What is a CRM ?

Working in a typical services business, you might already have heard your colleagues speaking about CRM. But what does it mean really? First of all CRM is an acronym which stands for Customer Relationship Management and is mostly associated to a software type. In fact it is a category of software which helps a company to manage all its interactions with their already existing or potential customers. As such you would often hear about CRM software which is used to simplify, organise and automate business processes, especially sales. A CRM application is not only limited to sales but can also be used to improve customer and technical support as well as marketing. The ultimate goal of CRM software is to win new customers and retain those which a business already has.

Depending on the exact need on the business as well as the business type there are different categories of CRM software. For example you have CRM tool which are more focused on marketing, analytics, social media or small business. The biggest market players in the CRM software industry are currently SAP AG, Oracle and Microsoft with their Microsoft Dynamics CRM software. Big companies in the retail or banking business usually all use SAP which is definitely the most well-known CRM software.

An iPad case just in case

You just bought one of these fancy iPads from Apple? and you are maybe wondering what would happen if it falls on the floor? Because let's be honest here, who didn't already let his mobile phone or even laptop computer fall on the floor by mistake... Then it is now a good time to think about getting an iPad case, you never know. Nowadays there are even quite a lot of different styles available and you should for sure find one which matches your tastes. Your iPad will thank you!

You will find here many cool iPad cases ranging from the simple and slick cover to the ultra stuffed and protective case.

Carter seahawks mellon football

Ticketamerica.com has tickets for carter finley stadium as well as the seattle seahawks football team and the mellon arena seating charts.

carter finley stadium tickets
seattle seahawks tickets
tacoma dome tickets

A social bookmarking alternative to del.icio.us

As you might now, Yahoo! decided to get rid of its del.icio.us social bookmarking service sometime this year either by selling it or shutting it down. Delicous, was one of the first social bookmarking portals back in 2003 and was then acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.

Myself, I have been using the del.icio.us social bookmarking portal for quite some time now in order to bookmark websites I found interesting and worth to share with others. In fact, I think it's quite a pity to have to see it disappear sometime soon.

Luckily, there is an alternative social bookmarking website called diigo since 2006 which works pretty much the same as del.icio.us and even has a few extra features. So what I did is to export my del.icio.us bookmarks and import them in diigo. Unfortunately, I heard that the importing from del.icio.us into diigo doesn't always work as it should.

Web Hosting Nuggets now on Facebook

Hosting Nuggets is now present on the famous social network Facebook. You can access our Facebook page through the following address http://www.facebook.com/hosting.web. Add us now as friend in order to get Hosting Nuggets' blog posts directly on Facebook and to catch up with the latest news about web hosting and innovative websites.

How to accelerate PHP enabled website

Do you want to keep the load down on your web server and at the same time accelerate the rendering of your PHP web pages? Then eAccelerator is exactly the PHP module you are looking for! eAccelerator is a very simple and small module which you add to your PHP installation and that will increase the performance of your PHP code by caching it in compiled state either in memory or on your hard disk. Even better news, eAccelerator is open source so that it is free for anyone to use. I personally use it all the time and I must say that you really see a difference in the time used for PHP code compilation and execution.

Using this accelerating PHP module I can get up to 50% reduced loading time for a web page and the documentation mentions that it can reduce even more the loading time of your PHP pages. Quite useful if you are running a busy website or simply want a faster website which has quite some PHP code behind it. Furthermore it's easy to configure and just has a bunch of around 10 parameters to configure, whereas most of them can be left as default. For performance reasons, I would suggest you install it from source; there are very good installation instructions available on their website. Basically it's just about running the following commands once the package is decompressed:

phpize

./configure

make

make install

Then you enable the module via PHP's php.ini config file by adding the following parameter:

extension="eaccelerator.so"

as well as the little configuration parameters there is:

eaccelerator.shm_size="16"

eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"

eaccelerator.enable="1"

eaccelerator.optimizer="1"

eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"

eaccelerator.debug="0"

eaccelerator.filter=""

eaccelerator.shm_max="0"

eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"

eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"

eaccelerator.shm_only="0"

eaccelerator.compress="1"

eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

Last recommendation: create a dedicated cache directory (eaccelerator.cache_dir) somewhere else than /tmp because anybody who has access to that machine can read the content of /tmp and give it read-write permission just for your web server's user (very often www-data or nobody). Enjoy your accelerated PHP website!

Hosting Nuggets has its own dot-com domain name

You might have already noticed it by looking at the URL but Hosting Nuggets is nowreachable under its own dot-com domain name: www.hostingnuggets.com. It was quite fortunate that the hostingnuggets.com domain name was still free and I really like that name. So there was nothing else to do that just to buy it and enable it in the settings of blogspot. No worries, you can still reach the Hosting Nuggets blog through its old address hostingnuggets.blogspot.com. In fact the nice thing is that the blog will always be reachable under these two names...

Failed managed servers really make the difference - Part 2

In my previous post of yesterday entitled Failed managed servers really make the difference, I was so amazed that a company could have failed servers showing on their special offer banner that I overlooked another problem with that very same advertisement: a typo in the text! So if you have a closer look at the bottom text of their banner, you will read: "* valid for singale server and new customers only." as highlighted in pink below.

So to summarize, there are three servers that show signs of hardware problem or failure and even the little text that there is contains a typo... Could it get any worse? Well, I hope not but I would really be interested to know how many people go for that special offer!

If you have a passion for technology, check out online it courses. This could really help avoiding such trivial errors in IT.