Hey there! It’s been a while and boy, have things been busy. Life has a knack for throwing curveballs, and sometimes, things can fall through the cracks. This website is one of them. It mysteriously disappeared during a server migration back in 2016. Simply put, I had not really invested much time in maintaining it for years prior and lo and behold, it simply got forgotten when we did one of the many migrations at my company ilscipio

Once that I noticed that it was lost, it still took me months to find the proper time to even begin with a “fresh” start. All the original template and data had been lost, afterall.

But I finally decided to use it as an experiment to accustom myself with the Hugo CMS. And thanks to the wayback machine and some limited files I still had stored somewhere, I managed to redo the original design (with slight modifications) and rework all the original content. So here it is - the new, old, refurbished personal website of mine!

Now that I got this over with, I promise (sorta), to occasionally update it with more of my stuff. I did a thing or two in the time inbetween, so yaaaay.

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I recently stumbled upon a great article byJoystiq.com which centers around the great Trespasser remake that s13n1 has been making over at TresCom.org. I am an enormous fan of Jurassic Park, as you may already have guessed, and as such I was quite touched. 

I was asked to give a few statements for the author and of course I was happy to oblige - it seriously feels just great to see the community coming up with these awesome additions all the time. The full article is definately worth your while and can be accessed here.

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Last week we launched CATO, a full ERP solution. Needless to say, the product took alot of effort on our end and we are slowly beginning to advertise it. On the forefront, we just launched a small ad-campaign in the german Harvard business manager: 

The ad features both Michael and I in the background - the actual model, was shot on a separate day. The entire planning was quite fun and I can only hope that it will spark some interest. 

If interested, head over to www.cato-commerce.com to see what it is all about!

Update 2023

This is an original post from 2014, we have since renamed CATO to “Scipio ERP” and added a loooooooong list of new features to it!

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Recently, I was asked to come aboard the Jurassic Park podcast “Ramblings of A Ingen Historian” to talk about the history of TresCom. Since i am a huge Jurassic Park enthuasiast and would do anything for  the community, I absolutely loved the experience. 

We covered quite alot of topics, ranging from the beginnings of the community to the recent “feud” there was with another jurassic park website.

If you want to listen to the podcast, follow this link.

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A few months ago I was given the opportunity to write for the german “Java Magazin”. They asked for an article on the popular Apache OFBiz - the first level ERP system by the Apache Software Foundation I am such a big fan of. Being an avid reader myself I was smitten. Afterall, even though we forked Scipio ERP from it in 2014, we did so out of love for the initial project!

The article I ended up writing gives a basic overview over the material at hand, gives short code examples to the most interesting aspects of the software and also analyses the pros and cons quite a bit. So if you have been looking for a great open-source business solution, perhaps you should check the article. Of course it is also available at your local bookstore.

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Doing shadows on boxes is quite a hassle within CSS. Though modern browsers support this in one form or antoher, it is tedious to look up the actual style property the few times you actually use them. If you want to support the lesser IE versions, it quickly spawns into a real nightmare.

Well, I looked into this a while back and created a fun little generator to play around with. By dragging a sun around, a complete set of CSS is generated for you that is safe to use with most browsers. In general it should support most modern Browsers & Internet Explorer down to IE7.

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It took me some time to get back onto writing guest articles. The main reason was that despite how much I enjoy doing this, it tends to be one of those things that get out of focus for a while, then instantly pop up and bite you in the ass again. So here’s my latest addition:

5 Gründe gegen Alles-Könner

Unfortunately, it happens to be a german article on the topic of why people tend to overlook extenral help within their startups or, even worse, have the tendency to evaluate it differently.

P.S.: If interested, also read up on Innovationswüste Deutsches Internet

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Being focused on several pitches and ilscipio related tasks, I didn’t really get around doing much fun for a little while… if it wasn’t for a tiny app by the name of Browseo Mobile. 

Browseo, as you may know, has been an incredible success so far. As a tool for SEO-professionals, we launched the app almost a year ago to a wider audience. Before, we had developed the tool for internal means and never had a market in mind. It came to our big surprise that Browseo was wildly acknowledged by SEO-Experts all around the globe. Since its launch the response has been overwelming: we received mails from the big ones (Rand Fishkin & Garrett French - thank you so much for the great correspondance), plenty of tweets and were contacted by companies of various huge brands. 

It is a great feeling to be developing something like this for a change that an entire industry can enjoy. So one weekend, Jonathan asked me to think about a mobile app. He enjoyed using the application on his mobile phone and hence was asking if we could be doing something like this along the side… I loved it.

So I made my way through a set of android docs and got to work. I used a small library called Phonegapwhich I can highly recommend and what do you know we managed to launch it all to the general public within two days. So if you happen to have an android phone, please give it a try- it’s free!

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This came as a surprise to all of us, but Ilscipio was nominated by Initiative Mittelstand as one of the best in the field of “eCommerce”.

This is of course a huge thing for all of us and we are very grateful for all who made it possible. You can read the full article in the Ilscipio Blog.

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With ilscipio we have been quite busy the past couple of months and we have alot in the pipeline which we are now beginning to release to the general public. To start off Jonathan, our SEO expert extraordinaire, released Browseo.net  this week - a neat little tool which lets you see a website through the perspective of a search engine crawler.

The tool is really meant for search engine optimizers, who currently rely on a set of firefox plugins and costly third party providers to do their daily business. We tried to take the best from those tools and combine them in one. It is easy to use and runs very smoothly on mobile devices (in fact, if you add it as a bookmark on your iPad or iPhone, it will run just like an actual browser).

Browseo comes with a rich set of functionalities. It removes all unnecessary styling, disables javascript, prints out additional information, such as meta tags, headers and such in a nifty little sidebar, and allows you to highlight internal and external links easily.  In short: it is a great tool for Search Engine Optimizers. In the future we will enhance this further and will even add nifty little guidelines.

So what can you do with it? Well, if you are into “search engine optimization”, ie the ways of optimizing your page so that it ranks higher within search engine results, this tool gives you what you need to optimize your page itself. Couple this with offsite optimizations (linkbuilding etc.) and you are off to a good start. But have a look on your own: Browseo.net

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