Many of the employees at MentorMate have Google Android phones. There are a few iPhone owners too, but they’re in the minority at MentorMate. We did a little survey and found out what Android apps everyone was using. We then consolidated the list and filtered out all the apps that wouldn’t be used by your average Google Android user. What follows is a list of truly great apps that every Google Android user should have. These apps have one more thing in common, they’re all FREE!

On November 19, 2009 Google announced their open source Chrome operating system built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security. The presentation started with a slide showing the increasing number of Chrome users – the browser that is used as a base in their OS. The slide also stated that Chrome has “39x faster JavaScript than Internet Explorer.” Is it really that much faster or faster at all? Will their built from scratch “V8 JavaScript Engine” outplay the latest version of the Microsoft browser and will it work almost 40 times faster?

The following SEO diagram was designed for our SEO presentation. It does a particularly good job of giving an overview of how we get through various steps of SEO to ultimately result in more revenue. A good way to read it is to work your way backwards, starting at the conversions step. Obviously this has a focus on revenue-generating web sites, but most of its principles can be associated with any SEO effort.

9/21/09 Google officially announces that meta keywords don’t impact ranking in Google
9/17/09 Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz changes stance on paid links
7/29/09 Yahoo gives up on search, makes deal with Bing

Why make backups? There are many reasons, and it is important to keep them all in mind when you are creating your backup system. Different types of disasters require different methods of recovery.

MentorMate’s web marketing team has created a list of some commonly-found problems in web site design. These flaws are detrimental aspects to the site in terms of actual site functionality, usability, and/or search engine optimization. They are problems that are readily apparent without an extensive technical background, and ranked in order, beginning with the most severe red flag and ending with more minor inconveniences that could be improved upon.

Paging queries or paging records is an often-used approach in web applications. It displays subsets of data records as a page, allowing the user to navigate more easily through all pages. The straightforward implementation of a paging query running over large data sets in a stored procedure in MS SQL 2005 can cause increased server load when large numbers of paging queries are executed simultaneously.

Recently, we’ve been dealing with an issue related to our Tomcat Application Server and wanted to share how we solved this one. We found one that the application server was irrelevant (it could be Glassfish or another as well). The server was running the latest version, Tomcat Application Server 6.0.18, and it was crashing in irregular intervals. There was no easy solution because the server stopped making logs before crashing.

Developers who have used NetBeans 6.1 and 6.5 for web development with Visual JSF (Woodstock) might have encountered an issue with their web application when deployed on a secured server (HTTPS) and opened with Internet Explorer. The issue lies in the way IE treats links to JavaScript and CSS files loaded in the pages. Under HTTPS, the links to JavaScript have to be absolute, not relative. IE does not assume that the “relative” folder is secured.

Often in the early stages of selling a prospect they will want you to do a lot of the design and architecting of a solution for free. It is a delicate subject to bring up, but you can’t do work for free. The sooner you bring that up and agree that you should be paid for your work – but not proposal writing, sales and marketing – the better off you’ll be. The most effective method is to make them want your expertise.