February 2005 Archives
Two songs!
Omaha from the Counting Crows and Believe from K's Choice.
I just uploaded some photos from the Euroshop trade show. You can see the booth and the house I stayed in.
Six days with almost no internet connection gave me a backlag. I just waded through all e-mail and some RSS-feeds, and hope to process all that information today. As of today I will focus completely on the CeBIT show, show posting will probably stay on a low level for some more time.
The EuroShop was in my opinion a moderate success. We made some good propaganda, but I would have liked to have more contacts. As with any trade show, the real result is only known after some months, when we know how interested the visitors of our booth were in our products.
As you can see, the EuroShop trade fair starts Saturday, so you can imagine what is on my mind at this moment. I just finished packing my suitcase, and will take the airplane tommorrow morning at 8:00 ---Ai, that means I have to leave home at 4!---
As I wrote before, I will be in hall 6, stand G30, the stand of the company Wirth. Besides ICG Software, the hardware companies Star and AQSonic will be on the stand. It is the first time we are present on the EuroShop, so I have no idea what to expect. I imagine that most visitors are shop owners, but seen the size of the fair it could very well be that I will be able to catch some potential distributors as well.
Being on a trade show usually leaves not a lot of time for other things, and ceratinly not for surfing the internet. So I will leave the management of this site to the spammers for some days ;-)
Instead of publishing, I have spend some time thinking about my site. The trigger was the article Stinky links by Matt Haughey. At that moment I had just created my FeedBurner feed combining my posts with my Flickr photo's and my linkdump, and I knew that I had done something wrong. Readers following me because of my Movable Type writings are probably not interested in my holiday photo's, and people who want to know about my life abroad don't want to be bothered by my link dump. This site has a lack of focus, and I only made it worse.
The feed readers have the biggest problem, since they don't see the context of each entry. On the home page, my 'normal' entries take up the bulk of the space, the links are shown in the sidebar, and the latest photo is shown in the sidebar as well. People who read my feed, don't see the context; the three content types appear in exactly the same way. To solve this, I am going to offer three more feeds: one for my weblog, one for the links and one for the photos. They will be added to the current everything-in-one feed, to give my readers more choice.
Once the biggest problem has been solved, I want to restructure the links section. My main problem is the category structure, since I find it increasingly difficult to correctly place the items. I have to review the existing categories and their items, and will probably start using a tree structure with sub-categories.
Next, I want to split the weblog part in two parts: a web--tech site and a personal site. First I will have to find out how to move certain categories from one weblog to another, but a little bit of SQL-fu should do, right? To link everything together I would like to change my homepage to a gateway to the different parts of the Brain tags empire. I guess this would also be the right moment for a new stylesheet, as I am getting fed up with light blue as well.
Once all that work has been done I want to start a new site, focused on a subject I work on every day, but which does not show up often on weblogs: point of sale software and hardware. I still have to work out my ideas on this subject, and I want to talk it over with some people, since it comes awfully close to a business weblog, but I think it would add something to the current blogosphere.
These are my ideas on the near future of Brain Tags. What is your opinion? Am I right, or should I go in another direction? I would like to hear and read your opinions.
[Update 2005.02.17]: The first step has been taken. I added a new feed for the photo's: http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainpics.
Mmm! Flogging Molly!
Tobacco Island
It's tradeshow time! The coming weeks I will present our products in two tradeshows in Germany ---note to self: start practising German.
The first show is the EuroShop in Düsseldorf. Though this show is aimed at end-users, I will go to support our German distributor. We will share the stand with some hardware companies. At the moment I am working vary hard to make leaflets for fashion shops, shoe shops, perfume shops, supermarkets,... Besides that I am double checking the quality of our German software and arranging a thousand of small things.
I will be in hall 6, stand G30. If you're in the neighbourhood, just drop by and I will show you our products in person.
The CeBIT is a show from which we expect a lot. There are many potential dealers walking around, who might know us from last year. As this is the second year we have a stand on the CeBIT, we are better prepared than last time. I can assure that the posters won't fall from the wall every 15 minutes this year :-D
After my return from the EuroShop I will start working full time for the CeBIT.
Our stand at the CeBIT is located in hall 1, stand 6i14.
While reading the great joke Google Maps find Weapons of Mass Destruction, I noticed something strange: all searches performed without specifying a state give results in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. Not exactly the states where I expect many things to happen. I did some more tests, and each time the results were found in the centre of the country.
I guess Google simply found too many results to display, and instead of showing the most significant results for the terms, it used some geographical parameters to decide what results to display...
Google is generous today! I have 50 invites for a GMail account to give away. Mail, IM, phone me or leave a comment if your interested.
It took a while, but I finally uploaded the photo's from our holidays in Thailand in August last year. I created a set ---Thailand--- to hold all of them, but since I have a limit of only three sets I probably will remove it in the future. You can always find these foto's by the tag thailand, or simply look at the pictures from August 2005.
I love the many ways of organizing photo's that Flickr offers!
[Update 2005.02.09]: I became a paid member of Flickr, so I don't have any set limits anymore.
Maintaining a site like this takes a lot of effort. After succesfully having outsourced pinging external sites to the Ping-o-Matic, and using Flickr to host my photo's, I decided to start using the FeedBurner service for making sure that all aggregators get up-to-date information.
Just as with the pings and photo's, the reason is that FeedBurner offers additional advantages ---statistics, feed optimization, Flickr integration, ...--- that I am currently unable to supply myself.
I will redirect request for my old feeds to the new location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/braintags.
[Update 2005.02.02]: Besides moving my feeds to FeedBurner, I also combined all my feeds to a single feed.
Hilarious video of a Rocky wannabe. (8Mb)
