Free software promotion

In celebration of it's 3rd month of release, we've decided to give away 100 free single-PC licence keys for Web Helper Browser.

If you would like to take advantage of the offer, all you need to do is download and install the trial software, then send an email to us at promo-key@webhelperbrowser.com containing the machine id from the Enter License Key form (access via the Help menu) in our software. If you need detailed instructions, please feel free to email us at the same address.

Web Helper Browser is a web browser designed to help anyone who needs to save web content, with some extra features for searching and automating web navigation, and a lot more to come in the future. The original idea for the software was to help anyone who usually has a copy of Word open when browsing, and uses copy and paste to save job adverts, product details, or just general information. Although there is an integrated web browser, you can keep using your preferred browser and still take advantage of the drag and drop saving features. The usual price per copy is $20, and the download is available directly from our site or through the following link:-

Web Helper Browser download (download.com)

These free licence keys are completely free, without obligation, but we are working hard to make the software as good as it can be, and would really appreciate any feedback you might like to provide. You can provide feedback via our website feedback form, the support forums, or via email. Even if you just want to tell us whether you like the software or not, or to tell us what you think should be in the next version, we would love to hear from you.

Offer limited to the first 100 people to apply, and to one PC per person/company.

Flashback

I saw on the news from home today that another part of the north of England has been devastated by flooding. I sympathise deeply, we lost our home to flooding in January, and are still seemingly months away from being able to move back in. I only hope everyone affected there is as lucky as we've been with the support we've had from family, and a little bit luckier than we've been when dealing with their insurance company and renovations. Call them now, guys, and keep on at them until you get something done. My earlier flooding related posts (with pictures) can be found here:-

Lessons learned
How deep was it

Link round up

It's been a pretty quiet week for me here, aside from a couple of earthquakes and a tsunami warning, that is. I've just been working on the latest updates for our products and planning our web site overhaul.

Aside from work, the Confederations Cup has been giving me a much needed football fix, even though I don't understand a word of the spanish commentary. I also came across a couple of good gaming links:-

Trash is an independent game, currently in beta and available to download from the website. It plays like Total Annihilation or Age of Empires, and is well worth the 20Mb download. I found this on 4 color rebellion, which seems to be where I get all my good gaming info lately.

I found the link to Experimental Gameplay in the 4 color rebellion forums, and it's an interesting site full of mini-games and experimentations around simple game mechanics. I haven't tried them all, but the ones I did try were surprisingly polished and fun.

Finally, for the ambitious among you, Steve Pavlina is blogging another epic self improvement series. This week's subject is the meaning of life, I'm sure it will be great, but the first post is like a novel, and I'm not sure I have the stamina right now. Maybe I'll save it for a long flight.

Coming Soon

Lately I've been working on some updates to Web Helper Browser. This is a great project to work on, because I use it all day everyday (dogfooding, as it's known in the trade!). Many of the new features are just little things I find myself wanting while I work, it's great to just add them to our list and then see them in the next version.

Often though, the bigger ideas or suggestions come from other users who may use the product in a different way to me. For example, the current version saves web content, but it doesn't save an independent copy of images. It takes advantage of the temporary internet files or uses a link to the original web server, so 99% of the time the images are still available, on or offline. When I use the software to save a web fragment, it's usually just a quick drag and drop, and I'm usually just researching a new purchase, or taking note of an address, and the text is the most important thing to me.

The way I use it, it works perfectly, and that was always the goal for me with the product. It's basically there to save me from having a copy of Word, or Notepad open, copying and pasting bits of information into documents. Other users tend to use the software more as an offline browser, saving entire pages to read when there's no internet connection, or to collect a history or compare things they see online. Occasionally, the linked images haven't been available, usually if the temporary internet files have been cleared and an internet connection isn't available, or the file on the original server has been moved or deleted.

This has never really bothered me as a user of the software, but obviously as a developer, the fact that the software doesn't deal with it does bother me. In the next version we'll be trying out an option which will save a permanent copy of images in any of the pages or fragments that you save.

I'll post a full list of new or updated features when the next version is available. I was also planning to talk about the upcoming improvements to our employee scheduling software, Oriador Rota, and a planned major overhaul of all our websites, but I think I'll save those for another day.

Adios Amigo

A friend has just headed off on a month long tour of Mexico, so we spent last night across town seeing him off. It was the first time we'd seen any of these guys for a couple of years, so it was great to catch up.

People keep telling me I don't sound English and I don't know what to think about it. It's not only people here, even in England people would ask where I'm from, or people I've known for years would tell me I'm losing my accent. It's happened too many times now for me to disregard it, I guess it's just that I spend most of my time with my wife (Bea, an american), and I've just picked up some of her speech patterns and modified some of my own to make things easier on her. I guess there's nothing I can do about it now.

Also, this morning we had the first small earthquake since we arrived, nothing too significant, just a slightly shaking bed, but it's still a new thing for me. Last time we were here there was one small one, but I didn't really feel it.

