Month: January 2005

Working on a White Paper with a colleague. WIll be posting very little today.

The team at Port80 Software has come up with a cool side-project: cool 404 pages.

The best: CLICK HERE. (May force you to download a file in Mozilla/Firefox)

I read this article, and although it applies to the Public Sector, it is completely true in the area of Web performance excellence.

The Takeaway Quote

“[T]he magical performance system doesn’t exist. Even a good performance system doesn’t exist. Systems don’t improve performance; leaders do.”

Robert Behn

Bloglines this…bloglines that. What’s the big deal?

Now I understand. I don’t have to worry about the feeds that I read anymore, and I can get them from anywhere! So much understanding flowing to me now!

Subscribing to Bloglines also forced me to clean out some of the detritus in my subscription list. I went nuts at the beginning, subscribing to everything with an RSS feed. Have to be a little more discriminating now.

A few posts ago, I made some statements which I may come to regret. However, as I wrote to the one person who commented on my statement, what I said was more of a back-handed challenge to Canadian employers to show me that they are truly innovative and world-busting.

I issue a challenge to Canadian Internet firms: Show me that you understand Web performance excellence, and are willing to take on a process to implement this concept from the CEO to the receptionist. I want to participate in this; I want to make a Canadian firm the example that the can be shown to the world as the leader.

It may be a niche area, but if you think about it, it means that a company has to understand how its Web property fits into or defines its business model from top to bottom. There are few companies in the world who can say that they understand this, especially not those who did not begin with an explicit ebusiness focus.

There may be firms that think that they have a handle in this. They key question is this: Do your business performance metrics talk to your Web performance metrics?

Let’s work together to make your business and technology speak the same language.

If anyone wants to buy me one of these, I will gladly start to use a Mac.

Matthew Homann of the [non-billable] hour has a link to a great read at Working Knowledge, a journal from the Harvard Business School. Titled Nail Customer Service, it reminds us that quantifying good customer service sometimes means stepping back and re-examining how you are trying to deliver it.

A good quick read with some great insights.

So far, YDS seems to be ok. A bit of hacking to get it to look into PST files (this should be a default!). However, I am re-building the indices (not indexes, please!) because the file search was having issues finding the string "doc". But my Outlook e-mail was all searchable (except for the PST files).

I will write more as I use it more.

YDS has a Fatal Flaw in my opinion — it does NOT search inside PST files. I believe that Copernic did.

Also, the searching interface is not real intuitive, and I am a non-linear thinker.

Off to get Copernic.

Sigh. The team at Port80 Software discovered this little nugget around Microsoft’s ISA Server. I quote it here in its entirety because the permalink is returning a 404.

UPDATE (January 10, 2005, 21:29 EST): The article is available here.

Does Microsoft ISA Server 2004 support compression?

One of the most popular questions of 2004 was, without a doubt, "Why does Microsoft ISA Server 2004 break HTTP compression?"

Many users of our httpZip and ZipEnable compression products have
been scratching their heads over why implementing ISA Server suddenly
makes their compression products stop working. Actually, what is
happening is that ISA Server by default removes the Accept-encoding
header from all inbound requests. This is the header that the
Web server uses to determine whether it is OK to return compressed
content to the browser making the request. Without this header,
compression products are just doing what they are supposed to do:
responding with uncompressed content.

Although they have not done a good job of getting the word out,
Microsoft has published this informative article that explains how Web
publishing rules can be written for ISA Server 2004 to ensure that the
Accept-encoding request headers get passed to the web server. If you’re
new to ISA, or just confused about why compression worked perfectly on
your test server but is mysteriously MIA in your production server
environment, check it out:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;838365