As it happens often in software development, I had to reschedule the release date of the “Website Analyzer”. A combination of several factors made it impossible to release the first public beta in October 1st. Instead I’m planning to have a private beta in October 1st and the first public beta in November 1st. However during this time the product has taken shape. I have finished the parsing and crawling modules, so given a starting point it is able to crawl all the other resources based on the constraints specified by the user. Also the module that parse the HTML and create a simple DOM is finished. However still there’s a lot to be done, which includes:

• Developing some of the plugins planned for the beta release. The list will include at least broken links, missing titles, meta tags, page rank, alexa rank, gzip compression and page size information.
• Developing the website. I have decided to use the ASP.NET MVC framework for the website combined with some AJAX stuff but I’m still looking for a nice design.
• Improve unit testing and code coverage of the product.
• All the marketing stuff. There are many questions mark here, but I hope they will have soon an answer.

Also, I’m planning to write some articles for the basis of HTTP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There are so many frameworks out there now that abstract away the low level stuff, but in the end to build a website you need a good understanding of the above concepts. I have the feeling that few developers have a good understanding of these concepts and a better understanding would help them a lot.

As you know many things do not go according to the plan. In this case the main thing did not go according to the plan and this is the product idea. As I said in the previous post I had envisioned it as a way to extract useful information (email, phone, fax, etc) from unstructured data (internet, email, etc). It turns out that the majority of the customers for this kind of products are SPAM companies, that is companies that send SPAM emails. Associating the first product of my mISV with SPAM is not such a good idea, so I decided to change the product. This is one of the biggest advantages of being a mISV: you can react quickly to change. No need for long meetings end endless discussions.

But what product I’m going to built? I will stick to the October 1st, 2008 release date so it must have the same attributes as the first one. For this reason I decided to stay in the same area, but a different product. It will be called “Tollkuci Website Analyzer” and a you can guess will analyze a website and offer advice for problems and improvements that can be made. Until now I have decided on a few things:

• It will be a web product, so users can directly check their website, without downloading anything.
• It will not analyze a single page, but the full website while allowing the users to limit the scope.
• It will be free for a limited number of pages, perhaps 100 pages.
• For big websites the result can take a considerable amount of time. So the users will submit the site and receive an email when the analysis is finished.

I’m still in the process of defining the actual features it will have, but for a overall idea they fall into these categories:

• General - broken links, missing titles, html & css standards, etc
• SEO - meta keywords, meta description, Google page rank, use of keywords in page content, etc.
• Performance - gzip compression, number of images, total page size, time to first byte, time to load, etc.
• Security - NoBot protection for forms, possibility of SQL injection attacks, etc
• ASP.NET specific - usage of output cashing, size of view state, etc.

Of course for the first verson only a few of these will be implemented, but I’m thinking to focus on ASP.NET specific features. Also I’m planning that for each problem reported there will be a thorough explanation of how it can be solved and also the possibility to offer consulting to the users through email, phone, remote access, etc.

Once I’ll finalise the list of features for the first version I’ll write my next article, so keep visiting

As I said in the previous post I’m going to release the first product of my mISV in October 1st, 2008. After evaluating lots of ideas I decided to build an “email extractor” or “email spider”. The more general idea is to extract useful data from different sources. This can be:

• Extract email addresses from web.
• Extract email addresses from local documents.
• Extract email addresses from outlook files.
• Extract phone/fax numbers from web.
• etc, etc

This can get pretty complicated and will require a lot of efforts, so for the first version I’ll focus on extracting email addresses from the web. But why this product? The two most important reasons are:

• I have already built a simple version in a few days and I know that it’s possible to built it in the timeframe I have planned.
• There’s definitely a market for it. There are at least 5-6 competitors in the same niche and based on their site activity they seem to be doing well.

But what I will do differently to differentiate from the competition? What I will do better? Why will people buy my product? Well, to tell the truth I have no idea (yet). I think it’s almost impossible to answer these questions before building the product. You have to start working, have some users, get some feedback, improve the product and repeat the cycle. If you improve continuously, you’ll be successful. The key to succeed is not to have a killer idea (at least for 99.99% of us), but is to listen to customers and improve all the time. As said by one of the blogers I read frequently (http://www.followsteph.com/2008/06/26/the-secret-to-success-can-be-summed-up-in-one-word-perseverance/) the key is preservance. To be successful the product may end up very different to how I’m envisioning now, but we’ll know this after some time (I hope not too much time:)).

