My pal Jeff Barr of Amazon posted on his personal blog about how he was interviewed by Google and continues to get pinged by their recruiters after he already gave them a polite "no thanks". He asks whether their recruiters shouldn’t maybe have way of looking up candidates in some sort of database — you [...]
Entries Tagged as 'How-Tos'
How to run a technology community
April 12th, 2007 · 1 Comment · Collaboration, Content, Community, How-Tos, Platforms, Web/Tech
This has come up with several of the companies I’ve been advising over the past few months, so I thought I’d lay out a few of my rules and tips for how to manage a public technical support forum and build a technical community. My thoughts in this area come from twenty years of managing [...]
Tags:
How to Name Your Developer Site
November 30th, 2006 · No Comments · How-Tos, Web/Tech
There is only one acceptable way to name a web site intended for developers and I’m going to tell you what it is. Give your developer web site tertiary DNS name of "developer". So if your consumer site is mysite.com, your developer site should be developer.mysite.com. Simple.
Do not call your developer site mysite.com/developer or developers.mysite.com. [...]
Tags:
MySQL Gotchas for .NET Developers
November 13th, 2006 · 12 Comments · How-Tos, MySQL, Web/Tech
I think I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog that I’ve been using the combination of .NET 2.0 and MySQL for Approver.com. I made this choice after very careful consideration. I spent about a month looking at Postgresql and MySQL earlier this year and came to the conclusion that either one is a good [...]
Tags:
Open Shortcuts for Yahoo! Search
December 20th, 2005 · 1 Comment · How-Tos, Web/Tech, Yahoo
Today we launched a new feature of Yahoo! Search called Open Shortcuts. This lets you do certain types of searches quickly. It’s also customizable. For instance, to search eBay from the Yahoo! search page:
Go to search.yahoo.com (or any convenient Yahoo! search box)
In the search box, type !ebay shoes
You’ll be taken to eBay where you’ll see [...]
Tags:
Contextual Search Madness
July 12th, 2005 · No Comments · How-Tos, Web/Tech, Yahoo
I added Y!Q contextual search to the blog, as you can see below. (Clicking on the soothing purple and yellow link gives you a dynamic HTML pop-up; it won’t take you away from this page, so click to your heart’s content to see how it works.)
This was not difficult to add to Typepad. The instructions [...]
Tags:
How To Evangelize Your New XML Features
June 1st, 2005 · No Comments · How-Tos, Web/Tech
Dear Bill,
Loved the big news today about how Office 12 will have an XML file format. But you blew it on the sound bite, my friend. Here’s how you described the benefits of XML last month:
Last month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that Office
12 would make it easier for workers to "focus, prioritize and
apply their [...]
Tags:
How Not To Sell Me Crap
March 9th, 2005 · 2 Comments · How-Tos
So many sales droids keep making the same mistakes, I thought I’d put together a handy primer on how not to sell crap to me.
Imagine that the sales process is a game and you have to score 100 points to win. When you win, I buy your crap. Now, at least 50 of those points [...]
Tags:
Credit Card Madness
November 20th, 2004 · 1 Comment · How-Tos
Excellent story in the New York Times about how credit card companies can charge you pretty much whatever they want after you’ve racked up a balance, thereby punishing their best customers (the ones who carry a balance). I mention this because some of the horror stories were similar to what happened to us after we [...]
Tags:
