Temperature in the mid 50′s.  Not too windy.  Beautiful day for an end of year bike ride.  Except…

Almost made it back home before I dropped the bike in the street.  Water, ice and skinny tires do NOT mix.  The good news is that I only have bruises and abrasions on my hip, elbow, ankle and thigh.  The bad news is that I cracked my helmet and messed up the bike.  I wanted to have it serviced in January anyway, but I guess it’ll need a little more work now.  Sigh.

In any event, have a very Happy, Safe and Healthy New Year and don’t ride your bike like I do.

My internet experience dates back to 1995 while I was with AT&T’s HR Information Systems Organization.  I had been handling AT&T’s medical claims information system and I proposed using a corporate intranet to deliver summary level reports to executives and decision makers.  HRISO had implemented Peoplesoft (before it had a web interface) to support its 150,000 employees (worldwide).  We had a “research group” that, in my opinion, spent more time playing with the web over 2 years versus developing practical uses.  I was 34.  I was impatient.  I wanted to do something that meant something.  I was also too direct sometimes…well, often.  I will never forget that day while sitting in yet another fantasy discussion about the internet with decision makers when these words jumped out of my mouth before my brain had a chance to block them:  “Are we just going to talk about this forever, or are we going to do it?”  Deafening  silence.  Uh-oh.

I went back to my office looking for available boxes to start packing up my stuff – certain that my AT&T days were numbered.  My boss came by my office the next day and surprisingly said, “We’re done talking about it.  You are in charge of developing a self-service model for all AT&T employees to use.”  I think this was management’s way of saying, “Put your money where your mouth is”.  They called me on it and now I had to walk the talk.  I was allowed to assemble what I still believe may have been the most awesome technical team ever (except of course, the current Beacon Team) and within 6 months we launched AT&T’s Employee Services Website.  It served ~150K employees worldwide.  It was ahead of its time.  It allowed employees to manage their own personal data, view their paystub online, access standard forms (vs printed versions that may have been in their desks for years), utilize online FAQs, contact the HR Help Desk and much more – all with a single, secure login & password (distribution of which was a very difficult component of this project).  Yeah, yeah…this is no big deal nowadays, but in the mid-90’s, it was cutting edge.   I was dubbed “Father of AT&T’s Intranet”, but it wasn’t me – it was an entire team that made this happen very quickly.  This team included John Scaramuzzo who has been my partner here at Beacon since we started over 13 years ago.  He handled the infrastructure, which in itself, required a mammoth effort.  There’s no one better than John to be at the helm of Beacon’s state-of-the-art web hosting services.  People forget that a website is worthless if its hosting infrastructure is poor and not dependable.  No news is good news for his team.  Our data center has been humming along now for 13 years.

Enough about me and John.  That’s really not the point of this post.  It’s more about my excitement about the mix of people in this terrific team we have here at Beacon as we head into 2011.  I have noticed a new energy in Beacon, one that reminds me of my days at AT&T in the mid-90’s when I “stirred the pot” or “rocked the boat” or “pushed the envelope” or whatever cliché works best for you.  Whether it’s creative social media marketing campaigns, new conversion optimization tools & techniques, unique technical solutions for content management, migration to virtual dedicated hosting solutions, utilization of cool aspdotnetstorefront plugins or the start of our new offering of IAPPS, Bridgeline Digital’s fully integrated platform for content management, ecommerce, marketing and analytics – the folks here at Beacon seem to always be thinking about how to take everything to the next level.  That’s how progress is made.

I recently did some development for Winston-Salem State University‘s Google Search Appliance. Getting started was a bit tedious, requiring the analysis of 3600 lines of XSLT. This post aims to get you working where you need to quickly style and construct the page contents of the Google Mini.

After navigating to the Stylesheet Editor within the administration console of the Google mini, I recommend copying the contents over to a text editor such as Notepad++. The Google Mini will give you the line that errors occur on, however, there is no line count in the simple editor.

The Mini’s code has a few main stylesheets that we are going to focus on:

• Global variables
• Global styles
• my_page_header
• my_page_footer
• swr_search
• front_door
• advanced_search
• search_results

These can all be found by doing the following searches respectively (CTRL+F) in the document:

• Logo setup (can be customized)
  • Note: Continues through ‘Global Style variables (can be customized)’ section
• Result page components
  • Note: Continues down until line ~200 and XSL variables end.
• <xsl:template name=”my_page_header”>
• <xsl:template name=”my_page_footer”>
• <xsl:template name=”swr_search”>
• <xsl:template name=”front_door”>
• <xsl:template name=”advanced_search”>
• <xsl:template name=”search_results”>

The global styles and variables are worth a quick look, however most of the default settings are pretty suitable. Be sure not include semi-colons in the CSS values.

First, we want to look at swr_search, front_door, advanced_search, and search_results. In each of these templates, you want to add your content directly after:

	<xsl:call-template name="langHeadStart"/>
	   <title><xsl:value-of select="$swr_page_title"/></title>
	<xsl:call-template name="style"/>

You do not have to provide an opening or closing tag as the Mini appears to generate this with ” ” and ” in all four of these sections. Within your tag just below “landHeadEnd”, you should have the following:

    ...
       <xsl:call-template name="my_page_header"/>
       <xsl:call-template name="RESPECTIVE SECTION"/>
       <xsl:call-template name="my_page_footer"/>
    ...

Consider the following basic XHTML template:

    <html>
    <body>
       <div id="topnav"></div>
       <div id="wrap">
          <div id="leftnav"></div>
          <div id="content">
             <!-- LOCATION FOR SEARCH AREA CONTENT -->
          </div>
       </div>
       <div id="footer"></div>
    </body>
    </html>

Now visit the “my_page_header” and “my_page_footer” sections. The above XHTML would go into “my_page_header”:

    <div id="topnav"></div>
       <div id="wrap">
          <div id="leftnav"></div>
          <div id="content">

And the rest into “my_page_footer”:

       </div>
    </div>
    <div id="footer"></div>

The calling sections that we first visited will populate the content area with your template constructed around it. If you need to modify the global styles further, although its is not recommended in the comments, you can search for “Global Style (do not customize)” and make additional modifications to the classes and Ids used by the default stylesheet. Additionally, if you want to remove the use of global styles altogether do a search for “” and comment it out in the respective sections you want it to no longer apply. Although its a hassle, I recommend copying and pasting back and forth between the Google Mini and your editor every few minutes and submitting the changes to debug for errors. The GSA will only give you a single error at a time, so if you there are multiple errors it requires multiple submissions and edits until you get it to validate–Much better just to test it as you go.

Ever see the variety act where someone is spinning plates? Briefly, this starts off with a guy putting a plate on a stick and spinning it. He then continuously adds more and more plates while keeping the original plates spinning. In a short time, he gives each plate another spin to prevent it from slowing down, falling off the stick and breaking. Good performers end up literally running between the two rows of sticks of spinning plates but eventually reach a point where he can’t keep all of them spinning.

This is a great visual to determine your workload capacity. You know you have reached that point when the plates start to break. I think this analogy appropriately illustrates when you have that much more on your plate than you can manage. If you can keep the current set of plates spinning, that equates to some extra, unused capacity. A clear sign to add some more!

Well, maybe not. Seems odd that we strive to work to the point where we start making mistakes. Having more plates than you can keep spinning is not good business practice. Mistakes are bad – lost time, cost of goods, and re-work and so on.

Of course, I appreciate the other extreme – barely working on tasks when you are capable of much more. You want to keep every plate spinning while avoiding having any one break. Good communications with your peers and management is vital to working at or near capacity.

To help keep your plates spinning, I offer some suggestions:

1.     Establish and document clearly defined goals – they should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timed)

2.     Be honest about what you can and cannot manage. Do not over-promise and under deliver.

3.     Control what you can by assuming the best while preparing for the worst.

4.     Ask for support when you need it. You are not alone; ask for expertise when it is beyond your skill set.

If you have buy-in from your manager on this approach, you can keep all plates spinning. If not, you have some work ahead of you. However, I believe that most managers want their teams on average working as close to capacity as possible. There will always be peaks and valleys in the workload, but it’s important to monitor progress to committed goals during the year and review on a regular basis.

