Why a website?

What are you trying to achieve in becoming a website owner? This is a question that most people don’t ask, consequently few websites have any tangible goals. If you can’t answer this question, it’s probably time to quit.

Who are your target audience?

Should you decide to go ahead, there’s nothing wrong with catching the eye of casual surfers, but it makes sense to have an idea of the type of visitor you’d like to attract.

This’ll help you decide what information needs to form the core of the website, remember, content is king.

What do you expect them to do?

There’s been quite a lot written recently on the ‘Call to Action’.

Your goals, remember the first step, will tell you what action you’d like visitors to take, but you need to decide how to structure the site to take them in the right direction.

What’s their motivation for investigating your website?

There are a huge number of websites on the Internet, and some of them will offer the same thing as you’re site, so what’s going to differentiate your website from these others?

Knowing your audience helps when creating an effective marketing campaign to accompany the site launch: where to advertise and how.

Why will they come back?

Your content is undoubtedly fabulous, and a sound foundation, but how is it structured and presented? If your hard won readership can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else, and are unlikely to come back.

You’ve got to commit to regularly providing something new and of value to your visitors. This is seriously time consuming, and if you’re unwilling, or unable to make this commitment it’s your last chance to back out of the website game.

Still interested? Next time it’s time to start building the website.

mkdir myproject cd myproject

The initialisation itself is pretty simple, just remember to point Git at the correct url for your Subversion repository, and watch the communication protocols.

git svn init -s --prefix=svn/ svn+ssh://svn.repository.com/svn/myproject

The -s option tells the repository to expect the typical trunk, branches and tags structure of a Subversion project. You can specify the location of your trunk, branches and tags using the -T, -b, and -t respectively.

Using the --prefix option is handy, ensuring that the remote directories will be prefixed with svn/. This makes it clear which are Subversion and which git branches later.

All that remains is to checkout all of the information relating to your project from the Subversion repository.

git svn fetch

Depending on the size of the project, this could take a while, it’s downloading the entire project history from the remote repository.

I word of warning you about the strangeness that can ensue if the remote repository contains any tags. They will be imported as git branches, and you may find the local master branch pointing to something other that the remote trunk.

These git svn commands, and all the others, are pretty well documented. Now I’ve got a Git repository, in the next post I’ll to describe my normal workflow.

Branching and merging is quick and simple, and as a result I find I do this far more often than when using Subversion alone. I also commit changes more frequently: it’s far quicker than using a remote repository, even when not off-line.

This sort of functionality is vital to successful version control, and I think it promotes better practice, as long as you’re only committing working software. All the local Git commits will later be bulk committed to the remote repository. However they all retain their identity as separate versions, so discipline is important, we wouldn’t want anyone finding broken code.

I could get all this from Git alone, but the combination retains Subversion vendor branching and the deployment advantages of my existing Subversion / Capistrano set up. I’m going to try GitHub, or my own remote Git repository, and exploiting the Capistrano support for Git, but at the moment why reinvent the wheel?

I prefer to work on the command line, and that’s the approach this series will take, but GUIs are available for Git, try typing git gui to check out the one bundled.

I use this approach for anything I need version controlled, including my Curriculum vitae/Resume, but before try this out for yourself you’re going to need to check out a local copy of that remote Subversion repository… I’ll cover that next time.

These small businesses are staffed by the knowledgeable, enthusiastic types that originally gave birth to the Company. These are very high value individuals that will create that feeling of quality that niche customers prize so highly, and justifies your higher price.

Eventually, the time comes to make the decision whether to stay small forever, or start to scale up; and this is where disaster can strike.

Growing turnover is dependent on appealing to a larger market that rarely shares the values of your current clientele. Frequently prices must be reduced, but doing this on a large scale means cutting costs, especially wage bills. Poor staff leads to poor service, and to make matters worse, the decline causes those old hands to look for something better elsewhere… a downward spiral which can destroy reputations.

I’ve experienced this decline through several suppliers I’ve used over the years as they’ve attempted to grow. The message is clear: know your market, and when think carefully before making a decision you may regret.

There’s a Google Group for this enterprise, so if you’d like to take part, and help us get it off the ground, please sign-up and join the discussion.

I want to continue blogging on personal topics: particularly investment, but anything else continues to be fair game. They’re going to have their own section of the site, but I need to bear in mind that today’s interest may become the business of tomorrow.

