Jice Lavocat

This post is not a review about Drift, but rather about how to use Google Tag Manager and how to make the most of ’events’ collected on your application : here I will use Drift as a concrete example.

A few days ago, Hiten Shah (@hnshah) submitted Drift on Product Hunt. Drift is nothing new : it’s just an in-app chat for your application. If you’re looking for in-app chat solutions, you will find dozens : Intercom, Tawkto, Zopim, Olark, Smooch…

Si vous suivez mon blog (allez, ça ne demande pas trop d’effort, j’écris moins d’un article par mois), vous savez que j’ai participé à la conférence E1 l’an dernier à Toulon. Une nouvelle édition du E1 est prévue d’ici quelques semaines.

La conférence aura lieu le 02 Juin et le ticket d’entrée est à 50€ (quelques billets à 25€ sont encore disponibles à l’écriture de ces lignes). L’ambiance et l’équipe organisatrice en font une des conférences majeures du Sud de la France (avec le Shake cela va de soi).

We have prepared a landing page to validate the value proposition from Repost among social media professionals. Our next step is to send some traffic on the page. However, before that, we listed few things to bear in mind before putting some money into advertisement. Be sure to check them all.

I have been a great proponent of landing pages to validate business ideas and key concepts. I got really convinced about their potential after reading Will Mitchell’s post 3 steps to validate your business ideas for free. I’ve created landing pages using all kind of tools like Unbounce, Wishpond or custom html. Below you’ll find some tips, some tools and some rules before investing into traffic. When I can, I am trying to exemplify based on our current project.

Three years ago was an important period of my life. I was in my final PhD year, and I decided to create my first SaaS product. This first experience taught me an amazing amount of things. I had no pressure to do it since my PhD was still going on, and it was more like a side project. The project crashed more or less at the end of 2014 for several reasons. Today, I’m starting over and, for the second time, I’m working a product I desperately love : Elokenz.

There is a small difference between a problem and a challenge, however, this difference might change your mindset. In this post I’ll try to convince you that changing your vocabulary can have a positive outcome on your daily life, especially on professional aspects.

Semantic

Let’s start with a bit of semantic :

Problem

• Something that ​causes ​difficulty or that is hard to ​deal with

• A problem is also a ​question to be ​answered or ​solved, esp. by ​reasoning or ​calculating (Mathematics)

  »

Protecting intellectual property in a digital world is tricky. I know that perfectly well since I have always tried to reverse engineer applications or online services other created. I had a lot of fun while learning how to crack software 15 years ago. Later I realized how easy it was to cheat on Flash games and spent some time cracking online contests just for distraction.

More recently, when I tried to create a startup called WordiZ.it, I spent some time doing some reverse engineering on Google+ API, to discover hidden data. This attraction to the dark side had a bad ending in the case of WordiZ. Since I started to build upon a non-maintained stream of Data, any change from Google meant I had to work lots of hours to find a new way to collect data. Eventually, Google stopped providing it completely, and my first startup idea became irrelevant in one day.

J’ai longtemps imaginé les mines de charbon comme des endroits tristes, gris, où le biotope est ramené à son strict minimum. L’Homme est souvent le seul animal croisé dans ces paysages. Cependant, quel que soit l’endroit de la planète, là où il y a des mines de charbon, il se produit un phénomène d’une nature étonnante.

Cette manifestation (que j’ai découverte en relisant un ancien article de New Scientist) est autrement plus colorée que l’image que l’on peut garder d’un chapitre de Germinal.

(Cover photo - Credit Benjamin Benschneider/ZGF)

Il est environ onze heure du matin et comme d’habitude depuis l’arrivée des beaux jours, c’est l’heure à laquelle la paroi principale du mur qui vous fait face change d’aspect. Au fil de la journée, vous savez que la température qui monte va faire fondre cette paroi, et lui donner des teintes changeantes. Depuis que vous travaillez dans ce nouveau bâtiment vous avez bien sûr été curieux de constater l’absence totale d’appareils de climatisation.

As I am going on with the development of our backend and several new features, Fanny did a very great job in redesigning our homepage. We will be discussing that in a future post. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you an anecdote about the first version of our homepage.

Elokenz v1 Homepage

When I designed our first home, I had no real experience about how to do this kind of business. I rolled up my sleeves and started from scratch with Bootstrap. The only thing I tried to keep in mind was the tips given by Oli Gardner in his Unbounce ebook about conversion-focused designs.

Lambda is one of the many services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS in short). The tool was built to help developers who need to frequently run small easy tasks, and don’t need a dedicated server (and all the fuss that goes with it) to perform them.

For each new task, Lambda will spawn an EC2 instance and run your task on it. The billing is made relatively to the RAM you allocated to the task, and the time it took to perform. This offers a really interesting and money-saving solution to frequent low-level tasks such as file or stream processing or data analysis.

When working on content marketing, adjusting the time you spend between creation and distribution can be difficult. In this posts, several experts give their best tips on how to choose a good balance.

As you start writing blog posts and distributing on various media (social media, communities, forums…) you might wonder how to balance your efforts. Most of the content planning and analysis can be done asynchronously : planning can be done much in advance, and analysis could be scheduled regularly.

Content Marketing is known for being really accessible (everyone can do it, registering a domain name for a self hosted wordpress blog is cheap) and can be quite effective if you do it properly, with a purpose and with associated metrics. However, content marketing faces one big issue : it takes a lot of time.

In this post, we’ll try to address the following question : How can a writer track time when working on a blog ? A quick search on Google didn’t bring much material to answer, so I decided to go for the creative approach. I’ll try to define some processes that might be efficient for this task, and to list some associated tools.

Hugo is a tool that I have been using for one year for generating static websites. On the contrary to dynamic websites which have a database, static websites are only made of HTML, JS and CSS. There is no scripts executed on the backend (php, python, ruby) and everything is static. In this post, I am giving you the simple deployment workflow I am using to push my sites made with Hugo to a FTP, via Codeship. Codeship is a continuous delivery platform.

(Cover photo - credit @loiclemay)

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend the E1 conference, in Toulon. This one day conference was dedicated to problem solving and the talks were oriented towards the main difficulties web entrepreneurs might have faced.

Live Broadcast

We had one track with 11 talks in French about personal experience and feedback from past projects which have faced major problems. The talks were recorded and broadcast live with our partner Bizeo.net. I guess that replays will soon be available (and I’ll try to edit this post when it’ll be the case).

For those who know me, you know that I have been terribly impacted by Google’s decision to stop promoting the authorship tag. This feature gave me the opportunity, at that time, to work toward my first startup project called Elokenz.

Google’s decision took many people by surprise, and I was very sad the day George Muller announced it on Google+.

Facebook new decision to showcase authors

In a press release published on June 18th, Facebook officially announced that the social network will support a new author tag.