Thanks to Olaf for reminding me about this one. Bob Walsh’s recently released ebook MicroISV Sites that Sell is featured on Bits du Jour today. This means that you can get Bob’s ebook about unique selling propositions for just $10 for the rest of the day. If you are into selling software or services and want to improve your website, this is your chance:
I finally found the time to install a new forum software for the Gurock Software website. We used our own custom forum before (which, in retrospect, wasn’t a very smart idea) but wanted to get a more advanced forum with user accounts, email notifications, search and so on. We now use the very nice UseBB forum package which we already use for our Delphi Forum on DelphiFeeds.com. So why not create an account and say ‘hi’?
New Forum: http://www.gurock.com/support/forum/
We have put a LOT of work into our website at www.gurock.com. We didn’t even use any template for it. That’s why we were surprised to see that another ISV used the exact same website design as ours. They just changed the content, the logo and some icons. The rest of the site, including parts of the HTML, CSS and even some images were copied. Even the layout, position of screenshots, buttons and the content style of the SmartInspect homepage is copied on their product sites.
I don’t want to post any screenshots or links just yet, as I hope that they will take the website down after this posting and after the email I sent them. I don’t have a problem with people who take some ideas from our website. This has happened before with some smaller elements and with our shop (which I documented in an article, so this was OK). But taking our entire website, changing the content and uploading it to a software company website, well … that is definitive too much.
Yes, I’m a bit angry right now and I can’t understand why some people want to build a business with a stolen website. Is there anything else we can do to protect our website design besides contacting the offending company?
One of our readers, JoaquÃn Bernal, was nice enough to build and send me a small Chickenfoot script to unhide the Google Groups link I mentioned in the previous blog posting. Chickenfoot is similar to Greasemonkey but with a much simpler syntax. Here is the Chickenfoot script to unhide the link:
click("more link")
l = find("Groups link").html
remove("Groups link");
click("more link")
insert(before("Video link"), l + ' ')
Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension just like Greasemonkey. It can modify websites on the fly when you visit them with Firefox. After installing the Chickenfoot XPI in Firefox, you can insert the script and enable it for the google.com domain.
You might know that I’m a big fan of searching Google Groups to solve technical problems. It looks like Google decided that Groups aren’t that important and to hide it on the default Google website:
You have to click on more to open a small window with more search options to see a link to Groups. Well, I guess that Google Video is much more important for most people and Google probably wants to promote Google Video as an alternative to YouTube.
Still, I always switched between web search and Groups search by using the link above the search edit control and I have to change my search behavior.
Most people probably know this already, but it was new to me: the MSDN search is now powered by Windows Live (aka MSN Search). My Microsoft ISV buddy told me this (Hi K. :-)) and he is right about the increased speed and search quality.
I tried some search terms and got much better results than I remember getting from MSDN before (I have been using Google to search the MSDN lately because the old MSDN search wasn’t that great).
The new MSDN search is greatly appreciated, because contrary to the past, Google doesn’t list MSDN pages as the first result for Windows API searches anymore.
The quality of Google’s search results are steadily declining. I have been testing the Yahoo and MSN search for some queries in the last weeks and I have to say that they often have better results. I’m not sure if this is the case because Google’s algorithms are not as good as the Yahoo/MSN ones or if Google is more heavily targeted by spammers. I guess it’s a combination of both. I still won’t switch my primary search engine any time soon though.
The reason is simple: of the three major search engines, Google is the only search engine that has a newsgroup/Usenet search (Google Groups). Whenever I have a technical problem or programming question, I almost always find the answers in the newsgroups. The newsgroups are like a giant knowledge base full of postings about every possible technical problem/bug/configuration issue ever known to mankind and I cannot work without it.
I’m not sure why Microsoft and Yahoo don’t have a newsgroup search, especially because unlike indexing the web, indexing newsgroups should be relative painless. The only problem I see is that Google bought the Usenet archive from Dejanews some years ago. MSN and Yahoo therefore won’t be able to include all the old messages in a newsgroup search if they decided to offer such a feature. But you know what: I don’t care if some guy had a problem with Delphi 2.0 10 years ago. I’m mainly interested in looking up messages and answers from the last few years and I’m sure most people could live without older messages. The only thing Yahoo and MSN have to figure out is where to get the newsgroup postings of the last few years then.
In my opinion, the missing newsgroup search is really what’s holding developers and IT people back from switching to a different search engine. If Yahoo and MSN are really serious about increasing their market share in the search space, they should get their act together and offer a newsgroup search.
After weeks of work we are happy to have the new Gurock Software website up and running. It’s always fascinating to see how much work such a small project really takes. Designing all the pages, adjusting the old PHP code, writing the copy, making screenshots and images, rewriting the copy because you already hate the new copy after a day, testing it with some often used browsers, updating the shop and lots of other stuff I forgot.
Why did we develop a new website in the first place? Well, we didn’t like the old design and copy anymore. Instead of changing the copy and design in small incremental steps, we thought it would be a better idea to start from scratch and build a completely new website. We are happy that we made the decision because we really like the outcome. We hope that the new website looks and reads much more professional than the old one.
We would love to get some feedback from you on our new website. So if you have a minute to spare, please visit our new website and leave a comment here. Any feedback would be welcome, especially suggestions to make it better or pointing out any errors that we didn’t catch.
Adam Messinger reviewed and compared Stuffed Tracker with Google Analytics on his blog. Stuffed Tracker is a website traffic/conversion analysis tool I wrote about before. We have been using it successfully for the last two months and we are really happy with it. If you need something faster and/or something you can host yourself, give Stuffed Tracker a try as an alternative to Google Analytics.
No, we don’t need them nor do we plan to use them in the future. But since we are based in Europe and .eu domains might be important in the future, we thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to protect them from domain grabbers and the like.
The public registration phase of the .eu domain went live today and we pre-ordered the domains from our domain provider. I actually looked into registering the domains in the previous sunrise phases but the required paper work and costs were just ridiculous. So, if you haven’t used a .eu domain before, feel free to enter the EU domain space with ours. 
