What's going on

Its been a while I wrote about what's going on. As you know I have finished creating a website for my badminton club here, there are a lot of features added like - events, registration forms etc. Please take a look at http://www.bellevuebadminton.com. You can also see the proshop - online shop for the same club being built by me at http://bellevuebadminton.com/proshop. Beware, the site is fully functional, so don't buy anything or else you will end up $$ bill on your card :) Let me know how you find the site and any suggestions are always welcome.

All of the above work is FREE!! and it is kind of biting me as I have to spend a lot of time without any real benefit, but that is okay as these are my first "such" projects and I am still learning. I can also get to explore and experiment on these (as they are free :) I am not accountable for any loss :P)

At the same time, all these efforts started by our mytechfinds.com website are paying off in multiple places, directly and also indirectly. I am getting a fully paid web design and development project for building an eCommerce site. Almost exactly same as the proshop site. Currently, I am working estimation. I will be glad if I get the project finally. I will keep you updated about how it goes...just wish me luck!! :)

I am working to find out some potential through my current project at Microsoft, I am currently writing a document on that (you will get to see it when it is released), I have to figure out what business we can do in that space...more later. You can get the glimpse of my project at http://www.microsoft.com/oneapp

First Live Project Complete

The badminton club website I had been talking about in many of my previous posts is finally complete and is live! You can check it out at http://bellevuebadminton.com This is my first web development project and I am pretty happy with the result.
The site has some cool features like calendar and google map on the contact form and some simple online forms.
The google analytics shows the success of this new site.Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

Some steady progress

It's been long that I updated on what's going on. It has been a steady progress on getting content on www.mytechinds.com. I try to get an article once in a while when I come across new stuff during my work. Really, this was the whole idea behind the project, rather than to expect it to compete with similar technical information sites. So, I am pretty okay with the progress, I would love to see more frequent updates, but it is little hard to run the show that way alone.

On the sideline, the website for the badminton club I talked about is now getting good shape. The site structure was complete a while ago. But the problem remains same - getting content on the site. I am working with the club manager and some coaches to that for me - which is really really the hard part, as they never see it as a high pri work. Also, may be they don't understand how much value and money through new memberships, online shopping etc. they can earn by setting up this new site. I am trying my best to explain, but I think tye will eventually get it once its up. I am really keeping the expectations low from the site to begin with as it my first "such" project.

Also, as said earlier, I had been exploring other CMSs like wordpress, drupal and many other and having a good feel of them now. Hope to do some work on those soon. I may set up a few sites for personal use using those first, lets see how it goes. I have also explored some forums like phpbb3 and sfm - really loved it. Again, finding a good use of them is a open question!

I will post the link to the new club site soon, once it goes live..so keep watch!!

What's next

With MyTechFinds.com built and ready to roll, I have started spanning my options. The site is not getting enough traffic just as yet because we have not yet advertised it. So, I am putting together a plan to advertise it, may be in stages, with a small beta-release amogst friends and family to see how we handle the site managment and then go with a wider audeience. But otherwise, things look good on mytechfinds.com front for now.

On a side note, my extra hrs put in to build myetechfinds.com site is bringing in an opportunity - to build a website for the badminton club I go to here. Isn't that great! The current club site is very poor. The owner of the club is a good friend of mine, so I have put a foot forward to build a brand new site for the club. Of course, I will be using Joomla to do that and it will be a very good experience. Also, one of my colleagues from India asked me to give a pre-built but empty site to start his own website. I have already given him a blank Joomla website and will be helping him to put his site together. What he gained from that - he does not need to know how to install and set up Joomla, no need to know how to get different modules and components and how to configure them. I gave him a site with all the components he required with all the settings done, he just have to put it the "content" now. This idea stretches towards my next steps.

My next steps are towards productization of Joomla and have a bunch of pre-built websites for different domains. E.g. when I will have the club site ready, it will form the ground of "any" club that wants to put up a site! and that will become a "product" as I will not have to put in the same efforts every time to build a particular website. Another example is school websites, I searched for all the schools around my city and visited their websites. To my surprise many of them have a website but the sites are poor and/or not up to date, just because there is no one to keep them alive. One major reason for that is the way these sites are built, they are difficult to maintain with non-technical people (school staff). Joomla website solves this problem. My job is to make the framework of a basic school website and do little changes to suite it to different schools. Let's see, how far the rabbit holes goes!!

