It is difficult to run a business, especially during the economic downturn. People are very careful spending their money by all means. Your suppliers start to chase outstanding invoices and your customers order less than ever.
So, it is really important to review your cash flow on a regular basis to find out your exact CASH situation. And then, you have to dig deeper to look at “everything” could help you through the troubled economic times. If you are not cash flow positive at the moment, you need to work out a plan to achieve that asap. And one way you can do that is by negotiating prices with all your suppliers, even your broadband provider. Remember, every little helps!
Your cash flow, at the same time, measures your business performance and assesses your options for growth. Why? It is always telling you the truth and never trying to hide anything.
You can now subscribe to your events feed so that other calendars which supports the iCalendar format can stay up-to-date with Bizroof.
The following is a list of applications which support iCalendar: Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft Office Outlook, Windows Live Calendar etc.
Microsoft today launched SearchPerks, which gives users points when they use msn live search, and then the points can be redeemed for all sorts of rewards.
The new CashBack programme encourages people to use Live Search, and they believe it will work in terms of increasing market share of online search.
To participate the SearchPerks, you have to download a special browser add-on, and you must use Internet Explorer. So, Microsoft is trying to kill three birds with one stone:
- To get more Live Search users
- To get more IE users
- To have a better understanding of what people are searching for
Google Chrome Beta, was released on September 2, 2008, focuses on applications rather than web pages.
- Strength - It is fast, secure and multi-processing structured.
- Performance - Chrome uses V8 JavaScript engine to generate javascript code dynamically and hide class transitions automatically. It also uses multi-processing architecture, which allows the browser to shut down a single Tab or a plugin wherever problem occurs but to keep the whole browser alive.
- Security - Chrome warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful website based on google’s phishing and malware blacklists, which is being updated periodically.
- Usability - The Tabs are placed at the top of the window in order to make the navigation faster and smoother. Additionally, Chrome displays 9 most visited web sites and sites most often searched on the home page. This concept was first introduced with Opera’s Speed Dail.
IE8 Beta, released on March 5, 2008, was targeted for web developers and designers. It behaves significantly diffent compared to IE7 and IE6.
- Strength - It is the default browser in Windows
- Security - InPrivate, allows IE8 not to save searching and browsing history, cookies and form data. In another word, it clears the browser cache by default.
- Usability - Search Suggestions, Web Slices, Tab Color Grouping
- Performance - Accelerators, Automatic Crash Recovery
Firefox 3 final version was released on June 17, 2008 after 8 alpha, 5 beta and 3 release candidates.
- Strength - Thousands of add-ons, themes and the community of developers / designers behind it.
- Usability - The download manager and bookmark storing system are redesigned, and they looks easy to use. Also, it separates the themes for Mac, Linux and windows, and that means users will have a more native look and feel on different operation systems.
- Performance - It employs Gecko 1.9 to enhance the existing layout engine. It passes Acid2 test and gets better results on the Acid3 test compared to Firefox 2. Basically, it means that Firefox 3 is more CSS and javascript friendly.
Safari 3 final release of the Windows version was offered on March 18, 2008.
- Strength - It is the default browser in Mac, and it has an elegant interface.
- Performance - It supports for CSS Web fonts and animations and improves support for SVG and HTML 5 media. Performance improvements.
- Usability - As-you-type text search, Quartz-style font-smoothing
Performance Comparison:
Average page loading time (Bizroof Application) :
- IE 8: 1.2 seconds
- FF3 1.1 seconds
- Safari 1.0 seconds
- Chrome: 0.6 seconds
Acid3 Scores:
- IE 8: 17/100
- FF3: 70/100
- Safar: 73/100
- Chrome: 74/100
We are proud to announce that our CRM platform is integrated with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, and we believe the marriage of the contact management and geo-location will extend users’ benifits.
Enjoy!
If you enter a phone number (marked as Skype), and you’ve installed skype on your computer, you can click the skype user name to call.
Additionally, if you are using Skype Firefox Extention, all the phone numbers will be highlighted, and you can click the numbers to make phone calls via Skype.
Enjoy! 
NBC Online Video Hub - Videos of all games (Watch while “on the go” and off-line)
New York Times - Schedule, Timetable, Tracker and News
NBC Olympics - Real-time Complete Medels Standings
CNET News - Break News
Bizroof uses prototype and scriptaculous as javascript framework in order to provide desktop-like look and feel. But, the framework itself is big in size and therefore takes quite a while to load. Although it only happens once to download the files, it still annoys the first-time visitors.
Without gzip - The first screenshot shows all the components needs to be downloaded for our sign in page, and the total file size is more than 310KB. It takes 8 seconds to response with standard DSL connections. Gosh! That is pain in the neck!
Screenshot 1 - Firebug Report - Without gzip
With gzip - The best solution we found is to gzip all the javascipts and css files. As shown in the second screenshot, for the same sign in page, first-time visitors only have to download 75KB, that takes less than 3 seconds. 
After the page loaded once, only 14KB need to be loaded each time, and that takes 0.6 seconds on average. What a big change! All we need to do is just to gzip all the javascripts and css files.
Screenshot 2 - Firebug Report - With gzip
To Developers and designers
In case you want to know what exactly we’ve done to gzip the files, here are a examples:
Javascript Example: prototype.js
- Rename the file to prototype.js.php
- Add the following php script as the first line of prototype.js.php
<?php require_once(’gzip-javascripts.php’); ?>
- Create the gzip-javascripts.php which will compress the files
<?php
if ( ((!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) ? strtolower(htmlspecialchars((string) $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) : ” && strpos((!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) ? strtolower(htmlspecialchars((string) $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) : ”, ‘msie 6.0′) === false) && extension_loaded(’zlib’) && !ini_get(’zlib.output_compression’) && ini_get(’output_handler’) != ‘ob_gzhandler’ && ((version_compare(phpversion(), ‘5.0′, ‘>=’) && ob_get_length() == false) || ob_get_length() === false) ) {
ob_start(’ob_gzhandler’);
}
header(”Cache-Control: public”);
header(”Pragma: cache”);
$offset = 2592000; // 60 * 60 * 24 * 30, Expire time
header(”Expires: “.gmdate(”D, d M Y H:i:s”, time() + $offset).” GMT”);
header(”Last-Modified: “.gmdate(”D, d M Y H:i:s”, filemtime($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])).” GMT”);
//header(’Content-Type: text/css; charset: UTF-8′); //Uncomment this line for CSS files
?>
- Use the new file name
For example: <script type=”text/javascript“ src=”/js/prototype.js.php“>
Matt