The work I’m targeting must determine content that’s pertinent to the business blog. I’ve focused on web development and administration to date, and I think this will continue. However, I could leverage my experience in project management and engineering teams better.

I’d like to improve the RSS provision and integrate other social media on the site, but that’s for another post.

Although I’m going to radically change the category structure on the site, I’m keen to avoid breaking the Web. This is where the permalinks should come into their own… I hope.

During the last bull market, some geographical regions, such as emerging Europe and Russia, accelerated well ahead of the rest, I failed to diligently rebalance and paid the price. I’d have more money to reinvest now if I’d thought about it.

Whilst rebalancing these runaway sectors, I’ll give closer consideration to reducing my whole portfolio, maintaining the target allocation of course. Liberating cash in this way is something large fund managers can rarely do, so I intend to use this advantage next time round.

Clearly, not all corrections are going to be as drastic as the Credit Crisis, but for those lesser moves I’d aim to stay fully invested. None the less, rebalancing out performing investments and holding back new cash may be appropriate.

I hope that reducing holdings, along with the stockpiling of new cash, will enable me to capitalise on future bear markets.

Personally, I’ve long been a fan of a hybrid system comprising a paper notebook; currently an A5 Red and Black, and a selection of applications on my MacBook.

My notebook goes most places with me, I could buy a smart-phone, but they are neither as rugged nor flexible as a paper notebook. Paper doesn’t impose a working structure upon me; I can sketch, write, draw up tables or whatever the occasion requires.

Combined with the camera on my phone; to rapidly capture complex information, I have everything I need to collect data for later processing. This usually takes place on my laptop where I can tag, search, and sync lists and calendars back to my phone.

A number of tips on how to customise your Moleskine notebook, remind me of features found in applications like Firefox.

• Divide sections with tabs could be interpreted as the now ubiquitous tabbed browsing feature.
• Number the pages reminds me of the practice of bookmarking.
• Mount photos – or a business card on the moleskine is one tip for customisation suggesting to me that maybe ‘bCard&trade’ is the new paper version of the common vCard format.

Lifehack is a great advocate of the Moleskine, and I too aspire to one for no obvious reason, but features like these tell me we’re on the verge of a revolution in paper technology… Paper2.0.

My experiences got me thinking about what I needed to code confidently. As a minimum, I need to know that everything works before committing code to version control, but security comes with regular testing, and this is no use unless everything is covered.

Based on web development frameworks using the nearly ubiquitous MVC design pattern, the logic and side effects at each application tier must be tested, and I came up with this list.

1. The Database tier schema, whether RDBMS, XML or anything else.
2. Data Access logic is usually implemented in models, but often uses built-in features of the framework, such as ActiveRecord.
3. Business logic is encapsulated in the models, libraries, and sometimes controllers.
4. Presentation logic at the server comprising controllers and their respective views.
5. Presentation and business logic at the client tier implemented by DOM scripting, mostly in JavaScript.
6. The actual data presentation at the client tier based on XHTML and CSS.

I’ve tried to order it from inside the application, working out from the data tier to the client, and it’s quite a list; I’d be interested to hear what I’ve missed.

Since this is a huge topic, I hope to write a series of posts isolating specific areas as I encounter them, and comparing tools and approaches. The first will look at how a few development frameworks in popular languages appear to measure up.

I recently heard the founder of CMC Markets commenting, and I paraphrase, that traders call a bad trade an investment. At the heights of the last bull market, when M&A action was all that was sustaining prices, I have to admit that I nearly fell into this trap.

Whilst I feel that I’m confessing a sin: admitting to buying on market rumours, I avoided compounding the error by convincing myself that the stock would still be good value for the long term. It wouldn’t, the price was inflated, the fundamentals I ignored made that clear, and it was very unlikely to ever be worth what I paid for it.

Trading and investing are not the same thing, and require different strategies. Timing is important for a trade, as is close observation and the use of stop losses. An investment must represent reasonable fundamental value to be worth buying, so the precise dynamic of the current market doesn’t matter as much.

In future I’ll decide, in advance, whether I’m trading or investing.

Unfortunately, testing anything other than libraries and models is difficult because there’s no way to access the another important type of object: controllers. CodeIgniter positively encourages using controllers to implement business logic, consequently not being able to test them is a serious anomaly.

Integrating a front-end testing framework, such as Selenium, might be the solution, but does that properly test the controller code? I don’t think it does; the target there is the presentation tier at the browser.

