The new site just went online, but we aren’t completely done yet. In the coming months we also plan to rewrite our customer portal, online store and most of the backend parts of the site, so there’s still a lot to do. One of the more complex tasks will be migrating to a new order processing system, as we plan to stop using ShareIt to handle our online sales. We have also migrated the forum to a new software package and imported the old topics and postings. Due to technical reasons we were unfortunately not able to import the old forum accounts, so please create a new account if you plan to participate in our support forum.

With the new website finally online, we would appreciate your feedback on the new site. Since we changed most of the pages and content, it would great if you could leave a comment or send us an email in case you notice any problems or other issues. Enjoy!

Download SmartInspect in 15 Minutes (3.55 MB)

The presentation is primarily intended for user group meetings to quickly introduce SmartInspect to all attendees. User group members are encouraged to visit our website and download the trial if they are interested in learning more about SmartInspect. The presentation is also a great way to introduce SmartInspect to your other team members and to quickly explain the benefits and architecture of SmartInspect.

There are two versions of the presentation available: one with notes and one without (both versions are included in the above download). Feel free to modify the notes or presentation to meet your needs. Of course, you can also just use the presentation as is if you don’t find the time to adapt it. If you have any suggestions for improving the presentation or if you find any errors, please let me know. Enjoy!

Of course, the websites also help us promote our own logging tool SmartInspect. But if the sites are useful guides to developers interested in this topic, it should be a win for everyone if we are able to make SmartInspect better known at the same time. We know that product related microsites worked well for some fellow MicroISVs such as Ian‘s open source help desk list, so we wanted to give this experiment a try. If you happen to have a programming or MicroISV related blog or website, we would be really grateful if you could support this experiment by linking to one of the sites.

If you are into search engine optimization, the choice of domain names might be interesting to you. We chose DotNetLogging.com and Java-Logging.com to be exact matches of popular logging related search keywords. After analyzing a few of the well-ranking websites for these keywords, we are positive that the domain names and URLs are important ranking factors for them, especially when you consider that some of those sites only have a handful of inbound links. This is also supported by a blog post by Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame:

“Over time the role of the domain name as an SEO tool has changed, but currently I think they carry a lot of weight for the associated exact match search. Depending on how they are leveraged going forward they may or may not continue to be a strong signal of quality to search engines.”

Another reason we’ve started this experiment is to find out if the server location has an impact on search engine rankings. Our main server, the server hosting this blog, gurock.com and DelphiFeeds.com, is a dedicated server located in Germany. Even though our website is only available in English, we believe Google is favoring websites hosted on US servers when users are searching for English keywords. This is also confirmed by the fact that our website is ranking better on Google.de, Google’s localized website for Germany, even though our website isn’t available in German. To test this theory, we opened a cheap shared hosting account with an US provider and are hosting both microsites on US servers.

It will be interesting to find out if our assumptions about domain names and server locations are true and if the sites become a useful resource for developers interested in logging frameworks and tools. We certainly hope so and would love to read your comments about this experiment!

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New Forum: http://www.gurock.com/support/forum/

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?

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 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.

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 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.