[This is a story about Bob. Bob is not his real name, but he is a real person. The events here were gleaned from intermittent conversations and pieced together as accurately as I could.]
I’d never heard the term “lifestyle business” until I met Bob. It was a few years ago, not long after he started […]

When I loaded up new screenshots a few weeks back, I decided to replace Lightbox 2 with John Reid’s PopBox. The more I see Lightbox, the more I find it annoying. It just seems slow. And no matter how many times I use it, I still hit the back button occasionally.
It turns out I’m not […]

Update: The method described below will cause IE7 to drop the extension. A modified version is pending.
Until recently, I had no idea that IE6 cached downloads. I knew page and image caching were issues, but I didn’t know if affected exe’s and zip’s as well.
FlowBreeze 2.0 was released 11 days ago, putting some of the […]

Someone on the Business of Software forum asked how others motivate themselves to get working. This is a timely question. The jump from FlowBreeze 1.x to FlowBreeze 2.0 has been a long struggle. The code base has grown 3X and of course that doesn’t include the re-writes and thrown away code. Facing burn out in […]

The Business of Software blog posted Part II of their microISV survey. (Part I van be found here.) I have to admit that I was surprised by some of the low revenue numbers. But I’m one of those obstinate people who refuses to believe something when it doesn’t fit his world view. At least for […]

Due to the recent incompatibilities between Vista and the crappy 3rd party licensing tool I use for FlowBreeze, I have been re-examining how I look at anti-piracy protection. I’ve decided it all boils down to a simple formula:
PL = F(SLS + SE + LS - DT)
Where, PL = Piracy Loss (i.e. the revenues lost due […]

When Google rose to the top of the search engine food chain, they created several commodities. One of them was backlinks. Google’s algorithm places a premium on the number of incoming links to a site. The more incoming links a site has, the higher the site will rank. The higher it ranks, the more traffic […]

My first programming experience was in Computer Math class back in High School. It was taught by Mr. “write this down and never forget it” Gray. Mr. Gray was a witty guy, but he wasn’t Mr. Witty. Mr. Witty was the Biology teacher, but he was actually kind of loony. But he wasn’t Mr. Looney. […]

One of the more frustrating things about selling online is dealing with AVS mismatches. Sometimes you get an email from a customer complaining that your payment processor won’t accept their credit card. Most of the time, though, the sale is lost without notice - unless you’re scanning your transaction logs daily.
So What is an AVS […]

I wanted to say Thanks! to all the BreezeTree customers who have made this a great first year.
The first six months were a little slow, but after the release of FlowBreeze 1.2, sales really started to pick up. FlowBreeze (a Flowchart Generator for Excel) has benefited from a lot of word of mouth marketing. Plus, […]