer relations practices in the technology industry.

Even so, it’s nice to be able to turn to cold hard numbers to see how we’re really doing, and one area where we do have those figures handy is in the customer satisfaction survey we ask every person who contacts us for technical support to fill out. Here’s what the numbers say from recent months:
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As I did with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, I thought I would share a few notes about my experience in upgrading to the latest version of the Mac operating system, 10.5 “Leopard”.
If you just want to hear about all of the good stuff I’m experiencing as a result of the upgrade, you can skip to the bottom line.
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