Tom's blog

I was doing some research on the adoption rate of agile development methodologies in corporations and came across this great quote in a CIO magazine article:

How does Google see your site? How do we know?

One common problem with dynamic sites are the need to use URL based session IDs. What do you do about people who don’t have cookies turned on.

There are two main options:

1. Give them a nice message that they must have cookies turned on to view the site
2. Use URL embedded session IDs.

There are five critical elements every website must have to get results. We call them the Five Cornerstones of a Successful Website. If your website is missing any one of these, then it is significantly under performing. Go ahead...test your website and see how it scores.

The five:

For years the advice I gave new consultants about problems solving is this:

1. Make sure you thoroughly define the problem. A problem well defined is half solved.
2. Never present a problem to a client without a solution. Nobody likes problems, everybody likes solutions.

Liz has become quite the budding photographer. I love the new photos she took of everybody in the office and the collage she put together. BTW, I know our training room has been getting cramp for our Friday meetings but I didn't realized we had 25 in-house.

Our own Kirk Lewis, master of the viral, is a top contender on the Yahoo! Talent Show. I love this video, although he is giving a preview of some of our projects that have not released yet. He was hoping I wouldn't notice.

Also check out Kirks other Videos. Make sure to vote for him.

This thanksgiving, I have something special to be thankfull for. I finally got that darn Cisco 7960 working with our new Asterisk VoIP system. Now our new phone system is the slickest piece of technology I have seen in a long time.

Note: this post might be a bit dry for general audiences, but if you are looking for a new phone system, you should take a long look at the Asterisk. I hope you can benefit from our Asterisk experience.

Last night LevelTen went to the Katie Awards. We were a finalist for best corporate website. We didn't win, but it didn't matter because the MC said that we should all be proud for just being selected as finalist. So we were proud. Personally, I am blame us not wining on LevelTen being a new comer and being typecast as Katie Award outsiders ;-) . We will get them next year.

During the summer of 2006 LevelTen reached a maturation point and officially entered our next phase of growth and wow is this phase proving to be double the challenge, double the fun.

Level10 Shadows is a simple WordPress plugin that enables site visitors to Shadow your pages by displaying the "Shadow Me" button. It also can display an "Add Pluck" button that adds your RSS feed to the Pluck reader.

To see it in action look at the "Shadow Me" and "+ Pluck" buttons under Add To Your Reader header in the sidebar of this blog.

Download Level10 Shadows WordPress plugin here!