Sam Hamilton

Great post from Search Engine Land today about twitter accounts - if you want to follow the major search engine twitter accounts this is just for you

Good question, two things really.

One - the company I spend most of my time working for sprang back into profit in January which is fantastic considering how rough the seas are out there for exporters from China! Talking to some people it has come at just the right time as everyone is wondering either in the back of their mind or in the front if the company will survive these dreadful economic times. Now that profit is back and we have some great help with our accounts and cash flow forecasting I am sure that we can hold steady in the wind.

Two - I have started a test to see what happens, I want to see just how effective writing content alone will be, so for this purpose I have bought a bunch of fresh domains all within my celeb niche and I am currently looking for someone to write content for them. I will do the usual things for a blog, let the posts do the talking and see how quickly fresh, non-duplicated content takes to grow the blogs to a good size. The last test I did was picture content alone with a title - it took only 1 week for the blog to go from 20 to 100 visitors a day and stay there for all time, that particular blog has had no updates since early November and has now started to gain more traffic from images.google.xxx. doubling the traffic over the last couple of weeks. My tests always seems to cost me money but don’t really make me any - perhaps that should be the next test…

Follow these steps:

1. Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
2. Choose Connect to Server from the Go menu (see Note 1).
3. In the address field of the Connect to Server dialog, type the URL using this syntax (see Note 3): smb://ServerName/ShareName/
4. Click Connect.

Just found this, very useful!

www.easysubmits.com

A random blog post reminded me to get my goals for 2009 in order so here they are:

• Earn enough money to support my Mum
• Finish getting my MCSE even though I no longer like Microsoft
• Get my RHCE
• Loose 10KG

More geeky than expected and not a huge list but I think with work carrying on at its breakneck speed it should be enough to keep me occupied for a while.

OK so the week has been and gone, and instead of getting two websites live we have only managed to get one ready and working. Learn masses about testing systems and how you need to be able to have a exact copy of the site somewhere else so that you can test before it goes live. Sounds simple but with OFBiz things never seem to be.

Launching our website is a few tickets away from completion, hope to have it up and running before Chinese New Year when everyone disappears for holidays.

D-day is nearly upon me. The day when we finally move the companies website from our current 3rd party supplier (Channel Advisor) to our own OFBiz / Rackspace / Akamai website. While Channel Advisor’s website has done us good for the last 3+ years its time to move onwards and upwards with something, well customisable.

OFBiz has proved to be a great platform for our warehouse and its really exciting to see the improved systems and processes take something to the next level. Working with developers who’s first language is not your own is always a challenge but I think the end result has been worth it.

The first site to go live is our JV’s site quickly followed by our own, should be a great week!

The world economy has gone mad - the UK government buys major stakes in HBOS and RBS!

• UK launches £37bn bank rescue (FT)
• Europe acts to rescue banks
• Brown targets fat cat pay after nationalising banks in £37 billion bailout
• Banking giants to be nationalised
• A £516 trillion derivatives ‘time-bomb’

Just a quick post to say that the company has now hired their 100 and 101st employee! Its almost 4 years to the day that we started too.

So this time last year I was planning on building a distributed IT system across many small offices with a maximum of 30 people in each. This year we are consolidated in one building on two different floors with all the servers in one room. Amazing change.

But to be honest it does not really change the overall IT plan that much. Our customers are still spread out all over the world and we now have staff members on three continents - not bad for a 100 person company.

The one thing that has changed is what software we use - we are driving firmly away from Microsoft and into the hands of Linux and open source software.

We are working with an Apache project ERP system called OFBiz with help from the great guys at Hotwax Media - the improvements we have seen from in our warehouse are just amazing.

How to handle user authentication has also become clearer with the help of a Redhat project called FreeIPA. This really looks good enough to replace our current Active Directory setup.

Finally Rackspace, my personal favorite managed hosting company went public and is about to open its Hong Kong data center. Servers already ordered!