An interesting bit on the use of Office in New Zealand’s school and some discussion on transitioning to Open Source as an alternative for the schools.
Should the education sector be looking more closely at open source and software as a service?
Author Archives: michaelon9
What goes into pricing a project?
Following up on a previous entry on my ideal hourly rate, I found another article that talks in more detail the various factors that goes into pricing a project.
A crucial problem to accurately pricing projects is that proposals happen so early in the process, as the vendor we only have a couple of meetings, phone calls or a document to understand the project. We do our best to come up with a fair and accurate price, but it often feels like a shot in the dark.
Source: Pricing a Project | Blue Flavor
Its a good read if you often are faced with having to create proposals (as a vendor) for customer projects and have been using lots of guesswork and estimates to come up with the magic figure.
In my work, I often break down the project into tasks and examine the resources assigned to the project to determine the complexity, experience of the person assigned to it to come up with the cost. This usually comes up to a reasonable figure that I can show the customer without hiding behind vague figures. A good formula to use would be like : task x time(complexity x effort) x rate = price (where complexity depends on resource assigned).
What’s your ideal hourly rate?
According to FreeLanceSwitch’s hourly rate calculator, my Ideal Hourly Rate is $43.75 p/hr and Break-Even Hourly Rate is $25.31 p/hr. This takes into factors like my business costs, personal costs, billable hours p/year and expected profit. Sure is interesting to know when pricing my projects.
Are you ALT.NET?
Just read a rather interesting discussion on ALT.NET, a description of people who don’t stick to one idea for too long (till it becomes stale) but whom strives to improve constantly. Now this is the type of developer one should look out for and work with.
What does it mean to be to be ALT.NET? In short it signifies:
- You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
- You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
- You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
- You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principals and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principals (e.g. Resharper.)
Source: the ‘bee log / ALT.NET
Mobility Touchdown Tour – Singapore Hands – On Lab
Will be at Microsoft for next 3 days covering topics on developing Mobile LOB Applications which is exactly what I do. We’ll also get to look into Mobility & Design Patterns & Concepts and many other topics. Should be interesting.
WordPress 2.2 gets released
Travelling sure makes it hard to keep updated on latest happenings. Just noticed that WordPress 2.2 was released couple of days ago and of course with all new software, there is always tiny problems that will occur. For example, if you are using K2, the new inclusion of the widgets causes a problems with K2’s sidebar module. Here’s a fix on the K2 forum. Think I’ll probably hold off upgrading all the sites till a minor revision to the 2.2 branch is released.
Just signed up for REMIX 07 Singapore
With all the buzz surrounding Microsoft Siverlight and REMIX 07 coming to Singapore on 29th June (details here), I decided to sign up for the event. Gimme a buzz if you happen to be in the developer track too!
Designing for users and knowing why (for the web)
Often, you’ll come across website that mentioned they are best for a certain browser and best viewed at XXX by XXX resolution. How do you know which is the best for your users and not just because the design looks great? By asking your users of course! Since most users probably wouldn’t be bothered to answer a poll on their machine specs, its much easier to employ tools to help with this.
Any decent web analytics software should be able to offer metrics with this. Case in point, Google Analytics (my account still doesn’t seem to be upgraded with the new look yet).
By looking at the “Content Optimization > Web Design Parameters”, there is a multitude of information that webmasters and designers should harvest if they are planning a revamp of a website.
For example, checking the Browser Versions info would tell you exactly which browser is the most popular with your site and you should make sure it works perfectly for that. That being said, you should always design for maximum compatibility with all browsers (if that is even possible these days) but you wouldn’t want your most important visitors to look at a messed up page would you?
Another useful information would be the browser resolution tab since you can immediately tell if you should be designing to cater to which crowd. Hope this tips help you with your next project and make your visitors slightly happier in navigating a website.
Personally, I browse mainly on Windows platform (XP, Vista) using Firefox 2, IE 7 at 1280×1024 and 1024×768 resolutions at Broadband 6Mbps, 256Kb just to see the loading times and design of my sites. Recently some projects have been having problems with Mac Safari and Firefox so looking at ways to resolve this.
Wondering when the next Page Rank update will be? Take a look at its history!
I was doing some updates to the website and wondered when the next Page Rank update would be and so started doing a quick search for this information. Came across the following site which lists down the trend of the Google Page Rank update. Pretty interesting results.
As of May 12th, there has not been a Toolbar PR export for 12 day(s). The longest time between toolbar PR exports recorded in the below Page Rank Export List was 122 days (Oct 19/2005 to Feb 18/2006).
Source: Page Rank Update or Export List History – PageRank – PR
Also another useful tool would be a Page Rank predictor below:
Google PageRank Prediction
This predictor tool does what it says, it predicts your future Google PageRank.
Are you using Google Analytics? It’s time for a new look!
In my previous post on search engine marketing, you might have noticed I had a little traffic graph that showed the traffic for Love Me Love My Dog. One of the reasons I had the graph in the first place was that I had used Google Analytics to monitor the site’s traffic for some time before we decided to embark on the SEM campaign.
By monitoring the traffic of a site, we can identify the extrance and exit points to the popular pages and also various other factors like duration of visit, popular articles, etc. This types of metrics can help a webmaster design a website that engages audiences and create visibility. (Which is why you should take note of the free service provided by Google).
The above diagram (take a good look) is from the older version of Google Analytics. The development team just announced on their blog that a new look would be unveiled to existing accounts soon.
Can’t wait for it to be propogated to my account so that I can help my customers monitor their websites even more effectively!
Michael Ong 