The lack of good code coverage bothers me a lot, but I continue to struggle on with CodeIgniter because I’ve found other PHP frameworks to be just as lacking. Is this a general problem with frameworks? I’m tempted to try Ruby on Rails next to find out.

This combination sounds a little contradictory, since asset allocation is the response to the perceived impossibility of deciding on price in a random walk down Wall Street: you can’t consistently outperform the market.

Whilst I don’t entirely subscribe to this sentiment, I believe it has good applications at the core of a portfolio comprised of these asset classes.

• Equity based mutual funds, diversified both by size and geographic region.
• Commodities based on ETCs.
• Geographically diverse corporate and government debt.
• Mutual funds directly invested in commercial property. If asset diversity is the goal, investing in property stocks doesn’t really cut it, they’re still equities.

This core represents about 80% of my portfolio, and I use fundamental analysis, alongside the actual asset distribution, as a method of timing my rebalancing and adding cash into the portfolio.

Fundamentals are key to actively managing the remaining 20% of my portfolio, which is mostly invested in UK equities, in the form of individual company stock, and both long and short index tracking ETFs.

This strategy remains unaffected by the Credit Crisis, but my execution has changed in two main respects; being honest with myself about objectives, and active use of cash within the portfolio. These will be the subjects for a couple of future posts.

How much of the project to attempt to tackle? Sticking to the Agile principles of releasing little and often, I decided that jumping in with a full blogging or CMS would be a mistake. Limiting things to HTML and CSS, with the portfolio displays enhanced with Lightbox, provides more control over the design.

This is especially important when starting out, and I’m not expecting the design to remain static. Once established, adding more functionality, or moving to a WordPress theme will be a much easier task. I feel that the website is the simplest thing that could work.

Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.” IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.

This covers an ever increasing amount of ground: smartphones, MP3 players, games consoles, software for any platform, ATMs, and even the checkout at the supermarket are examples of the breadth of IT.

In my experience, IT means PCs, and mainly Windows, to most people. When these go wrong, it’s a work department called “IT” they expect to help… or not: hence the association.

The strange thing is that they don’t associate it with the mobile phone in their pocket, or any of the devices that have become ubiquitous at home. How long is it going to be before everything uses “electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information”?

Catching up with a few people was interesting for a few days, but beyond that I don’t crave knowledge of some of the more pointless social activities, the desire for a virtual hug, or the excitement of a virtual snowball fight.

It could be that I’m a sour old git, but I don’t see what Facebook adds to the Web that’s new or lasting. For the most part, it’s an environment where people vie to have the longest friends list, and play silly games… much like the real world. May be it’ll be around for a while.

Conversely, the software behind blogs, forums and wikis on the Web have been around for a long time, establishing a reputation for solid performance under very heavy loads. Whilst they lack the complexity of enterprise solutions, they’re built on enterprise quality database management systems, rendering all that corporate intelligence easily searchable and secure.

The Internet is based on reliable, but inexpensive foundations; much of the software is free to use, even for commercial purposes; and where it isn’t the license fees are tiny compared with many proprietary packages.

I have an Intranet at home based on Apache web server, PHP and a MySQL database: all free to use and easy to install. It’s supported by a mixture of wired and wireless data connections that are common around many British homes and businesses. On this framework I’ve installed several copies of MediaWiki, the same software used by Wikipedia, both shared on the Intranet and privately on individual laptops.

Clare and I use these wikis to capture notes and the solutions to everyday issues. It provides a way for us to work jointly on these documents whilst maintaining a record of revisions. Everything is stored in a MySQL database rather than scattered around files on different drives. This can be quickly backed up and, best of all, it’s fully searchable from my browser; finding anything is really quick.

The bottom line is that bringing a little of the Internet inside the corporate firewall will make your intellectual property more agile, relevant, accessible and traceable: much more valuable!

For example, the ubiquitous Microsoft Office offers great productivity features; such as macros, pivot tables and database connectivity. However once trained few office workers will ever use them. They can’t conceive of the situations in which these tools can be helpful: these problems are too hard.

By comparison a flint flake, or a modern steel knife, is readily understood: it’s sharp so you can cut things with it. What’s more, simple experimentation will show just about anyone how.

That’s the key: complex tools are designed for complex problems. So what if I’m only expecting the user to, well… use the tool, not solve the problem? Someone else will have to make the software, or the stone tool. There are two approaches to using technology to decouple humanity from the problem.

