improving Octopress/Jekyll site performance – part 3 – SEO, being friendly to search engines

The performance of any website can be vastly improved by careful selection of service providers and the correct configuration of these services. This article is the second in a series of three and covers configuration of Heroku and Sinatra. Part 1 covers DNS, Hosting and CDN and part 3 covers search engine optimization.

The performance of any website can be vastly improved by careful selection of service providers, and the correct configuration of these services. This article is the first in a series of three and covers the following services: DNS, Hosting and CDN. Part 2 covers configuration of Heroku and Sinatra and part 3 covers search engine optimization.

Mobile continues to grow, but the impact of mobile can’t be fully appreciated by only looking at the transactions. This article examines why the direct impact of mobile may be less than you expect and why the influence of mobile across all channels is of far more consequence.

The growth in mobile devices (internet-enabled smartphones) is staggering and that growth is set to continue. Mobile technology will revolutionise our lives as, for the first time, technology is bridging the online digital world and the real-life one. Innovation will be pushed and driven hard by the upcoming ‘mobile-first’ generation. This article reviews the mobile market, explores user mobile behaviour and looks to the future.

Workplace negativity has been called a disease of the twenty-first century. It has been calculated to cost US businesses $3bn a year. Here’s a review of cynical behaviour, its impacts and what you can do about it.

“Be careful what you wish for…” That warning also applies to KPIs - the act of measuring carries more consequences than you realise; often counter-productive ones.

It’s easy to blame process for stifling innovation, reducing agility, etc. But that’s like blaming lines of code for causing bugs - it misses the fundamental issue that it’s people who cause bugs. The same is true with process - the root causes of problems lie with people’s design and management of process not simply with there being process.

Chairing a meeting successfully is difficult; here are some ideas that will make the meetings you chair become more effective.

Communication is a ‘means to an end’, that end is to create a shared understanding. To create better alignment in your business, change your focus from how to communicate to why you are communicating.

Meetings are a fact of working life, but usually inefficient and often ineffective. Here is a structure to streamline your meetings and produce better quality decisions.

Managing ‘up’ (escalation) and managing ‘down’ (delegation) are relatively straightforward, and to complete the picture there is also managing ‘across’. This is the most difficult to get right, as you don’t have a direct relationship with your peers.

When your platform/service suffers an outage, restoring service is critical, but so too is communicating with your customers - here are some ideas.

Your boss has a difficult job. No, really! However many issues you have bubbling up, your boss has many many more. Effective escalation, and managing upwards, is a critical part of your role.

Companies must move forward or die, especially in technology. Innovation keeps a company moving forward, but the wrong type of innovation is fatal.

“What could possibly go wrong?” That question is usually answered quickly, and how you communicate to your customers when this happens is crucial.

Delegation is a critical part of a manager’s job, but rarely performed well. Good delegation sets your team up for success. This article explains a simple, and effective, five-step delegation model.

There’s a minor issue with deploying Rails apps built using Twitter Bootstrap, on Heroku’s cedar stack. By default, even if you pre-compile your assets, the production environment has the less gem (and dependencies). This uses ~10M of your 100M slug space, slowing down deploys and increasing the instantiation time for webs and workers. One workaround is explained in this article.

There is a huge amount of media interest in the new hot thing: Pinterest. Here’s a quick round-up, and a recommendation.