Support Does Not Scale. Customer Service Does.

Patrick McKenzie posted a fabulous article on how customer service scales. It is an excellent article to help small business owners think about how small things are important in customer service communications.

On a slightly unrelated note, it is a big mistake for most companies to outsource customer service. Customer facing processes, particularly customer service, are sources of business intelligence on customers' needs and frustrations. Great pause must be taken when considering outsourcing or ignoring vital customer processes.

A.R.M. Yourself Against SQL Injection

To effectively protect your web application from SQL injection attack, you must ARM yourself. That is, when writing applications, be sure to validate all input strings. There are three, and only three, options when given a piece of data:

• Accept it
• Reject it
• Modify it

It might seem obvious that all input must be validated. Too often, webmasters and programmers are focused on getting a working application under time pressure and may not implement the best security practices.

So what does it mean to ARM yourself? Well, one good step is to use the string cleansing functions of your programming language. Also, if a field is supposed to be a number then explictly convert it from a string to number.

I originally talked about this at the ACMSE-2006 conference in May. I will have to write up some more on the topic at a later date.

SQL Converter for Excel - version 2.0.3 BETA released

It's been two days since the beta release of SQL Converter 2 for Excel. The new version was first announced on the SQL Converter Yahoo group, then the SQL Converter download page, and now here.

"SQL Converter for Excel is a tool to convert worksheets to real SQL database tables. First, you load and model your data as a familiar spreadsheet. Once you have the fields and data the way you need them, SQL Converter will help you build a SQL database table that can then be easily loaded into your MySQL database server " (SQL Converter 2.0.3 BETA readme).

As the primary developer for the project, I am glad that the program is finally in the beta phase. It has been many years in the making as my attention has previously been divided among the web hosting business, my undergraduate coursework, and other work.

This first beta phase will last for at least a month. The feedback will be incorporated into a subsequent beta and then the final copy will be released. Early beta testers will be able to earn a free copy of the final release by materially participating in the beta. If you are interested in joining the beta testing program for SQL Converter, please let me know.