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Working on a global team can cause some serious issues. Just start with the time differences. Just consider a time difference of "only" six hours. When the first have of the team starts working the rest of the team is deep asleep (hopefully) and they will just have enough time in the afternoon to say good bye. You can image how busy afternoons become. What if there's 9 hours of timeshift (for example Zürich – Los Angeles)?

Cultural Differences

Time is easy. It's just a fact you have to accept and you get used to it, but what about cultural differences? Sometimes I get really annoyed at americans for their way of doing things. I like their burgers and their steaks but sometimes I have a problem with their way of doing things. You may call it chaotic? Not taking on responsibility and so on. Just a cultural difference in many way.

I really love those short HSBC spots "Culture Differences".

Last year blogging was so much easier. The topic of rapsli.ch was well defined: Drupal. These days it's a lot harder. I've been blogging about all kind of things, but not really focused. Just what ever has been on my mind. This resulted mostly in blogposts in the "Misc" section. I have been blogging about Sharepoint, some projectmanagement, woopra and google analytics and even about WYSIWYG editors. After all, I haven't been blogging that much.

Just recently I listened to Boagworld. Paul raised a fundamental question when running a website: Why Does Your Website Exist? Excellent question. The answer used to be: Personal information management and personal marketing. Nowadays I'm not so sure about this anymore. It's definitely not personal information management.

Why Does Your Website Exist?

That's the questions I've been asking myself lately. I use my blog to improve my English knowledge and improve my writing skills. Also I like writing and probably an other reason is for my ego. I'm still dreaming about The Article. The article that will crash the server or something. … with approx. 300-400 PI per day there's still lots of space for improvement.

So for the future: Expect a wide variety of topics… I'm in the "self finding" process 😉 because successful blogging is only achieved when passsionate about a topic and I haven't found that topic yet.

I've been listening Podcasts for some time now. Usually I listen to podcasts while driving in the car, jogging, biking or doing housekeeping work (washing, cleaning, repearing stuff…). There's plenty of "idle time" that can be used for that.

So here are my favorite Podcasts:

Boagworld

Paul Boag is a unic character. The podcast has been around for years and together with Marcus Lillington they talk about on building and running websites. The podcast ist very informativ and entertaining at the same time. My all time favorite.

Frequency: About once a week
Duration: about 60 minutes
Language: British English

Think Vitamin

I just come from discovering this podcast but are very pleased about it. Discussion about the latest web trends: "We spend a lot of time in the office debating the latest hot topics of the web, so we thought, let's record it and put it out!"

Frequency: Bi-weekly
Duration: about 30 minutes
Language: English

Technikwürze

Interesting topics of the web are discussed in depth. They especially like to talk about web standards and accessibility but it's not really restricted to that topic only. Like it a lot.

Frequency: About once a month
Duration: about 60 minutes
Language: German/Deutsch

Digital

This is produced by DRS3 a swiss radio station. Very mixed topics and not technical at all, but sometimes some interesting news that are not only web relevant (for example a couple years ago introducing automatic vacuum cleaner).

Frequency: once a week
Duration: about 30 minutes
Language: German/Deutsch

Project Management Podcast

Think outside the box. This podcast usually consists of an interview with someone from the project management world.

Frequency: bi-week
Duration: about 60 minutes
Language: English

Over the last couple of months I've become very passionate about WYSIWYG HTML editors. Mostly because I was forced to use a really bad HTML WYSIWYG editor called Sharepoint Out-of-the-box editor. I actually ended up just editing most of the stuff in plain HTML, which is though not the point of having a HTML WYSIWYG editor. A good WYSIWYG editor will produce clean HTML markup and will make the writer much faster in producing nicely formatted output.

WYSIWYG – A short introduction – For all newbies. What is WYSIWYG.

WYSIWYG Editors Are Evil – Advantages Of Clean Content Markup – Why would you care about the editor?

Let's have a look at 6 HTML WYSIWYG editors for the web:

CKEditor

CKEditor is an open source HTML WYSIWYG editor that is also available with a commercial licence. It's very popular and provides an integration for Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 & 2007. A lot of open source CMS' like Drupal, WordPress, Typo3 provide modules or plugins to integrate the CKEditor. CKEditor is an opensource project. It's free.

NicEdit

NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, HTML Editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser. NicEdit Javascript integrates into any site in seconds to make any element/div editable or convert standard textareas to rich text editing.

TinyMCE

Very similar to CKeditor. WordPress uses it out of the box. Nice and powerful yet fast editor and also freely available.

RealObject edit-on NG

This editor is Java based. It looks very powerful. Since is Java based it though takes some time loading everything. Can't compare to CKEditor for example. edit-on NG is not open source. Licenses are pretty expensive (3000 $).

openwysiwyg

From the look and feel just like the CKEditor, but no support for Chrome! So this is a no go!

Xinha

Never heard of that one before. Here's what the website says: "Xinha is a powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor component that works in all current browsers. Its configurabilty and extensibility make it easy to build just the right editor for multiple purposes, from a restricted mini-editor for one database field to a full-fledged website editor." It seems though dead: Last update was in May 2010

Yesterday I attended the Webilea again. Great meeting with some really nice input. The evening was all about data (besides the soccer game ;). I actually have never heard about those different open data projects and just btw: they that all end up in Google.

Everybody was impressed by @hofrat and the project he is doing with http://www.datamaps.eu/. This is an amazing project and I'm looking forward to the integration of Europe and Switzerland. I'm sure cool graphics can be made using this tool:

Just played very quickly with google open data. Here's what I came up with. Driving on the left side of the road is safer than driving on the right side:

I have to admit, I'm an iPhone user. I just discovered Instagram. I have actually heard of that service a couple of times but have never paid any attention to it. I actually gave it a try today. It's a lot of fun and I'm actually curious to see what kinds of pictures will appear in my feed. It's kinda Twitter with pictures. Take a picture, add some cool filters and upload. That's it.

