Been a while, have to get better at this!

Right now we are creating a new website for a real estate agent in Stockholm. This invloves fetching and indexing a lot of data from a centralized system and then presenting it.

The actual fetching of the data is done by invoking the indexer via crontab but there is also the option for the real estate agents to manually invoke to speed things up.

One of the challenges here is to handle the huge amount of XML data that the centralized system puts out and to handle that data quick enough with concern to timeout issues since the website is on a shared server.

Another has passed full of exiting stuff. Not going to write to much here, but there is a Swedish version of this years summary to be read on our website. Cheers and happy new year!

The last couple of months I’ve been running into a lot of people that have just “seen the light” and opened their own business, most of them in IT but some in other business areas as well and most of the time the topic of discussion tends to become client acquisition.

Now, even though some of these entrepreneurs might become or already have become our competition I think it is only natural to share our experience with them. Sure, I might not give them information that would let them steal our best customers, that would just be plain stupid, but I truly believe in the common benfit of competition as a way for all of us to improve our businesses.

My experience in client acquisition is that there are no shortcuts. It’s hard work, persistance and refusal to give up that leads to success. So if I, after aprx 10 years of entrepreunial experience would put together a list of advice regarding client acquisition for new and old entrepreneurs this would be it:

• Join a business network
• Don’t be afraid to ask, the worst thing that can happen is that you get a ‘no’ in return
• Be fair in all your dealings with others; old and current customers, partners, the competition et cetera
• Say yes; it’s harder than no, but more rewarding
• Accept that you don’t know everything and never will, keep education your self about your industri, about entrepreneurship and about people

Well, there it is. Take it and run with it.

We use open source. That sums it up but lets look a little bit closer.

This is more or less the anatomy of the technical principles behind a project

1. We use some basics in the bottom like Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP
2. If needed; change it to suite our purposes
3. Next is a practical framework for whatever middleware we are using, mostly PHP
4. See step 2
5. Create stand alone code outside the framework from step 3

There are a lot of web developent firms out there that only do step 1 and 3 or only step 5. We belive that the mix of using (and contributing to) open source mixed with frameworks and stand alone unique project specific code is what created a truly usable and special web application which is the main goal that we have.

Some minor weekend work this weekend installning certificates on a clients server. Easier to do on a Saturday when there i virtually no traffic on the machines.