As I wrote in my last post I moved the blog from the default site www.tollkuci.com to blog.tollkuci.com (Currently www.tollkuci.com redirect to blog.tollkuci.com but this will change later). The reason for this change is because I want to use www.tollkuci.com as the official site of my newly born mISV “Tollkuci Software”. Yes, that’s right, a new mISV on the market and based on my knowledge that would be the first mISV in Albania. I wanted to do it since some time and finally decided to go on and do it. There will be a lot of work to do but I have made some important decisions:

* I have decided on the product I’m going to build.
* I have set the deadline for going live and that will be October 1, 2008.
* I’m almost done selecting the name for the product.
* I have done some basic research and I’m sure there’s enough market for it.

I have started some preparatory work, but the official start date is July 1, 2008 which leaves 3 months for going live. Considering that I will work on it in my “spare” time that’s not a lot of time, but my plan is to spend about 20% of my time. That would be about 120 hours in total and I believe it’s possible to built a simple product and have it ready for sale in 120 hours (others have done it in less time, like 1 week or 1 month part time). Lately, I have tried to adapt myself to the SCRUM methodology and I’m planning to use it for this product. There will be 3 sprints in total and I have already planned the work for the first one. The good thing about SCRUM is that if you cannot implement everything you drop features but you still have a product by the end of the sprint. I’m confident I will have a product ready for sale by October 1, 2008 (thought it may not sale).
In my next post, I’ll write more about the product I’m going to built. Also, I’m planning to write much more often here so stay tuned…

Finally, I’m starting to write again in my site. As you may notice, I have changed the blog address from the homepage http://www.tollkuci.com to http://blog.tollkuci.com. I have some plans on how to use http://www.tollkuci.com for some other purpose…more on this in the next days.

In the meantime, football fans should know that Germany has made once more in the semi-final of the Euro 2008. In the last 4 big competitions, Germany has made it at least to the semifinals in three occasions, and this during a period when German football has been considerd in crisis. I’m cheering for them to go all the way and win it:)

Today, I participated in the first Microsoft Summit held in Tirana, representing AESS Group together with two colleagues. As I have mentioned before, I’m co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of AESS Group, which is one of the best software companies in Albania. It was founded in summer 2005 and was the first Albanian company to achieve the Microsoft Certified Partner status in the country. All our developers have the Microsoft Certified Professional status, with two of them being Microsoft Certified Application Developers and me Microsoft Certified Solution Developer.

As this was the first Microsoft Summit here, it was mainly a general overview of what Microsoft is doing and focused on licensing Microsoft products. However we hope that the increased presence of Microsoft in the country will bring benefits to us as a software company because people “will get used” to pay for licensing software which currently is very difficult.

I got several pictures, but since I forgot my digital camera I used the phone and as you can see the quality is poor (sorry for that). I choose the best two to put them in the site.

Picture taken during the presentation.

Picture taken during the coffee break between the sessions.

It’s been quite a lot of time since my last post, but I’ve been very busy these days. I’m planning to write at least one article each week, mostly related with software development & mISVs, but don’t know if I’ll have enough time to do it. At least I’ll try…
Anyway, I’m writing this article on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop running Vista Ultimate x64. I generally love Vista and one of the things I like more is it’s build it search functionality. I’m also running Office 2007 and using Outlook as my email client which also has built-in search capabilities. Searching in Vista is pretty reliable, but unfortunately that’s not the case with outlook. As illustrated in the print screen below, when I search by one the first name of one of my contacts in the All Mail folder, it returns 7 results in about 20 seconds and I know that there are more items.

I had heard for a tool called Lookout that works great, but didn’t work with Outlook 2007. A few days before I run across a post that explained how to run Lookout with Outlook 2007 and I decided to try it. After installing it and letting index my emails the same search returned 84 results in only 1.2 seconds. Pretty impressive!

I find it very hard to believe that Microsoft cannot make searching in outlook better than an add-in developed by a single person. Until Microsoft fix it, I’ll be happy with lookout

P.S For some reasons lookout currently crashes Outlook when it tries to index new emails. So I disabled automatic indexing of new emails and will manually run the indexing procedure.