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Bizroof New Logo

2008 Beijing Olympics Is Powered By Latest Web2 Technologies

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

Google Launched “Insights for Search”

Google has launched a brand new searching related app today, Insights for Search.

It helps users to track multiple search terms’ popularity across different verticals, geographic regions and time periods.
Let’s take an example of the search term CRM Software. The results include all popular search terms related to the search term and a list of Rising Searches as well.

  1. Top Searches List: free crm, crm software free, microsoft crm software, business software, open crm, act crm
  2. Rising Searches List: web based crm, vtiger, sugar crm, top crm software, sage software, saleslogix

In addition, it provides a heat map to explain where the searching come from.

Speed Up Web Application - Gzip Javascripts And Css

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!

gzip javascripts css

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.

gzip javascripts and css

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

  1. Rename the file to prototype.js.php
  2. Add the following php script as the first line of prototype.js.php
    <?php require_once(’gzip-javascripts.php’); ?>
  3. Create the gzip-javascripts.php which will compress the files
  4. <?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
    ?>

  5. Use the new file name :-)

For example: <script type=”text/javascript src=”/js/prototype.js.php>

Matt

Blog Upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 + K2 Theme 1.0-RC7

We just upgraded the bizroof blog to wordpress 2.6 with the K2 theme 1.0-RC7. :-)

And here is a list of wordpress plugins we are currently using:

  1. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (Reason: promote blog)
  2. Akismet (Reason: stop spams)
  3. FeedBurner FeedSmith (Reason: redirect blog feeds to our FeedBurner)
  4. Google XML Sitemaps (Reason: inform search engines whenever blog updated)
  5. K2 Disable Widgets (Reason: integrate the K2 theme)
  6. WP Google Analytics (Reason: track bog statistics)

Give us a shout if you think we missed any great plugins. :)

Matt

Delicious 2.0

Delicious 2.0 finally released after the looong wait!

Delicious 2.0

Several BIG changes I noted:

Domain name changed to delicious.com - Personally, I like del.icio.us more, and I thought that was a smart idea.

It is Quicker - The single-page-loading-time has been reduced dramatically.

I haven’t found any news about their new infrastructure yet, but it is definitely better than before. :-)

It is sexier - The new design is clean and shiny. But, the font size is a bit small and may not be classified as easy-to-read.

It has a Search - Wow! I like the search facility, which is quick and accurate. I think they are using a caching system rather than real-time database queries, otherwise it can’t be that quick. :)

Not using Content Delivery Network (CDN) ? - On Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up your Web Site, they suggest to use CDN to reduce response times for across multiple, geographically dispersed servers. But, Delicious 2.0 is not using that technique.

Jason

Is Cuil Winning?

Cuil is so brave that they labeled themselves as Google-killer. :)

I like it and I think their launch was very successful in terms of broadcasting their messages, which have been posting onto many media giants, including PC World, TechCrunch, Time, Yahoo!, CNET, Mashable etc.

Unfortunately, cuil went offline just few hours after the over-heated launch. But, that is always a good problem to have. (I hope we could have that problem when bizroof was launched. ;-) )

I have to be honest that scalability and relevance are the 2 main problems for cuil at the moment. However, they have successfully created a BIG index, which I believe is the hardest part for searching engines.

Some suggestions

It is not an easy job at all to startup brand new search engines and compete with Google, Yahoo and MSN, even with $33M funding. :-)

So…… maybe one of the followings could help……

  1. Open Source - Get some help from all the developers on the planet. (Firefox is a good example in the web browsers industry)
  2. Human Editing - Go a little bit further and keep in mind that you guys have got a fabulous indexing system. Wikipedia and DMOZ are successful, aren’t they? :)

Good luck, Cuil, and we will give you a hand if you need.

Recent Google Pagerank Update - Major or Minor?

Have you noticed there were some changes in the Google PageRank toolbar during this weekend (July 25th and 26th 2008)? I have seen some changes of many sites PR, especially for new sites. It has been 150 days since the last Toolbar PR export (February 26th 2008), but I am not sure weather it is a major update or just a minor tweak this time.  :-)

Jason

What smart salespeople need?

WHAT’S YOUR WEAKNESSES, SMART SALESPEOPLE?

Good salespeople always know what, how, when to talk to their customers. Wow, that must take ages to learn! How the hell could they remember all the previous conversations with their customers?

Hmm… that is not that difficult… I can simply take notes about phone calls and have a look at them just before I pick up the phone again. Ain’t I smart? :-)

But what if you are not the only person talk to the customer? What if your colleague take a day off and the boss want you to do his work on that day?

Hmm… I don’t know then, what do you reckon?

You need a database to store the contacts and conversations collected by all the people in your office. You will soon discover the magic of that database which tells you everything you need to become a smart salespeople.

GOOD PRODUCT + EFFECTIVE MARKETING + ? =  REPEAT SALES

We have a brilliant product. We invest heavily on marketing. BUT, the sales report makes me cry. I need advice.

If you think your potential customers believe what you tell them, you are in danger. They do digest your message, BUT they prefer to trust what their friends tell them. Therefore, you need to focus on your existed customer and MAKE THEM HAPPY, and they will definitely pass the “happy” experience to their friends.

How could I make them happy?

Simple, you just do whatever you promised, even tiny stuff. The straightforward approach is to populate the “promises” onto an easy-to-use calendar which makes you confident to say “I’ve done it all!”

WHAT DOES BIZROOF PROMISE?

We try the best to provide a best way to store, organize and share information.

We try the best to make you succeed.

Figures behind the screen

Well, we launched Bizroof CRM 3 days ago, and here is all the stats so far! We don’t hide; we don’t lie; and we want to share. :-)

Report One - Usage

  1. 754 registered users
  2. 43 pending invitations sent by all existed users
  3. 16,870 contacts (people + organizations)
  4. 7,506 events
  5. 1.87 GB files
  6. 108,212 notes
  7. 93,002 tags

Report Two - Hits & Page views

  1. 8.1 GB Bandwidth (Total Traffic)
  2. 232,849 Hits
  3. 13.89 Hits/Visit

Report Three - Web Server Requests

3261866 200 OK
27 206 Partial content
79 301 Document moved permanently
135 302 Document found elsewhere
1315310 304 Not modified since last retrieval
16 400 Bad request
11 404 Document not found
5 408 Request timeout

Report Four - Client Browsers

  1. FF3.0 - 4.4%
  2. FF2.0 - 31.3%
  3. FF1.5 - 0.2%
  4. IE8.0 - 0.01%
  5. IE7.0 - 27.2%
  6. IE6.0 - 26.1%
  7. Safari - 4%