I've been to an Azure Training day today. The training was great, however it it seems that none of what I learnt was any use to me, or if it was then the costs make it prohibitive.

I was looking at it for scalability. What-Am-I-Doing is likely to need some help scaling. It creates a reasonable amount of data - 600 or so lines of data per day - and I need a way to multiply that by the number of users. Azure is not the answer.

SQL Azure costs either $9.99 per month for a 1GB instance, or $99.99 per month for a 10GB instance. Plus I'd have to pay for data transfer.

A 10GB instance is neither cheap, or any more scalable than a standard SQL server licence.

Rewriting the app to use the Azure storage option is a load of work, and to be honest, I can't be bothered. The reason for using a relational database is so that the data can be easily managed and related.

I think that I get, I just don't get it. There was one person who I could see was going to get great benefit from Azure. They run a public organization that each year runs a public survey. In one weekend they get a massive amount of traffc to collect survey results. This is an ideal use of Azure instances - they could just switch on more instances for the weekend, and then switch them all off when the survey is complete.

It was an interesting day, well enough presented, and the hosts (ICS at Basingstoke) were great. It's just a shame that Azure is not there yet.

One of my customers has been trying to address a couple of issues with their mobile work force.

• They sell items that are out of stock
• They don't sell items that are in stock
• They call head office too often to check prices

Before talking to NettMore they had started off down the route of a Windows Mobile application that synchronized the data each time the user conected, however this prooved to be pretty time consuming to develop, tied them into their existing mobile devices and the data was out of date almost immediately.

We took the approach of using a web application. Each night an inventory file is sent to a server in our data centre. A process loads the data into the database. Users can log in and see what is available.

We spent a lot of time working out what the best search strategy was. Whether to show results with all words, or any word (ranked), and ended up with all words. We can also control whether the results returnd are in stock or not, and whether they are "fast moving stock" (current) items. They can search by part code too.

There's 2 bits of price information. The RRP Price. There's also a price code which tells the rep what level of discount they can offer.

This project delivered a number of bonuses to the customer:

1. The reps actually use it (they didn't trust the old system)
2. We know the reps are using it, and what they are searching for
3. The internal customer services use it to look up prices as it's quicker than any other system
4. I've got a list of their products with a short description of each.

Why is number 5 a bonus? Because it means that, as I host their website, I could create some pages on the website that listed all their products. And they gave me some images named by product code, so I could automatically show these next to the product.

They weren't sure at first, however they are convinced now. When they look at their web analysis stats, a significant number are arriving at the site as a result of a product specific search, and these are often tracked straight through to them requesting a catalogue.

Content is king. Even better if you can use automatically generated content appropriately!

I must be old, becuase I hate twitter. I hate the fact that you only get a limited number of characters.  I hate the fact that people put such mundane aspects of their life on it. I hate that so many people using it have no idea why they are doing so!

One of out servers is hosted at RackSpace, and last week it went down for a little while. I tried to phone, and that wasn't working either. So I went to twitter and there was already 3 or 4 people commenting on the fact that their servers were down. This is the IT equivalent of, during a power cut, sticking your head out of the front door to see whether it's just your house or the whole street. It turns out that it was the whole street.

I admit that I am a fan of Racksace. Generally their response times are incredible (fanatical even!) and while our server was down for a few minutes, it came up pretty soon. I know that we pay handsomly for this, however for this application it is worth it. I'd say it was almost as fast as I could have worked out that something was wrong and walked into my server room to see what the problem was.

Out of interest, I went back to twitter, and there they were. 10 or 12 people already moaning about the failure of their rackspace web server. I hate twitter.

I've got a client with a relatively large site - 50 odd pages - that needs re-writing to a new format. We're bringing the site up to date and developing the calls to action. The client can write copy, but they are really busy and so far we've only managed to get some of the site wrritten.

Writing copy for websites is one of those skills that, I have to admit, I've always undervalued. Generally, I've advocated getting the client to write their own copy:

• they know the business, and are usually passionate about it
• they should know their customers
• they know what they are hoping to achieve

This week, I've been doing some research on what copywriting costs and how it "works" - I mean the process of getting it done rather than how the copy works.

What I found was I read a lot. And I kept reading.

Obviously, a top position in Google should indicate some of the world's best copywriters, but I was still surprised that I wanted to keep reading, that they maintained and managed my interest. Even if the site was poorly designed and unattractive I was still prepared to keep reading.

I'm nearly converted.

I've put this client in contact with a copywriter I encountered a few months ago and given them enough information about where we're going with the website. I'll let you know how it goes!

And the cost? - Pretty much every website I read used the "how long is a piece of string" analagy. Specifically for this project  - I'm not going to tell you - though it is a lot cheaper than a busy business owner not quite getting it done.

We've done a few sites for schools. I've just been looking at the stats for a couple of these sites, and it's been really interesting.

We've had a lot of snow this week, and some schools are closed, some are open.

Both schools have a CMS on their website that's easy to use, and they've used it to update their home pages to give parents information about whether the schools are open or closed.

Even if half of the vists to the site saved a phone call then being able to update the site saved approximately 1000 phone calls a day for the school.

Well, NettMore has gone slightly greener over the Christmas break.

Over time, the number of servers that we run has slowly increased. Each time that I want to do some testing, show something to a customer or test something slightly unusual then it's safer to put it in it's own server. Many of these are only live for a short time, however a few survive.

Over Christmas, I took the plunge and set up the infrastructure for virtual servers, and have managed to move all the development servers onto a single box.

Generally the processor usage seems reasonable so far.

My only diffiiculty now is that I have to do something with the old hardware!