Angus Bradley

Zendesk vs Tender - saas helpdesks

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:14:00 +0000

We’re upgrading our helpdesk system, we currently use ‘kayako’ which is incredibly full featured, but sadly also incredibly complicated to manage.

The current main options that meet our needs (simple, fast, easy and fully integrated with email) are tender and zendesk.

My initial findings posted below.

I think for us the campfire integration and escalations will mean that Zen wins by a small margin, however Tenders website widget (for placing on your own website) was much better than zendesks, it also had promising automatic login stuff.

UPDATE = 20th May

zendesk have upped their prices by a crazy amount, between 200% and 300% for most clients. We’ll be going back to check out tender and other alternatives now.

is as happy as Larry doing page designs for the new safedrop.com site. nice to be creating stuff.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:23:10 +0000

is as happy as Larry doing page designs for the new safedrop.com site. nice to be creating stuff.

European EC2 monthly pricing in US$ and British £. We’ve...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:56:48 +0100

European EC2 monthly pricing in US$ and British £. We’ve been looking at hosting options recently and this is looking more attractive than the £50k/annum we’ve been quoted for a small vmware cluster.

Think I may try this for our services :) > 37signals valued at $100 billion http://ping.fm/slTvE

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:56:12 +0100

Think I may try this for our services :) > 37signals valued at $100 billion
http://ping.fm/slTvE

student builds a toaster to highlight the effect of mass production we take for granted. takes 9...

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:31:48 +0100

student builds a toaster to highlight the effect of mass production we take for granted. takes 9 months costs $2k! http://ping.fm/PI2I1

secured microblogging for the enterprise will be huge. Yammer looks good, cubetree looks even...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:11:08 +0100

secured microblogging for the enterprise will be huge. Yammer looks good, cubetree looks even better.. http://ping.fm/rzqyf

Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. Knew I was doing something...

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:25:01 +0100

Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. Knew I was doing something wrong… http://ping.fm/rWV7g

7 rules for choosing a web agency or freelancer

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve managed the build for hundreds of websites, and am always getting asked for tips. Here’s a collection of things to be aware of when you’re engaging with an agency or a freelancer.

1 - Copyright
Make sure you own copyright to any custom code & design, and get the photoshop .psd graphics, not just the jpegs.

2 - CMS - content management
The content management system for your website is key. If you get a good one, you’ll have to do very little custom coding, and custom coding is what makes websites expensive. I strongly recommend you choose one that has widespread adoption, you don’t really want to be a guinea pig, if the agency folds/f*cks off, then you can be left with an expensive, non working site. Do not go with a system that is owned by one agency, go with a standard. More on this here

3 - Maintenance/Warranty.
Get a maintenance contract in place, with good response time guarantees. If this isn’t cost effective, just ensure you get say 3 months of free bug fixes after launch. If you go with an well adopted CMS, then it will be easy to find freelance developers, and do the maintenance yourselves, which is much cheaper in the long run.

4 - Browser Compatibility.
Many corporates are still on IE6, so you need IE6 and higher (including 8), Firefox 2 and higher. etc. Make sure this is in your agreement, IE6 is a real pain to code for. I’d suggest go for a minimum screen resolution of 1024x768.
Probably worth coding a mobile iphone/blackberry version as well. This shouldn’t cost much extra.

5 - SEO & Adwords

Unless you want to be really clever, I’d stay away from pure flash sites - they don’t get picked up easily by the search engines. Make sure you can add descriptions and titles to your pages, and that you can create landing pages. An agency can manage your adwords spend for about £80/month -this can save lot’s of time, and get you some traffic quickly. SEO and Adwords is a big topic, do some homework, or pay someone to do it for you.

6 - Hosting
Make sure you own the host & dns directly, you can give the agency login details.
If you’re in Europe, get a European based host, to avoid falling foul of data privacy. Rackspace are good but expensive, Serverbeach look good. For smaller sites Memset.com are good, and do good virtual hosts from about £20/month ( linux miniserver).
Again, make sure you pay for backups, raid storage and unless you’re techie, fully managed support. The hosting will also get you email addresses.
Use a 3rd party service like monitor.us to make sure your site’s working - it will ping you a text if it goes down.