We got now Blogging for the authors, Twitter for the lacy, Facebook for the social, Youtube for the video makers and now also Instagram for amateur photographers.

Instagram tools

• Instagrid. A Clean Web Gallery For Your Instagram Photos
• Stagir.am. Fun and useful metrics for your Instagram account.
• Gramfeed. gramfeed is web interface for Instagram Mobile Photo sharing service to view popular photos on Instagram, view your Instagram photo timeline, view your follower's photo stream, post comments, like photos, follow new users and more

Check out my first instagram image:

1. Have a backup plan for everything

1. Create some screenshots and show them in a powerpoint presentation. This has as disadvantage that it's not very interactive, but it's better than nothing.
2. Create an offline version of the website. There are several free tools available that are easy to use. If you are a linux geek you can also use wget (btw. 1.11 is having some windows authentication problems):

wget-1.10.2.exe -p -m -k -K -E http://www.mynewsite.com –http-user="username" –http-password="MyPassword"

Sit down and think what could go wrong and how likely it is that it will go wrong (don't forget about murphey's law -> "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"). Then it's up to you if you are willing to take the risk or plan for backup. Very easy risk management.

2. Know where you are presenting

3. Know what you are presenting

Needless to say. You should know what you are talking about. There are many methods on how to get to know the content of your presentation (maybe you need to present slides you haven't prepared):

• Dry run the presentation and record it on video.
• Have some background information
• Be prepared for some questions
• Have little cards with keypoints

4. Know who you are presenting to

Is it the top management, project stakeholders or co-workers. This might have an impact on how you will dress and what your slides will look like. Obviously you are probably not going to hold a presentation in jeans and t-shirt when presenting to the top management. Likewise it might look strange if you are all dressed up and are presenting something to co-workers.

You're audience will also influence the content. The top management doesn't like small details but rather a bird's eye view on things. Project stakeholders on the other side are might be very interested in details as they might impact their interests.

5. Plan enough time

Don't schedule an other meeting to close to the presentation (neither before nor after). Rather use the time before the presentation to be on sight and get a feeling for your audience. Maybe you can chat with some people of the audience. On the other hand there might be delays in your presentation, maybe you are waiting for an important person, you don't want to be in a rush and stressed because you have to attend another appointment.

Google Analytics got a facelift. I love it. At the first glance it looks basically the same, but have a closer look. I think it is

• Better and clearer structured. Even as a Google Analytics casual user you find the functions
• Smoother to use

I haven't really used Google Analytics a lot. I think it was just too powerful and I wouldn't even know where to start looking, but the new version makes it a lot easier to start.

Here some screenshots:

You can have a look at the new Google Analytics. You have to just switch on the top of the page "new version". What do you think about the new Google Analytics version?

A couple days ago I was booking the ferry for our summer vacation. There is a bunch of shipping companies out there, for example "Corsica Ferries", "Adria Ferries", "Condor Ferries" and so on. I was though booking via directferries, which is an intermediate platform, like a middleware. There are other platforms like that in the airline industry, for example ebookers.

I was finishing the transaction and at the end I got the following error message, which says something like: "We have received the booking request, but haven't received the confirmation by the shipping company. Please contact us by phone to confirm the booking. You credit cart WAS charged."

Not very comforting, and my car can definitely not swim, so I need that ferry. Well, the next day somebody from directyferries called me and we walked through it. We figured out that the problem was fairly simple: My last name is "Schär" (see the two dots over the a). Well, directferries would accept them, but it would screw up the booking system of the shipping company.

Conclusion

Teasting is not an easy thing. Probably they did test the platform, but probably only with names like "Peter Muster". The testers have not been creative enough. Maybe the testers were located somewhere in India and don't even have the "funny" letters like äöü on their keyboards.

When you test: Make sure you have enough time and try to think what the users might possibly do. Who are your users, where do they come from, what could they try to do to the system in order to achieve their goal. Be creative!

Woopra has been on the market already for a couple of years despite of the "Beta" sign that is still part of the logo. Woopra is providing live statistics to the administrator. So you can actually see when a visitor is entering your page and what pages he is looking at. You could even chat with them. You can stalk them 😉

I just discovered that there's also an iPhone app. Oky, let's look at some screenshots, so you can imagine what it looks like:

Looks pretty good. I like it and I can even think of a real life scenario, where you could actually use such an app.

Features

You can get quite a lot of different statistics, but there is no chance to get into any details. So for an in depth analysis you would rather use the browser or desktop version or google analytics.

Main feature: Live tracking while you are on the road.

Usage scenario

So where would you use a live tracker? I've seen a live tracker on a news publishing site. You have ten to twenty articles per day and you need an instant feedback on which topics are being red by your visitors, because you might want to add a second article to the same topic. This is for the desktop/browser version. What about the mobile version?

We actually used Twitter to enrich articles about a live events (for example a fashion show). The journalist would tweet from his mobile phone, the tweet stream is embeded in the article. The user actually has the option to either follow directly on twitter or for less techy people stay on the article that is being refreshed automatically. SI is using that same technology, for example for the Royal Wedding.

Since the journalist is writing from his mobile device he also needs an instant feedback so that he might eventually adapt his writing style to attract more readers.

For small websites like my blog this is more of a toy but for bigger sites this could be an essentiel tool for gathering instant feedback. Do you have other ideas on how to use it? Or how or why are you using it?

Woopra in iTunes.