Exceptional Performance: “Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team evangelizes best practices for improving web performance. They conduct research, build tools, write articles and blogs, and speak at conferences. Their best practices center around the rules for high performance web sites.”

These are great tips.

The guys at Blue Design Studio has a brand new list of their favourite Wordpress Content Management System (CMS) Plugins.

It is a great list for those interested in using Wordpress as a CMS. 

Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins | Blueprint Design Studio

John M Willis has a superb post -  Demystifying Clouds - on the the state and future of utility computing and clouds.

If you have any interest at all in the future of computing, this article wil help you get a flavour of what is to come.

I recent signed up for a Mosso account account and so far it has been superb. I have also recently started doing business with 3Tera and they are a superb outfit with an amazing product.

Demystifying Clouds | John M Willis ESM Blog

As Internet Services consultants, one of the most challenging projects we have be tasked with is to take a previously successful Hosting business and “revamp the strategy” to regain a “greater market share” and “make more money”. This less than adequate brief is typical of many hosting service providers who have seen their grasp on the market decline with the reduction of barriers-to-entry for SOHO start-ups, consolidation of larger competitors and an out-dating of their core technologies due to high churn-rates of new market offerings.

For the last 5 years the market has been scraping for position using more or less the same tools to little effect. Some larger players like Rackspace.com have made waves with their “Fanatical Support” and others with (almost) unbelievably low pricing that ultimately fails to satisfy.

We believe that the market is now entering into significant change cycle, brought on basically by the rising cost of energy globally. Utility Computing, renting on-demand resources for virtualised applications came about through a need to rationalise data centre resources and maximise the affective use of every kWh of electricity consumed. Utility computing is nothing new, mainframe computing is where it all began, but now, today, the difference is that the technical challenges the industry must overcome can now be considered profitable due to the savings delivered by energy efficiency.

If you’re still skeptical of the urgent need to focus on energy efficiency in data centres, consider this: in 2007, over 1.5% of the USA’s entire energy consumption was attributable to data centres. Now try and imagine just how much money that represents….

So, utility computing will save a stagnant SP business? Not quite, at least not on its own.

Here is our 15-point guideline for next generation hosting business excellence:

1. Stop underestimating customer defection rates. It is getting easier and easier for your customers to migrate to a better, more innovative offer from competitors. Existing customers are your safest option for growth. Keep the good ones, ditch the bad ones.
2. Stop relying on your historical brand strength - it may be strong and deserving of attention, but it should be reduced in priority with a return to the days of innovation on which your brand was established.
3. Do you *really* have a worthwhile USP? If not, you’re dead. Start innovating, targeting niches and getting noticed. Utility computing, Virtualisation, ASP, Content, Community. Listen to your customers, they’ll guide you towards your real USPs. Animate the market and surge ahead of competition.
4. Your data centre facility requires urgent upgrading: Efficient cooling system redesign, 24×7 manned access control, visual face-lift, procedures, virtualisation. If you can’t offer resilience, shut down and migrate to a low-carbon-footprint independent tier III facility.
5. Boost your New Business Development department: bring on board experienced, technically knowledgeable sales staff to sell solutions, not simply services. Aim for high-equity customers with good prospects of future add-on sales.
6. Your Database and CRM tools are too disconnected, under-used and with insufficient procedures for their effective use. The knowledge required for effective marketing and CRM is distributed across systems and harder to act upon usefully. Fix it.
7. There are insufficient internal SLAs and documented procedures for provisioning and support. You cannot force unrealistic SLAs but you need to establish some starting point in agreement with NOC and support. Then push for continual, measurable improvements.
8. Measurement and reporting do not allow for true evaluation of efficiency so you cannot highlight areas for profitable improvements. Measurement is difficult and time-consuming to implement but some basic steps should be taken and gradually, continually, improved.
   