7 - Keep it Fresh and Fast
Make sure someone has time to update the site and answer questions quickly!

Links

http://www.cmsreview.com/ - reviews of current CMS systems

its not that we have a short time to live,but that we waste a lot of it -having a coffee and reading...

Sun, 31 May 2009 10:05:00 +0100

its not that we have a short time to live,but that we waste a lot of it -having a coffee and reading Seneca, courtesy tim ferris. http://del ivr.com/10 7px

"I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street..."

Fri, 15 May 2009 15:14:44 +0100

“

I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.

That doesn’t mean, though, that Silicon Valley is still not a huge, critical, important part of our economy, and Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.

”

- Barack Obama (via Signal vs Noise) (via featureorbug)

Choosing a CMS

Fri, 15 May 2009 10:00:00 +0100

When you’re building a website, the content management system is key. If you get a good one, you’ll have to do very little custom coding, and custom coding is what makes websites expensive. I strongly recommend you choose one that has widespread adoption, you don’t really want to be a guinea pig, if the agency upsets you/folds/f*cks off, then you can be left with an expensive, non working site. Do not go with a system that is owned by one agency, go with a standard.

There are hundreds of options, from commercial systems like Opentext & Microsoft CMS, to open source like Drupal, Wordpress & Joomla. I would recommend an open source solution that has widespread adoption. With open source you don’t get left in the shit when the vendor changes their product, business model, gets bought, or goes bust. (I learnt this the hard way, years ago we invested loads of time into Macromedia’s Spectra. Then they dropped it) . Open source also means no licence or cpu fee’s.

A good way of testing adoption is to go to elance.com and search for the technology. At the moment, sharepoint yields 700 developers, Drupal 1,300 and Joomla 3,500. For you that means you can find a developer to take the site on for $10 - $20 an hour, way cheaper than an agency. If you fall out, you can find another developer easily.

In the open source CMS market Drupal, Wordpress & Joomla are the most popular - check out the links below - you get a lot of plugins like job boards, discussion, real time chat, FAQ’s, surveys etc. Many high profile sites use Drupal (e.g.: MTV UK, BBC, the Onion, Nasa, Greenpeace UK, Kleercut ) so I’d probably go with that if I was building a community site. For our site at Projectfusion.com we use Wordpress, as it’s a simple site, and wordpress is super easy to use and setup.

Links

http://www.cmsreview.com/ - reviews of current CMS systems

http://askville.amazon.com/pros-cons-Joomla-Drupal/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=6833886 - old review of Drupal and Joomla

new projectfusion.com site has dropped our bounce rate from 90% to 50%, and we just got our first...

Fri, 08 May 2009 10:05:01 +0100

new projectfusion.com site has dropped our bounce rate from 90% to 50%, and we just got our first sale from it. Yay!

just back from Donegal, 3 days of glorious sunshine and the most beautiful beaches in the...

Tue, 05 May 2009 22:59:56 +0100

just back from Donegal, 3 days of glorious sunshine and the most beautiful beaches in the world.shame about all the 1/2 finished houses..

southerly 10 knots, blue skies, sunshine. Great first race of the year!

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:39:19 +0100

southerly 10 knots, blue skies, sunshine. Great first race of the year!

1994 I went from filofax to pocketPC>PalmPilot>Psion>Smartphone>Symbian. 2009 got...

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:11:24 +0100

1994 I went from filofax to pocketPC>PalmPilot>Psion>Smartphone>Symbian. 2009 got another filofax. paper just works best.

testing ping.fm

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:51:26 +0100

testing ping.fm

Spotted in a window in clerkenwell

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:41:58 +0000

Spotted in a window in clerkenwell

I’ve struggled for ages to get my Nokia E71 to work...

