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...

The Google cloud

As I saw that the concept can be brought to life, I realized that we are going to need some tools to make the project work, mainly because we are in two locations, few folks in India and myself here. So better communication is going to play a key role in this whole exercise. Google came to our help! Within a day, I had set (almost) all the tools I think we would need for project managment using Google services - I created a new project on code.google.com which has lots of good and advanced features, but I was mainly looking for a platform to share ideas, a scratchpad to note something down, an issue management system to track progress and defects. It felt like one stop shopping for all of it at code.google.com. I also set up a group at groups.google.com including all the team memebers for better and easy communication. All of us are already using Gmail so there was no need to set seperate email for this project. I am using docs.google.com for sharing project documents or just to keep some notes and tracking sheets for myself which may not find a place on the project wiki. We had our first conference call about the project last weekend. We used skype and quality was excellent. Now, why we did not use gtalk? I really have no good reason for that. But we may try it in future.

Soon, I was seeing myself spending a lot of time on our code site, making wiki pages to document details about the project. We already have quite a list of issues/tasks that are being tracked on the code site. It is working great. It is doing all the things I want it to do - I can quickly create tasks/bugs, assign them to team members, comment on them etc, etc. I get notifications when someone works on my issue or comments on it. So, its been perfect so far. On top of it, it is configurable and I have done a bit configuration to suite it to our needs. I am really happy at this point even without using the advanced features like code-checkin and stuff.

Ohh and one thing almost forgot to mention, the conference call I talked about was scheduled on Google calendar!

Chapter one

So, there I was, with a new domain. I had no clue to where to go from there. I had not talked about it even to my wife for 2 days was I as not sure where I was going with it. I had seen some videos and read a lot of articles over the internet, where everyone was saying putting up website is not at all hard these days and anybody can do it! So, I played around with all sorts of site building tools offered by my host. I knew one thing for sure that for a technical community site, I will need a CMS - Content Management System for sure. As a software tester I have seen a lot of well built, beautiful websites and knew that it will take me ages to build one myself and I did not want to just sit on my domain with nothing (as I had already invested my money!). While exploring different CMSs, I came across Joomla (actually at the back of my mind I kinda knew that I am going to choose Joomla but I still looked at other options) and settled on it. Within 2 days, I had (almost) the entire site ready with user authentication, registration, article managment, document sharing, polls, placeholders for ads and what not (almost everything I mentioned is already available in Joomla, I just had to choose and configure). After spending almost a day over understanding how Joomla works (or how to make it work), I was pretty confident that I can do this, we can build a good site like this and I spread the news in the same group of buddies I had a talk with. I think, when we had something to look at than just random thoughts floating around, excited the group and the journey began...

The new old concept

I have been working as a software tester for almost 7 years now, while in India or during my first 4 years of working, i was busy catching up with all about the software and software testing buzz. I appeared and cleared for some testing certifications like CSQA and ISTQB foundation to keep up with market demands. But it the "concept" did not struck me till I came to US for work and seen people going beyond their boundaries of work duties to fullfil their inner desires. I saw people caring about what they like, nurturing their hobbies, learning new things all the time. I was impressed and felt like that was something I always wanted but did not know how. Another feeling was - I am wasting a lot of time in my life doing nothing! So, I talked to one of my best friends saying lets do something together, this was sometime in 2006 and nothing really happened till now. The thought lingered but could not find a thing to put my finger on and say, that's what I want to do. Recently, on visit home, I talked it all out with a bunch of friends and we brainstormed on ideas, again the main idea was to do something colaborative. We know each other for a long time now but we never worked together and do not really know the office-faces of us, this way we will know each other even better, and its always easy to take the critisisum from a close friend than seeing it directly reflected in the paycheck!

So, making the long story short - we decided to pull in all the knowledge we have built over years of working and make them shareable by putting up a website. Now, there were other themes also considered for the new website, but this was little more appreciated by everyone. Also, it has a direct customer as one of my friends who has just put up a software shop. So, one fine day, all alone at home, I just went online and registered for a domain, the action was spontaneous that I had no time to think about what I am going to call it, and I named it mytechfinds.com - My Technical Findings, a site to share knowledge, all those small obvious looking solutions you need and the ones which you think that are so obvious that you don't store/save and eventually forget about. More about mytechfinds.com in future posts...