Often, when I tell people my profession is “Business Development” the response I get is “Sweet! You must get to travel a lot. How much fun!”

Yeah right.

Don’t get me wrong, the best part of my job is the people and you run out of people if all you ever do is deal with the people in your neighborhood (Thats kinda anti-Mr. Rodgers isnt it?). So travel is a large part of the gig.

Last week, I headed out to DC for meetings and TechCocktail. Since meeting people in a one-on-one situation is preferable, Lijit sponsored a “Hangover Breakfast” the next morning for a small group of people.

At the end of the trip, when I was sitting at Reagan National Airport, I recorded a quick video about the trip:

To recap: I left Denver at 6pm, landed in DC at 10pm, was in my hotel by 11:00pm. Woke up and had a series of meetings starting at 9am (9am, 10:30am, noon, 2pm). TechCocktail started at 6:30pm. I was back in my hotel by 1am. I woke up at 6am, went to our breakfast at 9am until noon, when I jumped in a cab and headed to the airport, where I recorded this video. Back at my house in Boulder by 5pm.

Total time in DC: ~40 hours. 4 meetings and 2 events. Not bad, and certainly not out of the ordinary.

Want to work in Business Development? Learn to love airports.

With growth comes the need for more people in order to get more done. We have been feeling the growing pains and have gone through a bit of a hiring streak as of late. Our little startup is definitely getting bigger. While our office is almost at capacity, it only means I have even more people to profile. Today’s victim recipient of this honor is Bill.

Bill is one of those guys that you immediately feel comfortable around. I’m not sure if it’s his easy smile, laid back demeanor or quick wit, but this guy fits in wonderfully around here. I asked him a couple of questions and he was kind enough to provide me with some answers.

1. What is your Lijit contribution?

I’m a software developer-I help build the software that powers Lijit. Currently, I’m working on the search engine side, but in the future I expect to work on all components-search engine, website and adserver.

2. What is your least favorite sound and why?

The theme to ‘Law & Order’ (sheer repetition). Or, the sound of the woodpecker that is currently attacking my house.

3. What turns you on (emotionally, spiritually or creatively) and why?

I really like building things: bicycles, software systems, whatever. When I get to that point where it almost works, I get obsessive about it and have trouble sleeping til it’s done.

4. What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

Bike shop owner or record store owner. I’d love to spend every day playing with my favorite toys (bikes, records) and hanging out with people that share the same interests.

5. Something you’re guilty of…

I still love Devo.

[Interesting side note: Bill and Charlie both hate 'Law & Order' and when he does open his bike shop, Bill can hire Charlie to work as a mechanic.]

It’s obvious that Bill has what it takes to hang with our company. I mean, anyone who can juggle like this…

has got to be good. We’re glad to have Bill around even though there have been a few times when he’s walked in to the office wearing his bike “tights”.

Over the weekend, one of our favorite Lijit users, Fred Wilson, posted his desire to do a blog spring cleaning.

Of course, the first thing I did was rush over to Fred’s blog and see if Lijit had made the cut. Luckily, it appears that we are one of the chosen few.

Thinking that Fred made a good point about keeping a blog clean, I headed over to my blog at Learn To Duck and started whacking widgets.

Last.fm? Gone. Instant Message widget? Outta there.

After the third whacked widget, I began to think about 1) why people should keep Lijit on their blogs (other than its the coolest widget ever!) and 2) what value do widgets bring to a blog.

Widgets, by design, should provide three things:

1. No apparent slow down of the blog page itself;
2. Real utility to the readers of the blog;
3. Real utility to the publishers themselves.

So, how does Lijit stack up?

Page Load Speed:

I asked one of our developers what specifically do we do that ensures that Lijit doesn’t slow down a blog’s load. Andy explained that we cache the javascript for a two hour period, making the javascript call (which is the main culprit in page load slow down - watch the lower left of your browser, you can watch how long it takes widgets to load) much shorter. In addition, we will always display the latest widget to a user, and then cache the javascript in the background for the next user.

Not being technical, I am guessing that means we load more quickly because the site doesn’t have to go get the widget every single time someone comes to the page.