There are other plans to learn more about other big guns in open-source CMSs like Drupal, Wordpress etc. but may be later as I have just touched 10% of Joomla and there is a lot be learnt on that yet.

Google search caught us

We have started publishing niche content articles on mytechfind.com now, and we are getting in a steady paced progress. As I said earlier, it is not an easy job. But we are definitely starting to see results and Google is better understanding our site now. Some of the articles have already made to the top search page on Google. To be specific, 2 of my articles have made it all the way to the top for certain search queries. This is exciting!

I have spend a lot of time working on SilkTest, UI automation tool and in the early days, I always used to look for help. It was little hard to find help on SilkTest as it was or is still not as famous as other automation tools like Winrunner or QTP. If you look up the web for help in Winrunner or QTP, you will get tons of good results but SilkTest is not so lucky. So, to share my knowledge on SilkTest, I have written an article SilkTests Guidelines which is a small one pager but is the product of 3 years of learning. Today, if you look up for "silktest guidelines" on Google, you will find this document on the number 1 in the search results. Isn't that great? I believe this will help some people like me looking out for help on SilkTest and they would not have to spend hours and hours to put up their work.

Other article which has made it to the top also targets similar problem. It was hard to find help on how to process trx files produced by Visual Studio Team Systems as not many people (outside of Mirosoft world) work on this platform. I wrote 2 separate articles on how to process trx result files from VSTS. The "trx merger" has made it to the top of the search results - TRX Merger. I am glad again to help some testers like me looking out for ways to improve their work.

My other 2 articles - Generating HTML reports from trx using XSLT, Converting excel-based tests to VSTS manual tests are on first page of Google search for "trx to html with xslt" and "exel to vsts manual tests" search strings. Not bad at all!!

Content is king

"Content is king", you might have heard this term, but I realized it. So, mytechfinds.com is ready with all aspects, the core structure is built and ready to go. I even have revamped the books tab to show amazon store through amazon affiliates program. Haven't got any clicks, but it works great and is very easy to set up. Definitely gave birth to new ideas.

Coming back to content, mytechfinds.com has some niche content now. I have contributed 4 articles out of 6. We are going slower than expected, but that is okay. Content is king - and it really ease, after we started having some articles with niche content, search crawlers are finding some "sense" in our site and have started indexing. We have to keep on adding more to optimize the results and improve our ranking. We don't stand any ranking as such at this point.

Writing articles and bringing in content is easy said than done. We know a lot of stuff and we are learning all the time, but realizing what we have learnt and documenting that for others is an "art". I took almost a day to come up with the first article and by the 4th one, took me around 3-4 hrs. I still do not know if the articles are of any help, but I hope they are.

I am trying to generalize the problems I have solved while working as a tester. Tagging the content with right keywords is also as important as having right keywords in the article itself. This is one way of helping user find your article in the sea of solutions.

Where are the articles?

Mytechfinds project is up and running within 2 weeks with Joomla and Google. But we are not do even close to be done. Where are the articles for the site? Now, that is a slow process.

We have some masters of their domains - C#, C++, SQL and then software testing. All of us are gone back to pen and paper to put down our first article for the site. I am not sure where is eveybody at but we had decided to put up one article each by this weekend, that is by tomorrow. I have not heard from anybody anything yet, so lets keep the fingers crossed and hope that we do not loose the momentum and get the first round of articles published tomorrow. We are not going to go through the process of submit-review-publish process for our team members but will follow this process for all the other "registered users" on the site. The plan is to assign a publisher for each domain.

If someone submits an article on software testing, I (I will be assigned publisher for software testing) will get an notification email saying xyz has submitted such and such article for testing and it is waiting for your review. I can go check and review the article and decide to publish right away or send back to the author for corrections or more content. There will be exception to this rule for special people - our honored guests or featured authors. Again, the idea is to get valuable articles from many many experts we know in software industry. Initially, we won't be paying them for their articles, but if we start making some money with the website, we would love to. Let's see how it goes.

The whole idea behind the project is really to help ourselves first, by creating content of the knowledge that we posses, but then there is only a dotted line to before we start making our website (somewhat) commerical. The key is not to loose focus, the later will follow...