We just release the new SiteKreator.com home page and at the same time we replaced our 6-years old home-grown image editor with the leading web-based (flash) image editor: Picnik (recently acquired by Google). To illustrate this with a single image, I applied some Picnik-effects over the the new SK home page.

For the few ppl out there who still believe GOOG will bless them with some place under the sun (on the first page of search results) without contributing to the $21B Adwords revenue, we released few neat SEO-related features:

The guys at SKMurphy were too impressed by our daily release cycle, so they decided to do an interview with me on how we actually do it.

As the interview is quite lengthy (I can't imagine this is just part one of two), I'm gonna summarize it for people who are short on time and long on imagination.

1. Take advantage from having the team located in two time zones: You get 12h development window and 12h for review/QA on each daily release (aka "Follow the sun" model).
2. Automate the testing to the extend where you can increase the chance of catching a problem (usually by 1%), but increasing the data-set over which you run the test (usually by 100%). For SiteKreator we do brute-force screen capture and compare on massive scale in all possible browsers.
3. Involve the users in testing the features they requested. This builds a great community, while at the same time lowering the development cost and increasing the final quality.
4. Have one-click deploy and one-click roll-back in case the shit hits the fan.
5. Roll-out big changes in stealth mode and do bucket testing with real users before the full roll-out (this way you control how much shit should go to exactly what part of the fan).
   

So Office 2.0 is like Web 2.0, only is more useful for business. Or Office 2.0 is like an online version of the Microsoft Office, only it has neat collaboration features. The truth is that nobody really knows what Office 2.0 really means, incl Wikipedia.

This Friday the gals at DealMaker Media are organizing a great event called "Why Office 2.0 matters?" where we all will find out what Office 2.0 really is and does it really matter?

It will start around 8am in the Microsoft Campus in Mt. View. Be careful, not to leave your notebook unattendant there, as you may find it later preloaded with Windows Vista, which for sure won't be the best thing that could happen to you. After switching to Vista for recording some educational movies for our new design Aurora, Sergey (our lead designer) is rebooting his $2K Core2Duo box few times a day ...

Back to the conference, I'll be presenting our new design Aurora around 11am in the Galileo room. The motto if my presentation is:
Aurora makes the good web design less elitist and more accessible.

In order to prepare for the presentation I took the weekend off (Imagine -- not working on the weekends), but this time I was completely off the gird. I just used the mobile google maps on my Nokia E60 to find my way to the hotel in Tahoe, and that was it. This end up being so disturbing for my two year old Dell, so its battery completely died, just by staying couple of days suspended.

Also I was very proud when I saw how the gals at DealMaker media used SiteKreator to create two of their web sites: DealMaker Media and Under the Radar in just a few days. Wow, our tool can really be useful for someone who don't want to crunch HTML all day (and night) long. There were just some problems with the blog, but we are working on them. For example the blog archive will very soon will be available.