Alan Blaine Whitney

I was looking at a picture of downtown Lincoln, ME from the 1800's the other day. I noticed almost all of the businesses were local businesses. Grocery stories, pharmacies, department store, all local business. Today there is McDonald's, Walmart, Hannaford, and Rite Aid. It seems like the small and medium size local business is slowly falling away to corporations, chains, and things made in china. It got me thinking about small local businesses, and how tech companies stand a shot at it. <br />
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The reason why I think tech companies stand a shot, is pretty simple, it's one of the few areas where little companies can provide something of both quality and value, something that can't be cookie cutter by large stock holder controlled companies or made in asia. I am proud to say that I work in a small Maine-based web company. As long as small local companies continue to provide true value and quality, there will always be a niche.

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Google's <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/">web masters tools</a> is very cool. I have found it very helpful.

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So once upon a time, google was cool. I guess they are still sort of cool, but they are starting to do some silly things. Case in point, my gmail, I use it a lot, I even use their pop other mail feature, but when I send from gmail as one of these other email accounts, google slides in an extra headers, it throws in a sender header that is too the gmail address and as well as a return-path to the gmail. What is that, I said send it as another account. Google, at times, reminds me of Microsoft.

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Today I am not working at my companies main office but another location that has just me there. It got me thinking some about productivity.<br />
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One of the chief problems when I work at our main office, is distractions. There is always somebody calling, walking up and asking you something, people behind or beside you talking to something else. There is no shortage of distractions. Several articles outline how bad that is for productivity, this is my <a href="http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Alone_Time.php">favorite</a>.<br />
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So today, I have alone, nearly no distractions (I have opened up my email twice), but I find something sort of strange, I desire background noice. My ipod has been going almost the whole time with some music. I guess I just like to have some background noise.

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IE6 is a bad browser. It thumbs it's nose at standards, IE5/6 may have slowed down the development of ther internet as an application platform by 2 years in my opinion. So may developers spending extra time to make an app cross browser. I know I have spend how too much time having to turn standards compliant markup into IE compliant markup. But in IE8, they have plans to be standards compliant, as <a href='http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ie8-super-standards-mode.ars'>here</a>.<br />
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But it creates a very bad problem for them, how to be backwards compatible to stuff that worked in IE5/6 and even 7, while being web standards compliant. I guess they have this rendering mode thing.<br />
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So what's the point, I think the point is, that it's almost always not worth cutting corners, because it really comes back to bite you.

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Support of products is one of the most expensive, timely, costly, harmful things in the web products/services arena. Everybody wants good support, I know, I want good support, good support should be given. All I am saying is that support of a web app, from the person that wrote the web app is costly to the company. On the 37signals book, they talk about the <a href="http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Alone_Time.php">zone</a>. The zone is a very real place, I have been there, and been taken out of the zone. When a developer needs to get out of the zone for support. Very poor things happen. So my whole point is that, when you make web apps, they need to be easy to use. 90% of the questions that I get are because it's not easy enough to use. Making not easy to use web apps will really bit you on the butt.

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