9. Training is underdeveloped and under-documented. A new program should be developed based on bringing on-board a new experienced sales agent and the process should be led from within Sales & Marketing and backed up by NOC/support.
10. You don’t have a clear understanding of exact costs per service type or per customer, therefore individual profitability is not well understood, therefore future strategy and investments cannot be efficiently applied where they will have the most commercial effect.
11. You are not effectively targeting and attracting high-equity (profitable) customers. These could be large network customers, they may be smaller customers who require very little of your resources and refer other customers, or they may be customers of future strategic value. Engage visitors to the website when they are visiting the website, don’t wait for their contact.
12. 90% of your marketing resources are spent on acquisition and 10% on retention and defection strategies. Greater focus needs to be given to existing customers, reducing defection and maximising earnings per customer. Increase monitoring and presence on user forums. Listen to and learn from your customers.
13. High value customers/referrers want to manage themselves. Whether its domain management, development environments or other control panels, empower these customers with solid tools for managing themselves and back them up when they need help. Don’t try to develop everything yourself, that is a different business model, concentrate resources on integrating best-in-class applications. Monitor their habits and enhance your direct marketing capabilities.
14. Apply some effort to content provision platforms such as Streaming, Social Networking, Downloads & Application hosting. Strong support from development & NOC are required for implementation. Invest minimally, partner maximally. Develop advertising revenue channels.
15. Embrace targeted marketing. Greater targeted marketing is required, supported by detailed customer/prospect interaction database and external market research agency. Let our competitors waste money on mass-market advertising.

Welcome to the Combat Consultants Toolkit. This is a list of tools and services used by Combat Consultants. This is our “kit”, our battle tested set of old dependable’s . Some of the tools and software are not free (and in some cases downright expensive) but they tend to be either the best in their class or at the very least robust, dependable and secure. In some cases - like the Office Suite - it is used for convenience, great features and the fact it is a global standard.

Computer and Hardware

MacBook Pro running OS X (Leopard) and Windows XP (via Parallels Desktop for Mac)

Samsung D900 Mobile Phone - Doubles up as a Dictaphone. See this post for details.

Office Suite

Word Processing, Presentations, Spreadsheets

Microsoft Office 2007 (Win / Mac)

Google Apps (Web)

E-mail & Calendaring

DataGate Hosted Exchange (Web)

Gmail & Google Mail for Domains (Web)

Microsoft Outlook (Win) - Primary e-mail and calendar client

Mail.app (Mac)

Thunderbird with Lightning (Mac / Win, Free) - Also see my list of essential Thunderbird add-ons.

Personal Task Management

MyLifeOrganized (Win)

Omnifocus (Mac)

Project Management

Basecamp (Web)

MindManager Pro 7

JVC Gantt Pro MindManger add-in for Gantt charts

JIRA from Atlassian

Notes and Knowledge Management

Confluence Enterprise Wiki (Web - Free, personal license) - Corporate power free for individuals

Wikidpad Personal Wiki (Win, Free) - superb personal wiki

Image Database & Management

Flickr Pro (Web, $24 per annum) - great blogging aid and image database

Fotki Pro (Web, $30 per annum) - great for albums

iPhoto 8 - (Mac, usually bundled with Mac computers)

FastStone Image Viewer (Win, Free) - It is faster than anything else on Windows and has tons of features including image editing

Web browsing

Firefox 3 - (free, Win/Linux/Mac) - This is my primary browser. Please see my Essential Firefox Plug-ins and Greasemonkey scripts lists.

Opera 9.26 - (Win/Mac/Linux, free) - I still adore the magnificent, memory efficient and blazing fast Opera

Billing and Invoicing

Blinksale (Web) - Superb invoicing application

E-Junkie - best online store

Desktop Blogging Application

Windows Live Writer (Win. Free) - The best blogging client by far. Superb.

MarsEdit (Mac)

Blogging Platform

WordPress (Web, Free) - The best blogging platform. Simple, extendable through plug-ins, lovely themes and extremely easy to install

Online BackUp / Online Storage

Amazon S3 (Web) - Amazon’s infinite hard disk is dirt cheap, fast and generally superb

MediaMax (web) - Prior to Amazon, this was my web storage solution of choice

Technical Library

Safari Library from Safari Books Online has unlimited access to the entire safari catalogue plus hundreds more. If I acquire e-books in PDF format, I upload them to my Confluence wiki.

