Xgineer Solutions, Inc

When a potential client asks me, “How much and how long?” a million questions start rushing to my head. A seemingly obvious thing to do first is to figure out what exactly it is that they want; however, that’s very rarely well defined. Let’s assume though that you have at least a decent idea of what it is that they want, estimating the costs involved is such a delicate balance.

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Too many times I come across clients and potential clients that don’t know what they don’t know regarding how to approach building a web site or application. Not that it is completely their fault, this technology stuff can be pretty confusing, costly, and complicated. I wanted to simplify 3 basic things that you should know and consider when approaching a design or development firm for the first time.

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After several months of planning, programming, and designing, we are happy to introduce the new Xgineer Solutions site. Adam, Leo, and I have been excited to give our old website a face lift and make it a bit more personal and modern. A couple tidbits and shout outs:

• Site and CMS built on the Symphony Framework
• Sliders animation using Javascript
• Enne Bi Communications provided the photos for us, thank Nick

Though this is the new Xgineer site, we realize that this is for you, our customer, clients and peers. We want to make sure that you are coming back to the site for the things you need. We would be forever indebted to you for you thoughts and feedback on the new Xgineer site. Anything you can think of we would love to hear it.

Please click here for feedback.

Thanks in advance,

The Xgineers

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Web Shell

Web development can be often be frustrating depending on the tools your given. This is especially true when dealing with a shared server environment as one does not normally have any access to a shell of any kind. All that is typically available is FTP and a web server. This can make installing/maintaining software on a shared server (ie. Symfony framework) quite difficult, since it is often easier to just run a simple command directly on the server. Hence, the need for a web shell.

A web shell is a utility that gives you the ability to run commands, like tar and mkdir, directly on a remote machine via a web server and HTTP messages. Of course, this tool would not replace something like SSH. When SSH is not an option though, having a web shell can make life a lot easier. For instance, it’s much faster to compress a large folder into an archive, upload that single file to the server via FTP, and then extract it on the server, rather than uploading the whole folder over FTP since FTP sends each file one by one.

Now, there are certainly a few other web shells out there, but none of them have the ability to allow the commands to read from Standard Input. Also, the commands have to wait until it finishes to completely get the output. The tool we made provides such abilities, plus it has command completion. It also has a directory browser in which you can download, upload, and edit files in folder on the server merely for convenience.

Our web shell is built on PHP and should work on any Linux server, plus we’re releasing it as open source. Due to the nature of a web shell, it still has a few limitations, like you can’t execute certain commands like ssh, but we find it more than useful regardless of such limitations.

The current state of the web shell is beta, so they may be bugs. We certainly welcome feedback on bugs or any improvements.

For see a complete list of features and limitations, http://red.xgineer.com/wiki/webshell/Web_Shell

Download it from here: http://red.xgineer.com/wiki/webshell/Download

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I saw that an old friend from High School (haven’t seen him since then, wow) was promoting his new corporate blog. The blog looked great but I thought I would share my thoughts as someone that has maybe a 6 month head start. Below is the email I sent to him giving some of my basic thoughts and a couple great links I keep in mind. Figured it may help out some others.

Hi Jason,

Glad you responded. I am actually working on my company’s blog as well and making sure that it s fresh and applicable. A couple of my own few tips:

• Know your audience or potential audience and cater to them specifically. Don’t be afraid to polarize
• Make sure that the content you write about is conversational. It should not read like another corporate site. It is an opportunity for you to be candid with your customers. (this was the biggest thing that I took away from my first look at your blog, basically corp content in a new medium.)
• Keep it clean – by clean I mean not too much stuff going on around the content. (I use wordpress as well and there is a lot of temptation to keep adding plug-ins because they’re so damn cool. I have gone overboard a couple times, I can’t help it. Then I try to scale back with the essentials)
• Write about your thoughts and take towards the item or industry. Blog is short for web log, like a journal. Interested parties can get the facts on your corporate site.
• The blog should spark dialogue. Write pieces that leave the readers wanting to answer another question and that’s when you get the really warm leads.
• Be patient, it won’t happen overnight. I am still waiting to find the right people I should be talking to
• Find 3 to 5 great blogs that you follow and emulate them. (I use google reader to consolidate my articles that I read, my favorites include dumblittleman, zen habits, seth godin, Guy Kawasaki) . there is a blog for everything out there these days
• That’s all I got off the top of my head

The following resources are just good articles on writing and producing blogs.

http://danblank.com/blog/2009/01/16/how-to-create-a-high-quality-blog/

http://writetodone.com/2008/11/06/branding-101-how-to-promote-your-blog-like-the-big-guys-do/

also look into twitter:

http://www.twitterbusinessbook.com/2009/01/17-reasons-your-business-should-be-on-twitter/

Hope this stuff helps. All the best.

Greg

If anyone else can offer some help feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to pass you along to Jason.

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