In a chaotic web world full of websites, it is a very good idea and a trend to show the Google Maps location to your business on the contact page, homepage or somewhere on the website. Local business can greatly benefit from it.

If picture is worth a thousand words, Google maps is certainly worth a million words. Now, as this seems a fairly good idea, it may seem as easy as copy and pasting Google maps screen shot and cutting it out on Photoshop.

Someone said, “If you want to make a person do something, sometimes it is only necessary to make that thing difficult” and trust me Google maps is not cut and paste easy as it seems and this only makes it interesting enough for us to pursue. (well if you don’t use iframe; which I am not a big fan of)

Here’s the JavaScript Google Code that you can paste it into your webpage that currently will show 99 Dollar Webmaster location.

Now, all you need to do is to change the latitude, longitude field in the line var center = new GLatLng(41.229636877216485, -96.1358642578125); and keep your own latitude and longitude.

Now how do you find your latitude longitude?

Visit this website of Steve Morse and convert your physical address into latitude and longitude and replace it on the above line.

I know this is just out of the blue. It is not a project or anything. Just today I was explaining our developer how Agile works and it has become almost the de-facto methodology replacing waterfall. He seemed to buy into what I was saying. I told him how we need to embrace change rather that fight change and how you add value to your product if you identify what works and what does not, ultimately create a product that meets what the customer may not have envisioned in the first place, but in fact exceeds that. Basically I was explaining him how you start to work on version 1.0 and at the end of it, you might actually have a version 2.0.

I saw that we don’t have any mention of Agile in our corporate website. The designer found an image that actually had a mention of it, among other things. I just liked that image so much. 🙂 Our client seemed to be interested in how we plan our products. I think Agile works for smaller projects also. Basically, if we have the mindset of change is acceptable and re-work is actually refactoring (making better) and we can make clients understand that as well (because more hours also mean better product and little more money as well) we could do Agile for small projects as well.

As far as a tool to do this, there is rally. Community version is free to use for 10 people. But we can manage only 1 project in community edition. It is hosted on rally’s on server. Another tool is JIRA with greenhopper plugin. It is one of Atlassian tools. Other good tools from Atlassian family are Cruicible for peer review and bamboo for continuous integration. These other tools make sense only for Enterprise Level application. I am sure most of us are familiar with these and other tools as well.

I am just suggesting that we can have a mention of Agile in the corporate site and our practices in creating software. While we may not do this immediately and this may seem like something to resist at first because of the load it puts on us, on a longer term, it should have a lot of benefits. I can spread the word like we do all this in our office. You can come and join us. Young people here just love to be doing something smart so that they can market themselves later. Just one example.

I will stop writing here. Gotta do some work.

Thanks.