Today more and more companies start to understand the importance of PM software which is targeted to solve numerous tasks and thus gives an opportunity to increase profit potential and decrease costs

One of the most positive points of project collaboration software is that it gives a possibility to improve the overall work on numerous projects. For example, many managers of your group fulfill different functions and work on different parts of the project. It would be a hard task to estimate the work of everyone and also see the work in progress. Only imagine what will happen if just one of them does not work properly or makes mistakes. It can spoil the work of all members of the group.

But if you have special online project collaboration software you can see the work of every manager online and of course correct their work online. Another advantage of this particular kind of custom software development is that it works with the help of Internet thus it gives a possibility to connect all your offices which can be situated all over the world. As you see there are numerous advantages of installing PM software.

This has been a crazy week of server maintenance, PC crashes (buy Macs people, please) and client technical support problems. I spent a huge amount of time already this week logging in to various remote systems to fix a handful of disasters and problems. And none of it would have been possible without VNC.

VNC, or Virtual Network Computing, is a method of accessing a remote system. It’s basically a simple way to do desktop sharing. I use it to help troubleshoot client problems by logging directly onto their computer, taking control of that machine’s keyboard and mouse and walking through the problem live with my client. It’s an invaluable tool that every freelancer needs to become intimately familiar with.

This whole setup is very easy to install. I use RealVNC on each client machine and then, since I’m a Mac user, I connect to them using a program called Chicken of the VNC. Chicken of the VNC also has one of the best application icons of all time, as you can see on the right.

Anyway, if you have clients and find yourself in need to some hand holding with them you should definitely look into using VNC.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been trying my hand at some amateur SEO (or, Search Engine Optimisation) with my rankings for Fore Score on the term “golf stats” and I’ve had a bit of success. People don’t search for “golf stats” quite a whole lot, and the competition is pretty stiff at the top of the rankings, but I thought I’d give it a shot anyway just to see how I could do.

When I started this, Fore Score was the 10th result on the first page for a “golf stats” search on Google. Occasionally, it was dipping to the top of the 2nd page as well. After working on some of the code and putting extra effort into getting targeted backlinks with the right anchor text I’ve seen Fore Score rise to the #4 or #5 position depending on when you run the search. I’d say that’s a step in the right direction. I’ve managed to outrank some pretty large competitors: Sports Illustrated, Golf.com and USA Today to name three of the biggest.

This has been an interesting little experiment. In the world of Internet marketing, SEO and monitoring and tracking keywords and search engine results is a part of daily life. Internet marketers usually have a much better understanding of these things than someone like myself, who is mainly focused full-time on web development.

I’m probably going to switch my focus to another keyword or keyphrase here as the summer wraps up. I’ll keep everyone posted on the results.

It’s been a really long time since I had a post with a coding solution here. So today I thought I’d throw up something I needed earlier this summer for anyone else looking for similar code.

On an older site, still running Classic ASP, I needed to redirect anyone visiting a page with standard HTTP to the same page using HTTPS. Here’s the solution which I included at the very top of the page before any other code is called:

<%
	if Request.ServerVariables("HTTPS") = "off" then
		srvname = Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")
		scrname = Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
		response.redirect("https://" & srvname & scrname)
	end if
%>

Basically, whenever someone visits the page it checks to see if they came from http://www.example.com/page and then redirects them straight to https://www.example.com/page to ensure they’re visiting the page on a secure connection.

There are probably much better ways to do this but since this is what worked for me I thought I’d share.

UPDATE: GrabUp has been sold at the “Buy It Now” price of $20,000 USD. That’s actually half of what the initial buyout price was, but the seller cut it in half to speed up the sale.

When is it too soon to sell a site? A lot of people worry about waiting too long to sell their websites. They’re concerned if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, and cash in on recent revenue stats, that they might not make the most possible from the sale of their sites.

An Example of Selling Too Soon?

There’s a great Mac-only piece of software out there called GrabUp that lets you quickly take snapshots of your screen and upload them to the web for you to share with others. The program is snappy and the system for uploading is extremely fast and efficient. It’s a great product that just recently launched an extended version that, for a small cost, lets you get even more out of the software. The future looks bright for GrabUp.

That future, unfortunately, is going to belong to someone other than the program’s creator.

GrabUp is currently up for sale over at SitePoint. This sale comes only one week after the “pro” version of the software has been available. In that week the profit has been $1,060. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at and the owner is using that figure to justify their “Buy It Now” price.

It feels to me like the seller might be rushing into this one a bit. I obviously don’t know, or pretend to know, their financial situation of course. But with sales figures like that so early in the game, with little promotion from what the seller is claiming, it seems like they’d be better served holding on for at least a few more months.

Here’s the other problem with selling so fast. It makes potential buyers skeptical. You immediately ask yourself, when first seeing this sale, “Why is he selling already? What’s the problem?” If you do a little research, you find out GrabUp has actually been up for sale before and then the deal was cancelled. That’s going to raise concern as well.

Software is a tricky game to play. I know that from experience working at the enterprise level. It’s just as hard at the consumer level, of course. But when you have an apparent hit on your hands it might be best to stick to it and see where it leads you. As opposed to jumping ship for your next project at the first sight of a payday.