I don’t like the sound of breaking plates. Disrupts the workplace, requires getting replacements and then there is the clean-up also. Keep your plates spinning and when they start to fall off and break, dial back a bit!

How do you measure your capacity? How many “plates” are you spinning?

Beacon Technologies just successfully launched another ASPDNSF site for Mattress King. This was a big team effort, with assistance from virtually everyone on the TSG and SW Development groups. For several people, this was their first experience with an ASPDNSF site and they picked it up in record time and with much success.

Here are some interesting features used on this site:

· Rotating home page images that the client can maintain in Admin site.

· Filtered product listings page (“Narrow Your Results” in left nav).

· “Tabbed” product detail page.

· Nicely formatted “Store Locations” page.

· Customer Video page.

‘Twas two weeks before Christmas, when all through the halls
Not a network was slow to the Internet malls;
Our servers were humming securely with care,
Flooded with shoppers that found their way there;

The products were nestled all snug in their pages,
With visions of fast service from all different ages;
And Beacon prepared to respond at a snap,
Had just settled down for a fleeting cat nap;
When out on the web there arose such a clatter,
We sprang from our chairs to see what was the matter;
Away to our positions we flew like a flash,
Popped open our browsers and reset the cache.

The web on the breast of the new social network,
Opened its doors to where new customers lurk;
When, what to our wondering eyes should appear,
But millions of visitors and guidance so clear;

With a couple old drivers, one such a Deacon,
Backed by good people is what we call Beacon.
More rapid than eagles their courses they came,
And they whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

“Now Facebook! Now Google! Now Bing and Yahoo!
On Twitter! On Email! On Bizrate and Youtube!
To the top of the SERPs! To the top of the wall!
Now click away! Click away! Click away all!

From your friends at Beacon Technologies

Great Food, Awesome Company, and Fantastic Prizes!

In case you were wondering what a holiday party at Beacon Technologies was like (and I know that you are), there is video tape from this year’s.  Upper management can be a bit zany in social situations…

- EW

follow me on twitter @ejwestksu

Please note Beacon will be closed on Dec 23, Dec 24, Dec 31 and Jan 3.

IMPORTANT DATES
12/16/10 (Thu) – Beacon Employee Holiday Party
12/23/10 (Thu) – Beacon Closed for Holiday
12/24/10 (Fri) – Beacon Closed for Holiday
12/31/10 (Fri) – Beacon Closed for Holiday
1/3/11 (Mon) – Beacon Closed for Holiday

*Most of the Beacon staff checks their email regularly, but if you have an emergency, please call Beacon PCS at 336-232-5699 or 888-893-0843.

Thank you and have a happy holiday from your friends at Beacon Technologies!

People enjoy the feelings of being treated as special and receiving bargains.  This thrill of the hunt is a financial benefit to both the customer for cost-saving purposes and to the vendor for moving inventory.  Those businesses that carry e-commerce sites but do not currently post coupons are definitely neglecting opportunities for making more money.

For readers thinking, “But Nicole, my margins are just too tight to support coupons,” there is a simple response:  Try raising prices in combination with an intensive coupon offer.  Listed below are some tips to initiate the process:

• Always use expiration dates.
• When using a code, use one that is easy to remember like “December10,” “GROUPON2010,” or BEACON_ROCKS.”   A code like “TX24586L” just does not have a ring to it and is difficult to remember.
• If the item is less than $100, use a dollar-off amount.  If it is more than $100, offer a certain percentage off.
• If there is a wide selection of merchandise, make the coupon more generic by offering money off of the cart.  By only offering a discount on a particular item, new visitors to the site will not spend as much time browsing all of the products actually have available.
• Create unique offers for different sites to make members have a feeling of exclusivity.  Besides, many sites, such as Foursquare, require a unique offer.
• Always push free shipping.  If shipping is $5.99, it is better to charge $16 for an item and provide free shipping than to charge $10 and require shipping.  While the price is identical, offering free shipping evokes more appeal.
• Allow coupons to be stackable.  The goal is to move as much product as possible, so be open to the possibility, and let customers believe they are getting an advantage.

When working with several affiliates, Tracking 202 helps manage it all.  It is free of charge and even helps with maintaining general PPC stats!