Instant Messaging

Adium (Mac, Free) - Superb multi-protocol Instant Messaging Client

Pidgin (Win, Free) - Adium’s Windows brother. Lean and stable multi-protocol Instant Messaging Client

Meebo (Web, Free) - Online multi-protocol Instant Messaging Client

Clipboard Recording

Text Shortcuts

Anti-Virus

Nod 32 (Win) - The best AV of them all without doubt. Tiny, fast and never failed to detect a virus

FTP

Filezilla (Win, Free)

Transmit (Mac) - The best Mac FTP client.

Encryption & Passwords

Keepass Password Safe (Win, Free)

Truecrypt (Win/Mac/Linux, Free)

1password (Mac)

PDF reading

FoxIt Reader (Win, Free)

File management

Pathfinder (Mac)

Screen Grabs

Skitch (Mac, Free) - Amazing little screen snapping and touch-up tool

Screen recording

Camtasia Studio (Win, expensive but superb)

Camstudio (free, Win)

Folder Synchronisation

Foldershare (Win/Mac)

Personal CRM & Contact Management

Highrise (Web)

LinkedIn (Web)

Plaxo (Web)

Book Inventory

LibraryThing (Web)

RSS / OPML

Newsgator (Web)

Images Editing

ImageWell

Diagramming

Visio

Podcasting & Sound

Garageband

To add

“Many people know from their own experience that it’s not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.”

For Linux, Windows, Max OS X and Solaris.

Apache friends - XAMP

If you have your own server, or even a spare old PC or iMac lying around? You maybe able to set yourself up with enterprise class technology for free.

Bitnami make as easy to install a whole slew of Open Source products on your box as it is to installing AOL Instant Messenger.

“BitNami stacks make it incredibly easy to install your favourite open source software. Application stacks include an open source application and all the dependencies necessary to run it, such as Apache, MySQL and PHP or Ruby. All you need to do is download the Stack, provide a few pieces of information when prompted by the installation wizard, and that’s it. By the time you click ‘finish’, your new application will be ready to run.”

BitNami :: BitNami Stacks

I found this book in a charity bookshop in Ealing. I bought the book because I liked the cheesy cover and every South African has a fascination with Shaka Zulu.

I was surprised to find myself enjoying the little book, and I finished it in one sitting on the plane to Belgrade from London.

The books introduction tells the story of a young consultant with a very tough gig at a well established South African corporation. The problems in the company stem from poor leadership. Whilst complaining to his wife about the impossibility of his task, she reminds him of a family heirloom - a diary written by his grandfather at the turn of the 20th century which reveal the leadership secrets of Africa’s greatest emperor Shaka Zulu. He rushes to the family home and reads the diary.

The bulk of the book is the diary itself, written by the Oxford educated Phinda Mzwakhe Madi, the author’s grandfather.

It recounts a series of encounters with Shaka’s aunt and eventually murderer Nobelungu. She recounts Shaka’s rise and fall - and most importantly his leadership secrets - which help young Madi overcome his foes and problems related to setting u the first newspaper in Zululand.

The 10 Principles are:

1. Build a sense of Mission
2. Mission is more important than convention
3. To be a conqueror, be apprenticed to a conqueror
4. Lead the charge (from the front)
5. Build a fanatical team
6. Go where angels fear to tread
7. be a good strategist (or get one)
8. Know the battlefield (better than the enemy)
9. Be obsessed with world-class technologies
10. Never believe your own PR

I groaned when I read this list. They sound like the usual leadership clichés. There are however a few gems in the text and an genuinely interesting take on some of these themes.

The best advice, and the wisdom Nobelungu considered the most important, was the last: Never believe your own PR. Shaka, who was adored by his people, eventually became a figure of hate who nearly destroyed everything he had build after he became convinced he was a demi-god. Eventually his team - the very people he has brought together to help him achieve his mission of unifying the African people - had to kill him to preserve what was left of his achievements.

The book is available on Amazon.co.uk.

Loak 1303

Loak Artemis

Thin Slicing at work in the corporate world as the Economist declares “What the boss looks like determines how he performs”.

This may sound like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th century denigrating the work of 19th-century physiognomists and phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces and skulls carry information about personality. However, recent work has shown that such traits can, indeed, be assessed from photographs of faces with a reasonable accuracy.

…These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.

Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though these traits are not harmful). But this result also suggests yet another thing that stockmarket analysts might care to take into account when preparing their reports: the physog of the chief executive.

Physiognomy and success | Face value | Economist.com