Reader Utility:

Why is Lijit better than standard site search or Google custom search? Two specific reasons:

1. We search the publisher’s entire social graph and trusted sources.
2. While Google tries to index everything, Lijit just indexes everything that is important to you.

So the likelihood a relevant result is returned through Lijit search should be higher than if the same search was done on any standard search engine.

Also, unlike most widgets, Lijit is built to keep users on your site. Most widgets are connected to a destination site and their sole purpose is to drive traffic to the destination site. Lijit just wants to search your stuff.

Publisher Value:

For a widget to earn the right to live on my blog, it must make me a better blogger. The stats that Lijit provides is a direct example of this. One stat that I use a lot is “Results that returned zero results.” If people are searching for topics, but not finding them, then I need to write about them.

Also, because Lijit is trusted network-based search, relevant content from my blog is surfaced on other blogs that include me in their network. Basically, I get more traffic the more people trust my content, because it appears more often in the network’s search results.

Finally, because more of my social content is exposed through Lijit search, readers are more engaged and consume more content across my site and my social graph.

I certainly can understand Fred’s desire to clean up his blog, and have echoed his efforts on my own blog. Frankly, I wish more people would periodically do a widget clean up and when the time comes to determine which widgets stay and which are round filed, ask yourself three questions:

1. Does this widget slow down my blog page load?
2. Does this widget provide real value to my readers?
3. Does the widget provide real value to me as a publisher?

Hopefully, the answer in Lijit’s case is a clear yes to all three.

Last month, Eric Olson and Frank Gruber brought TECH cocktail to Boulder. Lijit was more than happy to help sponsor the event. While they were in town, the guys stopped by our offices to say hello and Frank wanted an official tour. Watch to see what happens as we cruise around the Lijit offices…

I’m excited to announce an innovation on the Lijit customer service front. You might notice a shiny new badge in the sidebar of our blog here? (If you are reading our feed, simply click out for a second to behold the greatness of the badge!) From their site…

“Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers. Customers, employees, and companies are all welcome here. Nothing is hidden, and no one is censored. Join the conversation!”

I first heard of Get Satisfaction when their CEO Thor Muller installed the Lijit wijit on his blog. During my usual outreach, I started checking out what Thor was up to and discovered Get Satisfaction. I was so impressed with the idea behind GS (Open customer relations? A public space to have conversations with your users? Why hadn’t someone thought of this before?) that I immediately signed up for an account with Lijit. However, I never did much more with the account than upload our logo and establish myself as the company representative. I figured that other people would come and do the rest.

That was that. Until I found out that the nice Get Satisfaction folks were hosting a meetup at SXSW…and they were serving breakfast tacos. (That’s a picture of Lane Becker, the GS President standing by all the delicious tacos!) Besides the necessary hangover nutrition they provided, Lane, Thor and Amy also gave me lots of information about how to cultivate Lijit’s presence on GS. It turns out that I forgot to tell people about it. Whoops! Thanks to all at GS for helping out a newbie community gal.

And now, look at me! My how times have changed. When you click on the Get Satisfaction badge, it will take you straight to the Lijit account. I’ve started to add some of the questions that I frequently answer from users and hope to continue building it out over time. However, since the whole point of Get Satisfaction is about fostering the customer community, your input is most appreciated. Ask a question, report a problem or share an idea. I’m there and I’m listening. Don’t forget that you play a HUGE part in getting satisfaction out of this site.

One additional note: once you start digging into GS, you’ll realize that there are many other companies striving to open up the conversation. Some of my favorites in there are Timbuk2, Apple and other Boulder startups Socialthing!, Intense Debate, and Filtrbox. Sign up and start getting heard!

Derek Greentree, one of our Senior Software Engineers, has agreed to share his thoughts on what he does here at Lijit. You can read the first part of this series here.

When you first start optimizing a website, there are many questions to answer. What are you optimizing for? Raw speed? Maximum concurrency? How will you determine the bottlenecks in your way? How will you test the optimizations you make to be sure they were real and not placebos? How will your optimizations scale? And finally, how much time are you willing to put in for what amount of return? A famous quote among software development people, coined by Donald Knuth, states that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Web applications are no exception.

