Google is doing it. Twine. Twitter. Delicious. They offer a version of it. Yahoo and Microsoft are discussing it. What is it? Personal search. It’s being bandied about as the next big thing. A game changer for search engines, search engine marketing and search engine optimization. How does it work? Social bookmarking sites, like Twine and Delicious are straightforward: sites you bookmark lead you to other sites other people have bookmarked that are similar. It’s not so much a search as an exploration of similar sites. A community-based approach to finding what you want. That’s not the newest twist on personal search (more…)

web developers, we have all been there. You hear from a client that they have received many messages from their website form with random letters that have no meaning to them. You inform your client that those messages are spam and that you will look into it. Unfortunately, it takes a few spam messages in an inbox to get spam blocking applications in place, thus taking a reactive approach. Your first few forms will be the hardest because you are learning what spammers are capable of and what they can do. You must keep a close watch on these forms in particular since they could be easy targets for spammers. As you update these forms to fight spam, you will begin to notice that filtering spam is a constant and long term battle, putting your human mind against that of the spammer. Since there is no end-all, be-all automatic algorithm or program that fights spam now and into the future, you must come up with methods to fight spam.

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Client: County Public Water and Sewer District
Technology: MS-Access 2003, on a shared network

The Challenge: Better Approach for Managing New Constructions Projects

When planning for a new land development project, the water and sewer plans must adhere to strict state and local regulations and can cost millions of dollars. Throughout the project development phases, there are hundreds of petitions, checklists, planning notes, meeting minutes and approval documents. Thus, the manual process was expensive and hard to manage. Each project was managed using a separate file folder package, and there could be several projects running at the same time, which increased the need for a technology solution.

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Why buy a car? For some people, using mass transit is a perfectly acceptable solution, requiring little investment on the rider’s part. So why do most of us buy cars? Because the bus won’t take us where we want to go and when we want to go there.

In the long run, a car lets us be far more flexible, more comfortable and more productive. The same holds true for custom software.

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The Challenge: Managing Employees, Clients and Client Orders
A Cincinnati temporary personnel agency needed a better way to manage their 10,000+ employees for all of their clients. When a new request arrived for 1 or more people, they had to search through thousands of word documents for phrases that matched the request. For example, if a client needed a ‘server’ and a ‘bartender’, the word docs were scanned for either ‘server’ or ‘bartender’, which became very tedious. Also, the office staff needed to gain access to the information during ‘off-hours’, which added a level of complexity to the project request.

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Web Application Development:What Is A Web-Application?

Web Applications are websites that are more than just online brochures; they act as tools for connecting members online, and are well-suited for member associations, organizations, and other business entities where members can benefit from online interaction.

By using databases, these dynamic websites bring the power of software applications online.

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