Simple interface.

Technology can be encapsulated to present the user with a simple interface.

In this case the user has little or no idea how the problem is solved, but is better aware of what can be done and how to instruct the device to do it. The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is focused on pursuing this approach.

The underlying technology may be capable of far more than the relatively simple interface is capable of communicating. Again, the human user is the limiting factor, but at least the design case problem has been solved by someone else.

Substitute the user.

The technology could be freed of dependence on human intervention.

Most examples of automation seek to do this, relying on relatively capable human minds to provide the programming framework.

This can be combined with weak artificial intelligence, so that the machine is capable of making minor decisions to overcome difficulties: for example the chess playing computer or robots capable of avoiding obstacles.

Dividing humanity.

Use of these approaches has been accelerating since the advent of industrialisation. Technological problem solving is really applied by an ever shrinking proportion of the humanity. The remainder are present as sentient regulators to check the machine does as the manual says it should.

Does this mean that the average skill level of the human race is actually falling, or just being placed into fewer hands and heads?

In the UK, this title appears to be most frequently used in the public sector, for which the data presented on ITJobsWatch indicates there’s a small, but growing demand. Whilst these vacancies cite SQL and information security as desirable skills, I feel that it’s too tightly focused on specific platforms and established techniques.

Making full use of all the information out there, not just specific corporate databases, requires developments in the application of query languages. A distributed nature places emphasis on capturing and maintaining data source references, and version control to provide traceability.

Corporate data must move away from the monumental central store, with a schema unchanged since the dawn of time, to a series of smaller repositories that can be easily maintained, extended and indexed as the business need arises.

The key message is that if business moves quickly, as does information upon which it’s based, so must the approach to interpreting that information. As for the Information Analyst, this job is too big for any individual professional. It’s an exciting multi-disciplinary field that will grow in importance as key step in the future of information.

The focus of this article was the fact that risk is perceived differently by different people and he offered an equation for risk.

Risk = Consequence x Likelihood x Outrage ⁽¹⁾

In investment it’s the outrage element that represents market sentiment, and it can spell disaster or opportunity.

Ever wondered at the drop in value of a high growth company’s stock when they report hugely positive results, that are only slightly below expectations?

Equally, outrage underpins contrarian investing: nobody’s surprised when a dog of a company reports poor results, but what if they’re good?

It’s not rational to expect a business to sustain double digit rates forever, and unrelated changes in long term cycles can improve the cash flow statement. The likelihood of either event may be similar, and the consequences for both company’s operations relatively minor, but the outrage, or delight, factor leads to disproportionate perceptions of risk; and hence return.

I’d love investment to be a rational activity where we could trust in the efficient market. With millions of individual human beings involved the outrage factor isn’t going anywere soon, so the only option is to try and understand it.

Reference.

1. Davies, Paul (2009) “Risky business.” The Chemical Engineer, (Issue 812), pp. 28–29.

Positive experiences.

The most frequently touted benefit frameworks have to offer is minimising the time taken to code and deploy a software solution. Given my interest in Agility, this is an attraction, reducing the time to market.

Another solid development practice is code reuse in the form of software components, and frameworks have a place amongst them. This approach offers the reliability and security inherent in widely used and tested code. Remember to choose popular software though, or this benefit disappears.

On the downside.

Applications developed using frameworks have to carry significant excess baggage in the form of unused features. This raises two main issues: your codebase will be unnecessarily large, and underused blocks of code are a breeding ground for hidden exploits and errors.

Frameworks are designed to function in a specific way, some with more flexibility than others. This much you’d expect, after all it’s the essence of a framework, but what if it doesn’t provide everything you need? For example, I’ve spent hours trying to integrate SimpleTest, a unit testing suite, to produce satisfactory results with CodeIgniter. My unit tests run well for my own libraries, but I’m still unhappy with the test coverage imposed by CodeIgniter’s MVC implementation.

Finally, they say practice makes perfect, but does reliance on any framework reduce developer skill? This isn’t a problem if everything is pre-packaged in your chosen tool, but what if a client wants something that isn’t included?

Too good to ignore.

That said, I’ve found all of these software very useful and there are far too many advantages to ignore them. But I often find myself fighting these same tools, frustrated at they’re eagerness to help me do something in a way I don’t want it done. I guess the key is to understand which is the right tool for the current job: the ultimate skill for a developer.