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:55:34 +0000

I’ve struggled for ages to get my Nokia E71 to work properly with Mac OS X on 3 UK over bluetooth.

I found 3g on 3 really slow, and thought it was 3’s fault.

Then I tried Ross Barkman’s scripts at http://www.taniwha.org.uk/. The speed went from 50kb/s to 450kb/s… Screenshot of the relevant settings, hope this saves someone some time.

New Case where Police Use Truncated Hash Labelling to Catch a Perp

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:50:51 +0100

New Case where Police Use Truncated Hash Labelling to Catch a Perp:

I have been thinking about using abbreviated hash for some time, to make the process of identifying due diligence documents easier, and was just getting to the stage of thinking “mmh, wonder could we patent this?” when I found this article by Ralph Losey

We’re implementing a truncated hash system on our virtual dataroom. For due diligence, it’s just great when the index document has an automatic, easy to reference number, to ensure you’re talking about the same file - even if it gets moved around in the dataroom.

Nokia E71 and a sensible data tariff finally makes working on the move a reality.

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:40:00 +0100

I took hold of a new nokia e71 last week, nokia’s latest smartphone, billed as their answer to the blackberry and the iphone. It was £32 a month on 3, with 1Gb of data transfer.

I’ve used smartphone’s for many years, starting with an early windows mobile device. To date, my experience has been mixed. If it worked, it was irregular, and always expensive, with per Mb and other insane walled garden internet access restrictions.

Last week, that all changed. The technology and network finally just work. For less than £10 a month I get a Gb of internet, more than enough for emails, browsing and file transfer. The schedule below could probably be just as easy on a palm or iphone, what’s important is that it works, and you can now really be productive when you’re on the move.

Here’s todays commute:

Got train to London

Downloaded (via 3g) and listened to podcast

Answered emails on computer using phone as a bluetooth modem

Looked up diary (which automatically synchronises via bluetooth with my laptop),

used website to check tomorrow trains, and then email a new meeting based on the times.

Advise client by phone’s email train running 10 Minutes late.

Check route by gps, get walking directions to meeting.

Then wrote the draft of this whilst on the bus en route to another meeting.

And it all worked perfectly. At one stage the phone was doing no less than: email (Profimail), calendar, gps maps, opera mini web browser & listening to podcast, all at the same time.

No crashes, no lockups, just working as you would expect, and it actually looks nice - unlike all my previous qwerty keyboard bricks.

I may leave the laptop behind next time I travel.

Angus Bradley

Zendesk vs Tender - saas helpdesks

is as happy as Larry doing page designs for the new safedrop.com site. nice to be creating stuff.

European EC2 monthly pricing in US$ and British £. We’ve...

Think I may try this for our services :) > 37signals valued at $100 billion http://ping.fm/slTvE

student builds a toaster to highlight the effect of mass production we take for granted. takes 9...

secured microblogging for the enterprise will be huge. Yammer looks good, cubetree looks even...

Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. Knew I was doing something...

7 rules for choosing a web agency or freelancer

its not that we have a short time to live,but that we waste a lot of it -having a coffee and reading...

its not that we have a short time to live,but that we waste a lot of it -having a coffee and reading Seneca, courtesy tim ferris. http://delivr.com/107px

"I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street..."

Choosing a CMS

new projectfusion.com site has dropped our bounce rate from 90% to 50%, and we just got our first...

just back from Donegal, 3 days of glorious sunshine and the most beautiful beaches in the...

southerly 10 knots, blue skies, sunshine. Great first race of the year!

1994 I went from filofax to pocketPC>PalmPilot>Psion>Smartphone>Symbian. 2009 got...

testing ping.fm

Spotted in a window in clerkenwell

I’ve struggled for ages to get my Nokia E71 to work...

New Case where Police Use Truncated Hash Labelling to Catch a Perp

Nokia E71 and a sensible data tariff finally makes working on the move a reality.

its not that we have a short time to live,but that we waste a lot of it -having a coffee and reading Seneca, courtesy tim ferris. http://del ivr.com/10 7px