New Business

Going to be a busy Summer. Two classes to teach but with different challenges.

One is a repeat client, which is always good. Training someone who missed the class. But, spending time on my real professional interest; we’re going to do a short introduction to process mapping. That will be after the July 4th weekend.

And a new client at the end of August. The challenge here will be to develop a module for Mindjet Connect, the latest release has collaboration capabilities.

I’d beta tested the Connect version. Used a couple folks from the training class, in Detroit, last year. So I’ve got notes about what did and didn’t work. But I need to think of example to demonstrate the capabilities.

Business Networks

Just finished reading a blog post , by Guy Kawasaki, on how to use LinkedIn more effectively.

For example, the post notes that you can personalize your profile URL. This can put your name in the URL rather than a system generated name. Makes it easier to bubble to the surface on a search engine query.

It also pointed out using customized buttons to make it easier to find your profile.

I've added the button to the links section of the blog, down near the bottom. I suspect it works inline too. Like this:

LinkedIn is essentially a professional social network. I've received a couple of invites, so I decided to put my profile into the works. It doesn't cost anything to join, only if you want advanced features.

Web Maintenance

Spent this afternoon reworking a web page. Pointed out two important lessons, or at least reinforced something I already knew.

1. Your local PC back-up copy of the web site may not reflect your actual web site content.
2. Files transferred to a new laptop may not contain all the versions of the web site.

These become important considerations when you're 1100 miles from home and can't fire up the old laptop.

The site has evolved over the last 6 years. Some changes were experimental, but some were important at the moment. Then, having solved the project at hand, that section was left alone. You sometimes forget which files were the active versions. That's the case at hand. My "new laptop" version has files from 2004 but I made some additions in 2006.

What initiated this effort was the work about a month ago when I installed Google Analytics. I checked it yesterday and found that most search referrals are for "Brainstorming Examples" and the common entry is page PiqueroHome-181.The text on PH-181 is a little longer than I'd like. And, Brainstorming is only one example of many of the sample maps on the page.

I decided to rewrite the page and make sure the Brainstorming example was within the initial view. That's when I realized I didn't have the "master" of the current page.

Got it done. So if you're interested, here's the new page.