First, you’ll need an environment where you can test your changes. You should have a test environment anyway, but this environment will exist mostly for benchmarking, which means you’ll be putting load on it, so you may want to have a separate environment just for load testing. Since you’re going to be deploying your optimizations eventually to your production servers, this environment needs to mimic your production architecture as closely as possible. Don’t load test on a machine that serves its content from a network share, when your production servers serve that content from local disk.

When you have an environment ready, your next step is to benchmark what you currently have. Many tools exist for this, but at Lijit, for website benchmarking, we use Siege. After a siege run, you’ll have data such as how many requests completed, the distribution of HTTP status codes, and average number of transactions per second. Be statistically smart about this - run several tests and average them together to get a baseline reading. Try to max out your environment; knowing when your overhead runs out in your current architecture is powerful knowledge. And, if you can max out your environment during the test, you can be sure the limits you’re hitting aren’t limits of the load testers, but the thing being tested. Try to hit your site in a browser during the load test so you can see what the user experience will be like in a high load situation. Anticipate problems before they occur.

Once you have these baseline numbers, you can test optimizations by running the same sequence of load tests and comparing the results. You can see if the various status codes coming back from the test changed. For example, if you deploy an optimization and start getting a lot of HTTP 500 instead of HTTP 200, you broke something.

Getting a good benchmarking environment setup is the essential first step to trying to optimize your site. In the next article, we’ll talk about some basic things to look at when approaching optimization, including whether you need to do it at all, and some specific examples of problems and solutions we’ve encountered at Lijit.

One of our publishers took a trip and was kind enough to bring us along. Here is Calamity Jen strolling around the International Market Place in Honolulu. It helps us all to sleep at night knowing that someone is doing the hard job of evangelizing in Hawaii when our CEO isn’t there.

On April 1st (no foolin’), Lijit celebrated a milestone around our office. We hit a million page views that day and couldn’t wait to share our success with the rest of the Boulder startup community. At our CEO’s insistence, an impromptu party was thrown together to fully commemorate the event. Tweets went out and at the appointed time, we had about 20 people gathered in our office to help us with all the extra alcohol that we had sitting around the kitchen.

We marked the occasion with a shot and it was decided that when we hit 2 million, there will be two shots. Yikes. After the fact, we realized that it was also a very informal office warming, since we never actually had one of those. (You can see a video of the office tour that Todd gave to Colorado Startups here.) It was a fun time and good chance to say thanks to the folks that have helped us along the way.

And a big thanks go out to one of our newest Lijit publishers and the bearer of delicious tidings…Cupcakes Take The Cake. Besides posting pictures of amazing cupcakes, they also have a directory of where to buy cupcakes all over the country. You won’t find too many recipes, but I don’t find that problematic because sometimes, you just want to look at a cupcake. (Tends to be the lower calorie option as well…) We are excited to be helping out cupcake aficionados everywhere by providing a valuable search tool that serves up relevant and tasty results. Check out their blog for immediate help with sweet tooth cravings!

(This post was crossposted at I Quit for Lijit.)

The BlogHer Business conference consisted of information, smart women and lots of discussion surrounding marketing to bloggers. One of the (many) multi-talented people I met at the conference was Nichelle Stephens. We first started talking at the sk*rt meetup and then continued our conversation over the course of the next two days.

Besides being wicked smart, Nichelle is also busy. She maintains three blogs and is involved in many projects. In her spare time (??), she hosts a stand-up comedy show and offered to represent me if I should ever decide to schedule an East Coast tour. A mere eight hours after we finished talking, she had installed the Lijit wijit on two of her three blogs. (I told you she was smart!)

The first is Keeping Nickels, a blog about business, accounting and finance.With tax tips, business ideas and fun suggestions to improve your productivity, this blog is chock full o’ knowledge.

The second blog that Nichelle maintains is Ladies Who Launch. As the name suggests, this blog “provides content and community to help women start and expand their businesses and creative ventures”. Full of information for and about female entrepreneurs, you can’t help but be inspired after reading it. (Nichelle was very excited that Lijit came in pink!)

The third blog that Nichelle helps with is one of my favorites, Cupcakes Take The Cake. While she hasn’t installed Lijit on that one yet, once she does, you know I’ll be doing an indepth post about it. I mean, considering my ongoing love affair, could there be anything better than a Lijit cupcake blog?