Sweet relief

It's funny how sometimes when a series comes to an end you feel disappointed because there's no more, and other times you feel relieved that it's over and you can relax. As I mentioned a post or two ago, Steve Pavlina posted a great series on self-discipline this week. It was a great series both in the sense that it was full of good information, and in the sense that there was a lot of it. I'm glad he wrote it and posted it up for free, and I'm glad that I read it, but I'm also glad it's over.

To keep up my geek status, I suppose I also have to talk about Star Wars at some point, and that's probably the best opening I'm going to get. I saw Episode 3 this week, finishing off another series. Now, it would have wrapped up the last paragraph perfectly if I could say that I felt disappointed that there was no more to come, but, unfortunately, I'm relieved that Star Wars is over too. I hadn't been looking forward to Episode 3 all that much, I liked the old movies, and no amount of reality checking can wash the rose tinting out of my glasses. But I knew I had hated Episodes 1 & 2, so I was very surprised to find that I loved the latest movie, it wrapped everything up nicely enough for me, the pace was great, there was plenty going on, I got completely into it. It also recaptured some of the darkness and menace of the earlier movies that the first two prequels completely missed.

Maybe in the years since the massive disappointment of The Phantom Menace I'd subconciously made my peace with the bad scripting and acting, and that this latest movie was just the first one to fully benefit from that new perspective. In that case, maybe if I was to watch Episodes 1 & 2 again with a low expectation level, I would change my opinion of them.

Maybe, but I doubt it, and I feel quite comfortable thinking that the series went out on a relatively high note.

Another good business blog

I feel like I'm only posting links at the moment. Either it's because my time has been split between reading and working, with no time for thinking and writing, or I just burned out my blogging circuit last week. Whatever the reasons, good ideas for posts just haven't been coming my way.

The new link today is to a good business blog that I found this week:-

http://www.smallbusinessbranding.com/

Another good tip from a Joel on Software forum member. There's a lot of good small business information on there already, and it seems to be updated regularly.

Playtime

Here's another great classic gaming link courtesy of 4 color rebellion. This time it's Duck Hunt.

It's not quite the same without the light gun, but it still filled my nostalgic fun quota for today.

Self Discipline

Steve Pavlina is blogging like a demon this week on self discipline. I feel like I'm making a real effort just setting aside the time to read the whole article each day.

I really like Steve's writing style, it's good advice delivered in an enthusiastic and encouraging way, but flexible enough that it doesn't make me feel too bad for not following it.

Choose your keywords for the world

One thing we really need to work on for Oriador Rota is improving the search engine visibility on the most appropriate keywords. Our main focus so far has been on variations of Rota and Staff Rota, and on variations of Roster.

We could never really understand why we were doing really well in the UK and Australia, everywhere in fact, but getting virtually no traffic from the US. That was until we came across the phrase Employee Shift Scheduling (link is to our product site) and a bunch of similiar variants. This was when I was just tweaking our Adwords campaign a few weeks ago and this popped up as a keyword suggestion. I was shocked to find that our ad's estimated position would be 89th. Bingo. If 88 other companies are already lining up for these ad slots, this must be an area we need to get some visibility in. Further investigation and multiple "how did we miss that?" moments seem to have confirmed it.

Fortunately, our sites are all scheduled for a make-over in the near future, so I'm hoping we can re-structure slightly for some better keywords. I realise one group of keywords probably doesn't completely explain our relative lack of performance in a major market, but I have a feeling it could explain quite a lot.

Download.com Update

Back at the beginning of April, I posted about listing one of our products on Download.com. In the last couple of weeks, I've also listed Web Helper Browser.

They have a free listing option now, but it takes 15 working days to process updates and submissions, as opposed to 5 for paid listings. That means if we update our software, anyone going by Download.com is going to get an older version for 3 weeks. I don't really think that's acceptable, so I went with the basic paid listing again.

The listing of Oriador Rota really paid off, but not exactly in the way I expected. I was expecting an increase in downloads, as I write this there have been just over 300 in the two months it's been listed. That's not too bad, assuming those are all extra downloads that wouldn't have made it to our site without the Download.com listing, but we still do most of our downloads direct from our site. Where the listing really helped has been in our search engine ranking, most notably Google. At the moment our product page is on the first page of results for some of our targetted keywords, whereas for most of the past year Google had been largely ignoring us.

So far they have served about 80 downloads of Web Helper Browser, but the real benefit should be the increased search engine visibility of the product.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Aside from the scenery, one of the things that made the long drive to Las Vegas enjoyable was the comfortable rented mini-van and the DVD player.

At one point we watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I don't know exactly how popular or well known this show is, either here or in the UK, but I do know for sure that it's not enough and that most people I've mentioned it to just give me blank looks. It features Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld playing himself, which seems to boil down to a taller, thinner, less politically correct incarnation of George Costanza. Everything in Larry's life is complicated, and hilarious.

This is the funniest show on TV, if you haven't seen it, go and see it now. Unless extremely, brutally bad language bothers you, in which case stay exactly where you are and don't watch the show. Ever.