My Blog On Mobile

Once in a while, I browse the internet on my HTC Touch PDA. I have no interest yet in owning an iPhone because of the price so I make use of everything that I now own. Recently I've tried out Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini. It's an awesome piece of smartphone with amazing touch features.

There is a drawback when using mobile phone for browsing the net. Apart from having to pay for the data charges (that is assuming if you are not not subscribing to any data plan provided by your mobile carriers), the screen is just to small to look at all those amazing design and features a normal web browser can provide. Nevertheless, when using these tiny little small screens, we only want to read text or maybe some resized pictures or images.

Because of this, it would be best to provide your blog with tools to help people who loves your blog but only have time to read them on their mobiles. There's a solution for this, Onbile.



Whenever a mobile user logs, the javascript provided will detect whether you are browsing using a mobile phone or a normal browser. This would really help your mobile readers and encourage them to visit your blog more often.

The only issue I have is:

• Only 2 pages of your title list will be available (I am guessing this would depend on your feed setting)


• You can't revert back to your original layout once it's loaded on your smartphone

I am still going to try this tool for a while and see if suits my need or else I am going to remove it and search for another tool or Wordpress plugin.

Implementing Sugar CRM for Sales and Marketing Use

I guess being used of multi-jobs/multi-tasking for a company creates activities that is quite beneficial. As always, I've moved on to do something else already. This time it's called Customer Relationship Management. You can read all about CRM at Wikipedia. I decided to learn about CRM after the event last 2 weeks, now that I got all the contact lists, I am left with questions such as:

1. What should I do with all these leads?


2. How am I going to manage it?


3. What tools can I use to make my marketing and sales job more easier?


4. Is there any ready to use FREE CRM web-based tool that I can install and use straight away without a steep learning curve?

Based on my experience, if you have a software whether it's a windows-based or web-based, you don't need to read all those thick books that explains stuff from A-Z and take weeks to understand about the subject. You just need to play around with it for a while, getting used to it and applying it. It's just like playing Monopoly. So, after Googling around, I found out about SugarCRM. It's basically a web-based package that has all my answers to the above questions. To add further convenience, the application has a free open source download package (same as Joomla) and the installation is easy (if you can install Joomla, you'll definitely know how to install SugarCRM).

Two days after I've installed and putting in data into it, I've actually mastered almost 70% of it's use. The only thing I need more is more data to build up my database. Here's a screenshot of how my SugarCRM Dashboard looks like:



I was surprised by this web-based CRM engine when looking at it under the hood. It has all the CSS and AJAX components which is really cool. You can change the colour of your theme instantly by selecting the colour tab at the above page. You can also set the size of your font and drag and drop the dashboard box. I was blown away with it's features and capabilities.

Now, the next thing I need to learn is to try and find ways of how I can implement this system and train the staff to use this application in my company. Sometimes, I just can't believe an IT company or even worse, a web-based application developer company that doesn't use CRM to track their sales and marketing activities. At the moment, I am the only one that is using this system in the company. Oh well, I'll give it some time for me to get used to this system and then I'll show my boss about it.

I just love web-based tools! Especially FREE ONES! ;-)