my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Screw paper!

As a sort of follow-up to my post on bizarre, backward paper-based processes I recently doubled down on removing my remaining dependencies on paper and paper-based processes. With an reinvigorated passion for achieving "The Paperless Office ™" I did the following: scan all documents and invoices with PDFScanner (for macOS) store all scanned documents in Evernote sign documents with DocuSign have Zapier automatically store all invoices that arrived digitally via eMail in Evernote as well rigorously throw away everything that doesn't need to be stored for ...

nagg – Simple A/B Testing For Links

nagg is an interesting take on URL shortening. It lets you enter up to 4 links each of which will be presented to the user clicking on the link at a previously set rate. For example, if entering four links with a rate of 25% each, each link will be shown every fourth time a user clicks on the shortenend link. This allows you for instance to do quick split testing of marketing sites or landing pages.

Sunday January 19th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Web

Exploring Stereotypes With Google Autocomplete

This post by Facebook engineer Stoyan Stefanov suggests Google Autocomplete as a fun way for exploring clichés about nations: A friend was suggesting that one can easily list the most popular stereotypes about a nation. With a little help from a friend – Google autocomplete. Simply type “why are the [nationality X] so …” in the old search box and enjoy. It turns out that this actually works pretty well:

Sunday December 8th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web

Vernetzt euch: #blognetz

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Ende letzten Jahres setzte sich Johnny Haeusler auf Spreeblick für 2013 das Ziel, das Web zurück zu erobern. Kurz gesagt geht es ihm darum, dass sich schon seit geraumer Zeit öffentliche Meinung und Diskussionen im Netz von Blogs hin zu sozialen Netzwerken wie Facebook und Twitter verschieben. Das Problem dabei ist, dass Walled Gardens wie Facebook den Prinzipien eines offenen WWW widersprechen, in dem Inhalte dauerhaft und unabhängig vom Wohlwollen einzelner Unternehmen verlinkt werden ...

Sunday May 5th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web

WordPress Child Themes

A few days ago I read a very useful tip regarding customizing WordPress themes and why you should use child themes for that. In short, child themes allow you to extend and customize existing WordPress themes without compromising the ability to update the original theme. If instead you directly customized a theme your changes would be lost once you install an update (or have that update installed automatically).

Sunday January 6th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Automatic Updates for WordPress

I'd like to introduce you (or rather the WordPress users amongst you) to one of the lesser known gems for WordPress - the Automatic Updater plugin. This plugin automatically updates your WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins and themes, which is a boon, especially if you have to maintain several WordPress installations.

Thursday December 20th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Bauhaus and Web Design

The other day I've read this somewhat older yet still relevant article by Simon Collision: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design. In a stream of thought kind of way it deals with the main tenets of the Bauhaus school of thought and how those relate to modern and future web design. It draws upon Bauhaus ideas such as "form follows function", simplicity and the unification of art, craft, and technology - most of which seem oddly familiar in the context ...

Sunday December 16th, 2012 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Publishing for tablets – A market ripe for disruption

This week there were two quite intriguing posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog: Tablets are waiting for their Movable Type Publishers shouldn't be app developers Both posts deal with the shortcomings of magazine and newspaper publishing for tablets like the iPad. Currently, publishing for the iPad and other tablets mostly amounts to magazine publishers writing native apps that wrap their content. Given that magazine publishers usually don't specialize in software development more often than not this entails slow, unstable apps and a generally ...

Sunday December 2nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Business, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.