Und ab geht’s in die Berge….
german - and not important content - ignore 
Mal n bisschen was für SEO tun - swoodoo startet jetzt mit der - natürlich allerbesten - Flugsuchmaschine für Billigflüge auch in Österreich und der Schweiz. Das ganze unter den Domains flugsupermarkt.ch und flugsupermarkt.at. Das war eigentlich schon die ganze Message.
Und wem das noch nicht genug ist - der darf sich die - trashige, aber coole - flugsupermarkt TV Werbung reinziehen.
Jetzt fühl ich mich besser. Und wie.
Speaking the Speaker….
Recently I had the chance to visit two SEO Conferences (smx and semseo) here in Germany. Phew - I can tell you these people know how to party. Not that I do not enjoy the evenings at the php conferences I usually attend, but hey - when was the last time at a php conference where there was an organized coyote ugly party and the crowd was filled up with tequila from nearly naked beautiful women? At least I can’t remember. Followed by that I’ve enjoyed a karaoke show where one of the organizers - Alan Webb from Abakus presented his version of Sinatra’s - or was it Sid Vicious? - version of ‘My Way’. Well - we definitly can learn from the SEO folks a lot about partying. Maybe we will enjoy Bjoern Schotte singing and dancing in Berlin? Would love to see this.
Back to business - let’s get a bit more serious.
For me it was a quite unusual experience being a visitor and not one of the speakers so I could experience how difficult it is as a ‘plain’ visitor to get into touch with the speakers. In every ’scene’ the speakers usually know each other for a quite long time and enjoy to meet again - so it is for me on the PHP Conferences. We gather, hang around, talk, drink and have fun. Nothing wrong with that. Only - if you are not a ‘member’ of the speaker crowd it might feel a bit difficult to enter the conversation and get into touch with us. Especially developers tend to be bit shy - not much of us you could call ‘extrovert’. Humm… well besides me.
PHP is open source, driven by the community. And this is about you. Some of the speakers on the conferences around the world might contribute a bit more than you do - but nevertheless you are part of the community. So you are part of the ‘crowd’ and so you should act.
So if you want to get into touch with me for any reason then feel free to approach me any time. I will happily answer your questions, share a beer with you or will help you to get into contact with other people you are interested in.
Next chance to meet me is on the IPC Spring Edition in Berlin next week. Hope to see you there!
More Skype fun…
Via seoblackhat I found this chat - it fits too perfect to my last skype posting for not posting it.
Bye Bye bella Roma
The last few days I had the pleasure to visit the PHP Conference in Rome. It was - as usual - really good organized and even though it was not that big as other conferences I personally think that it was quite successful. And for sure the location… thousands of years of culture. There is simply no other city in the world with the age and the cultural background like Rome.
As promised here are my presentations:
( V2 as this is an improved version now with better examples using OXID eShop to show the power of selfmade Nagios/Cacti plugins)
Last night somewhere in germany…
[20:10:17] aunthiya46 : hello, im from thailand, but i don’t talk about sex
[20:11:20] XYZ : sorry, i only talk about sex
[20:12:17] aunthiya46 : o.k if you like talk about sex don’t talk to me
[20:12:34] XYZ : i’m not talking to you, you are talking to me
[20:13:22] aunthiya46 : yes but if you talk about sex i don’t talk with you
[20:13:39] XYZ : so let’s not talk
[20:13:45] XYZr : bye
[20:13:53] aunthiya46 : good bye
Book your holiday in the concentration camp?
Interesting title isn’t it ? Sounds macabre? It is!
During my work at swoodoo.com (german only, sorry) I accidentially stumbled upon translation issues concerning the city “Kaunas” (Lithuania) on other - travel related - webpages.
The city Kaunas was translated into “KZ Kauen“.
Actually “KZ” means “Konzentrationslager” == Concentration Camp. And “Kauen” is the old “Nazi” name for Kaunas. In Kaunas was the largest concentration camp in Lithuania where the Nazis killed around 25.000 people.
Interested in a hotel in the concentration camp?
More over - and this is the reason why I post this under the “PHP” flag - I want to show how dangerous it is to copy translations from other websites. Exactly this seemed to have happend - there is a bunch of websites out there who obviously copied from the same source.
