CustomerCentrix

I had a good conversation with Roger, our CTO, about the functionality of LoadStorm. He agrees with me that our system will be a good set of general purpose software testing tools.

For example, LoadStorm supports regression testing because it will allow a test plan to be executed repeatedly. The same functionality works for agile testing, performance testing, and endurance testing.

Since we offer a free Breeze account, our clients can essentially use LoadStorm for small volume regression testing...for free. I'm not sure I will invest any money advertising our software testing tools that way, but we will not restrict anyone from using it in this form.

It is an exciting time around here at CustomerCentrix. Roger, Nigel, Christian, Charlie and the rest of the team are ready to release our new load testing tool to beta.

This load testing product is an on-demand web application that utilizes a cloud computing infrastructure. It will allow web developers to easily create test plans with several types of virtual users.

Our goal is to make load testing easy and inexpensive. We are offering a free account to anyone. That removes anyone's objection to trying it because of cost. We believe we can bring significant value to the smaller development shops and to independent developers.

We have launched our new site to prepare for the coming load testing product. Get ready for LoadStorm!

loadstorm-d824254fca

Here are a few notes about using Performancing For Firefox with Drupal.  When I first installed it, it only worked with the admin user (1st user added) which has special privileges.  I thought at first that other users would not work because we generally have a space in the user name "Firstname Last", but this was not the problem.  The problem was with enabled modules and permissions.  Both the blog and blogapi modules must be enabled.  Then, using administer >> access control >> blog module >> edit own blog >> check this for users who will be using performancing.  The last thing to do is in administer >> settings >> blogapi >> Blog types >> choose one or more type.  We haven't used personal blog (or any blog) for our business sites.  Even though we are really blogging, it is just called other things in Drupal (like stories and pages).

Here is a great little tool - technically a Firefox extension, it is really a nicely integrated blogging editor.  Something that could (and probably does) exist as a standalone tool but ties into the browser well.  I am using it now to add a posting to our company Drupal-driven site, and it also works for all of the most popular blogging products.  It pops into the bottom of your Firefox browser and provides basic WYSIWYG markup features.  I dislike HTML editors as javascript-based tools that download from the server because they are often full of quirks/bugs and sluggish in performance even with today's computing power.  This one is a free download that I might not have seen or tried if it hadn't been a Firefox extension.

The story is the simplest type of content to start with, and I try to avoid using an online html editor for a number of reasons. But, realistically most people want to use some html markup. The internet after all wouldn't be what it is without links, images, colors and other stuff that might be functional or just fun and prettier than basic text. For users who just want a few of these, learning how to do a link and images with html and the Drupal plain text edit box works.

Links are created with an anchor tag that brackets the text something like this:

<a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">my link to yahoo</a>

Here is a news story about our largest customer, Alltel. Not sure what effect that it will have on us, but likely there will be some contract adjustments next year.

Seems like a simple thing, but there are too many options that don't seem to easy enough. I was looking for a way to show a couple of link lists for a particular tag or group of tags. Basically a replacement for the built-in links and categories included with Wordpress. Sorting alphabetically would be nice.

First try was the one by Alexander Malov (version 1.4). I have curl installed, but it gave an error, so I moved on to try others.

Next is Tom Gilbert's version 1.1 which works fine. This one just doesn't have the functionality that I would like, and also requires a password, which seems a bit of a nuisance. There is no way to select a particular tag or subset of tags and the links are displayed in what looks to be save order, making it good for showing recent links but otherwise not what I want.

I now have a Technorati Profile and added (claimed) this site, LearnCentrix and the Albuquerque Campbells. This is part of our campaign for site promotion. Need to do the same for some of the other blog/site directories on the web.

Although not new, two web tools are now available that solve problems and change the way that we think about the internet. Del.icio.us is a free web service that now has a broad following and good support from 3rd party software and services. Its purpose is very simple: social bookmarking. The basics is that your bookmarks or favorites (internet addresses) are saved to the web site and available to the rest of the world. You categorize them as you wish with tags. Tags are similar to folders except that they are not hierarchical, so a bookmark can have multiple tags and tags have no specific relation to one another.