Things are looking a lot different around here at A2 Hosting. We've got a completely re-designed website, a customer forum and even a brand new logo. As you can see, our blog has a fresh look and feel to it as well!
When we launched our previous blog, the posts were about our Marketing Manager's (that's me!) adventures learning about the world of web hosting. After further review, that's not really something our customers are all that interested in. Our customers are developers and businesses, so instead we're bringing you fresh web development news in Developer Depot and marketing info in Marketing Mojo. Check them out; they're already loaded them up with a ton of interesting posts.
All our employees will be contributing to The A2 Posting. We'll have posts from our support staff, developers, engineers, billing manager, community manager and even our CEO. With everyone involved writing about the topics you're interested in, there will never be a shortage of cool stuff to read. Thanks for stopping by and make sure to come on back regularly for more!
In a perfect world, your customers would just come to you. You wouldn’t spend any advertising dollars. That’s sort of the idea behind inbound marketing. Though people are coming to you, and not vice versa, it takes a lot of work. So what is inbound marketing? It’s about becoming the expert in your market. You release great content, blog posts and videos. You answer the most commonly asked questions and you keep your audience updated on the latest industry trends.
Outbound marketing, in contrast, is when you go out and try to bring in customers. As far as online marketing goes, it often means banner advertising. In most instances, outbound marketing is much quicker (and pricier). You make your ad spend and you’re all set. The problem is you’re screaming in a crowded marketplace.
I bet it’s a lot easier for you to remember who wrote the last interesting blog post you read as opposed to the last company you saw a banner ad for. I bet you can’t even remember the last banner ad you saw. In fact, over the past few years, I’ve saved the banner ads that have actually gotten my attention in a special folder. There are a grand total of two banners in that folder.
Think of outbound marketing like a child who has ten siblings. He is constantly competing with those siblings for the attention of his parents by screaming for their attention. Is it worth the effort? Or would it be better for the child to do something like get straight A’s on a report card to get his parents to come to him?
Here’s a real example of an inbound marketing success we’ve had here at A2 Hosting. A few years ago, we became a popular place to host the Kloxo control panel on a VPS. How? It wasn’t by posting Kloxo VPS ads. Trust me, I tried that. No, it was actually kind of by accident, but taught us a great inbound marketing lesson. All we did was post instructions on how to install Kloxo to a VPS. These instructions actually became one of our most visited pages thanks partly to Kloxo sending their users to those instructions. We posted quality content and people came to us. We became the Kloxo Hosting experts.
Now I’m not saying you should pull all of your outbound marketing efforts and go all in with inbound marketing. Outbound marketing can certainly be effective when crafted properly. Just be mindful of both techniques the next time you look at your marketing strategy.
If you've been running or developing websites for awhile, you may have run into a problem where a field that should contain a more recent date is instead showing up with the date 12-31-1969. Many people may just recognize this as a problem, get it resolved somehow and move on. But have you ever stopped to wonder just why this specific date is the one that shows up when there's an issue?
This occurs when data that should be a UNIX timestamp is instead either empty or contains a value of zero. UNIX timestamps are integers that count the number of seconds since midnight on 12-31-1969. As you can imagine, nowadays they're pretty big.
Sometimes a bug in the software will cause these fields to lose their value -- maybe during a software update or database migration -- and that's when you see the epoch date (12-31-1969) instead of the value you were expecting. The good news is the software which is rendering out the timestamp to human readable format is doing its job (a timestamp of zero does correlate to that date). The bad news is you've got missing values which are going to have to be tracked down.
So the obvious question is why this particular date? Well it's very early in UNIX's history (though this date wasn't actually chosen until 1972), and basically it just seemed to be a good starting point to begin counting from. It's amazing how many of the standards we live by today were chosen almost arbitrarily sometime in the past!
If you're a professional developer, or even a hobbyist who keeps up with the industry, you've probably heard of iterative development already. If you haven't, it's just what it sounds like; the practice of writing and then rewriting code repeatedly throughout development. It puts an emphasis on writing code over planning. It focuses on improving your final product by consistent testing and refactoring.
For experienced developers, it tends to make a lot of sense. Testing will almost always reveal issues which require addressing that were not anticipated during planning. Planning is definitely a stage with diminishing returns. Some is always necessary, but it tends to be the case that for each additional block of time you spend on it, the less you're getting out.
So once you've done the necessary planning, why not start writing? Start working. Write some code that at least attempts to solve the problem you're trying to solve. Then test it. Functional testing and just as important, user testing will reveal further issues to work on.
Iterative development means not being scared of refactoring code; don't view rewriting a class or function as lost time, recognize it as a learning experiment, and know that you couldn't have gotten to the better version without writing the previous version first.