Want a cheap flight into the concentration camp?
Or interested how the weather is in the concentration camp ?
And even worse - Adwords booked on the term “KZ Kauen”
I doubt that they booked this adword, most likely it is “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”… but nevertheless quite macabre.
If you are into I18n then you should take translation serious. Quite often translated webpages simply sound silly or funny, but as you can see in this example - sometimes it can be worse.
Share one with a friend….
Still so much todo that I don’t find time for meaningful and good blog entries. Nevertheless I want to share this one with you - my friends - the best beer commercial ever. Don’t shoot me please - take this one not to serious….
Dreambookers…
Nachdem ich den Artikel über Dreambookers bei Tourismus-Zukunft gelesen hatte wollte ich eigentlich auf ExcitingTravel ein Feature drüber schreiben. Nur darf ich nicht rein.
Ich bin schlicht nicht gut genug. Und nein 
es geht auch nicht mit einer anderen eMail Adresse…. Schade eigentlich…
Upcoming Talks
This year will be very interesting as I will present two talks in Rome, Italy at the PHP Conference. As this will be my first time in Rome I am really looking forward to visit this fabulous place.
My Talks will be:
Monitor your Business
The most important thing happening in your website is the business process. So why should you monitor your database and your webserver only when your business is failing? Monitoring is not only about hardware and databases - it’s also about the internals of your application. Learn how to monitor your business using PHP and how to create nice, good looking management compatible graphs.
This talk will be a highly improved version of the talk I have held at the IPC 2008.
And something new, and (I hope) quite interesting:
Why Architecture in Web Development matters
Choosing the right software architecture for your project is very important. Besides the framework decision there are many other key issues you need to take into account and which have an impact on such things like maintainability, scalability and also the frequency of possible deployments. In this session you will to learn why you have to remove Co-dependency in your source code, which patterns there are for successful scaling and how the choosen framework influences your architecture.
Hope to see you in italy
Outsourcing and Quality…
Yesterday night I’ve received an interesting comment on my PHP@INDIA posting. After reading I’ve decided that this deserves a posting to answer it thoroughly.
The comment was
The poster who made this statement doesn’t explain to you that India-based workers can only speak about 60% english.
he doesn’t explain that these same developers use BEGINNER LEVEL coding techniques that render your site open to almost the most grade-school level of attacks.
he doesn’t explain to you that these same developers don’t give a damn about you, or your project.
he doesn’t explain to you that their answers to questions are from monitors on their screen, and should you have an advanced-level technical question they are NOT going to be able to answer for you.
And he also didn’t explain that you GET what you PAY for. You pay for garbage in India, expect garbage as a product. You pay good in America for a product, expect the best as a product.
The commentor is right in his statements. Actually talking about Quality in outsourcing you need to take care that the quality is good enough for you. It would be simply very dumb to rely on any developer - check it personally! I’ve made the same experience 10 years ago like my anonymous commentor, but I had to understand that things changed and that it is possible now to get better quality. But as always - you need the right partner.
After reading my posting again I’ve realized that I need to clearify a few things. Outsourcing (in PHP area!) is never about saving money. Having good people inhouse or around the corner will help your project a lot. Outsourcing is about scaling. If you do have any tasks which need to be scaled, like developing the same stuff again and again, editing pictures, running any process against something which need to be repeateded over and over then you should think about offshoring.
I state that it’s very difficult to scale your team from 5 to 15 inhouse fast - and this is possible in india. Simply because there are many indians.
A few rules need to be applied to choose the right partner:
- Do never ever give your core technology to any outsourcer somewhere on this planet. You need to have full control over your technology. Otherwise the risk of beeing ripped off is very high.
- Choose your partner thorougly. Check the references and call them to doublecheck.
- Be aware of your expectations. You will need a few months before the project will run by itself.
- if you do not put in energy, knowhow and your personal sweat it won’t work.
Follow these rules and your outsourcing project will be successful.
To come to an end - yes, also in india you get what you pay for. This is valid anywhere on the planet. Pay your developers well and you will get good quality. And for sure you can not judge over all people in a country - there are good and bad developers all over the planet. Even though it is hard to believe - just beeing american doesn’t make you a good developer - and vice versa - beeing indian doesn’t make you a bad developer.