Category: Work

What Women Want

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LinkedIn had done a survey among career women and came out with this brilliant infographic. It’s encouraging to see these trends … stuff such as around half the women surveyed considered their appearances did not play a major role in their career. Was this questionnaire designed by an MCP sexist? Jokes apart, I really like the fact that a majority of the problems faced by women are pretty much the same as that of men.

What Women Want at Work

So, if the answer to this post is what Men want … well, then every one knows that all offices will have a giant screen TV airing cricket/football, a fridge full of beer and a comfortable sofy at every desk!!

Yes, I am still clueless about what they want :-|

SUBTOTAL in Excel

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

I generally do not write about Microsoft Excel, for the daily inspiration dose of dashboard heroics I look at Chandoo’s site. However, today I stumbled upon SUBTOTAL and was amazed at what it can do! At work, in Pristine, we run daily numbers of all our online marketing campaigns. Reporting numbers in a template is one thing, and to analyze them is something totally different. As I was sifting through the daily numbers, I realised that for each Excel filter I am running, if there were a summary dashboard, then it will be easier to analyze.

A quick look at the excel that we prepared told me that we had an overall daily summary prepared for Adwords (Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Leads, Landing Page Conversion, Cost, CPC, etc.). Why not have a summary which changes with respect to the filter I chose?

Fortunately we have our own set of Excel heroes within the organization who guided me to the SUBTOTAL formula. And you know what? It’s wowsome!!

SUBTOTAL in Excel

As you can see from the animated GIF that I quickly made, that the bottom summary changes depending on the filter conditions that I change. This dashboard is also a good tool to track the campaigns you are running (and if you are properly measuring your data).

The Office-less Organization

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As someone who has been working on the web for the past decade or so, I have always dreamt of my ideal organization as the one which does not have any offices (read that as a work from home). Obviously, I have heard of many IT organizations working on this model viz., Accenture, IBM to name a few.

However, my idea was not just that. I thought it could be possible to have an organization which does not have any offices! All the employees will be operating independently on their own. This utopian organization seemed a dream and I had more or less dismissed the thought … until today!

An excerpt from Wall Street Journal

The Web-services company Automattic Inc. has 123 employees working in 26 countries, 94 cities and 28 U.S. states. Its offices? Workers’ homes.

At Automattic, which hosts the servers for the blogging platform WordPress.com, work gets done wherever employees choose, and virtual meetings are conducted on Skype or over Internet chat.

The company has a San Francisco office for occasional use, but project management, brainstorming and water-cooler chatter take place on internal blogs. If necessary, team members fly around the world to meet each other face to face. And if people have sensitive questions, they pick up the phone.

How freakin’ awesome is that!

I decided to dive further, and learn more about this organization.

Guess what, they are awesome –

Being the makers of some of the web products that I have come to love and cherish – WordPress, Vaultpress, Akismet, Jetpack, CodePoet … damn, their lis goes on. Google cannot be a dream company, this should be the dream company for all of us WordPress tinkerers!

Using Bugzilla

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At Pristine, the team I am leading has a gargantuan task at hand. We are creating a custom Learning Management System (LMS) in addition with a completely overhauled new website for the international audience. This entire process of planning and detailing the products feature-wise has taken roughly 2 months, but it is well worth it. Continue reading “Using Bugzilla” →

Using Moodle

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Almost all companies who are in the business of training and education require a system where they can provide the course materials and take quizzes online through that system. A lot of the premier educational institutes also have similar requirements. This is where the need of a educational content management system (CMS) is felt … a learning management system (LMS). The open source movement has created one such popular package and that is Moodle. Moodle is an open source learning management system which candidates can use to access courseware, give practice tests, quizzes and submit assignments.

Institutes such as IIT-B, IIM-A, IIM-B and IIM-C have been successfully using Moodle for more than a decade now. As a training provider for CFA, we also use Moodle to provide courseware and quizzes to our students. Now you should know that although the fundamental pedagogies of most institutions are the same, the business processes might differ. What that means for Moodle, is that the requirements and expectations from this system differ from institute to institute. For the past three years we were using Moodle 1.9 … a system which has now become archaic.

It works, yes. But it lacks in the functionality extended towards the course administration. In addition there are a host of other Learning Management Systems cropping up … you have KhanAcademy.org’s open source code for non-profitable institutions which is perl based, but is awesome, you have Dokeos and Sakai which are other open source LMS. There are free cloud based systems such as Pearson’s Google App integrated LMS, and there are premium cloud based systems such as Blackboard.

In my quest to upgrade our systems, I was looking at different options and finally decided to settle with a known beast … albeit a higher version … Moodle 2.2! The good part of any open source package is that it’s generally free of cost and open to customizations … the bad part is that well … there’s almost no documentation and virtually no support. You have to figure most of the stuff by yourself and use forums to  get past your stumbling blocks, and this takes time.

Having said that, I was pretty happy with the latest Moodle, here are my findings –

  • The system has gone more and more object oriented. If you wish to change any behaviour in the core modules, simply extend and over-ride!
  • Reporting has substantially improved
  • Theming has become more complex, but once you go through the steep learning curve then you should do fine
  • The core modules are MVC based, so although it is not suggested, you can jump into their codes and alter away!
  • The documentation is virtually absent, the wiki is a mix of versions 1.9, 2.0, 2.2 and 2.3
  • Quizzing modules have been substantially improved
  • Course progress and objectives tracking has been implemented
  • Adaptive quizzes have been implemented, however I have yet to test these
  • Question randomizations are there ensuring that the quizzes students give are random every time

Google Search Update

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I had earlier posted about a starters guide to SEO. Back then my understanding of this was also developing and the only way I could add to my understanding of the subject was via experiments … that I carried out on this blog, and also at work.

Finally, we did arrive at a scalable solution. A solution for SEO which could easily be replicated and scaled for almost all my target keywords. Out of a target 5000+ keywords, we managed to get in the top 10 for a decent 3000 of them, and would have proceeded to touch base upon all of them as well (do remind me to release this as well!)

Had it not been for the upcoming Google, I would have went ahead with the plan. However, the new update effectively means that all black hat SEO tactics (which the Indian SEO industry is famous for) will be negatively penalized. So throw your keyword stuffing, badly written English to match your keywords, slightly different versions to match the keyword variants, and link submissions out of the best practices window.

I wonder what would be the extent of the penalty levied by the new algorithm on sites which are already way ahead on their link submissions. Getting those links off the 1000 or so directories is going to be tough!!

Here’s a parting thought, that Google Search is embedded in so many Digital Strategist’s plans, that people are not even considering to optimize their pages for other search engines (such as Bing). Isn’t it great how being a market leader can impact an entire industry?

Note to Self – Learn about Bing optimization and work on generating search traffic from Bing.