Started on a new project: StudentSign

Last year, my son spent a year abroad on a highschool in Canada. We had to sign many documents that were emailed to us, especially because he was 16 at the time he went to Canada, so his parents' consent was needed often, for instance for a weekend trip around Canada, or a school canoeing trip.

Signing documents was a tedious process: print the document, sign on paper, scan the signed document and send an email back. It must be very time-consuming for student exchange organisations in this way, having to deal with all the emails with documents from students, parents and schools. It occured to me that there must be an easier way: digital signatures on documents stored in the cloud!

After a little bit of investigation I decided to build a platform on top of an existing digital signature platform. In this way, it is easier to get started and I can focus on the use case for signing documents for exchange students instead of reinventing the wheel by developing a new digital signature platform.

Current state of the project is that a sandbox experimental environment exists and that I am going to conduct interviews with organisations to validate the idea and find out if organisations really need this solution.  We can use the sandbox to experiment with documents, work flow and signatures.

A landing page with an overview of the project has been created:  https://studentsign.net

Added project costs tracking

On request of a client I added project costs tracking to https://projecthours.net. Administrators can add hourly rates to users. In reports, totals costs per project or activity are displayed, based on hourly rates.  I hope that with this new and easy-to-use feature, Project Hours will be useful to even more companies..

Marketing is important, created improved landing pages

Project Hours has been online for a few years and we have a group of loyal costumers. To attract more customers I realized we must improve our presence on the web. So I created landing pages with an attractive design, a Dutch version and an English version. The Project Hours Google ads will link to the new pages from now on.

Next is to work on a request from a customer: add hourly rates to users so users can calculate project costs. That's it for now, Bert-Jan.

SQL temporal tables to collect invoice data for customers

Projcct Hours Time Tracking has been online now for over a year and it is time to send out the first invoices to customers. I realized that in order to correctly calculate the amounts to charge for users I will need historical data, i.e. when did users start or when where they set to inactive.

To record historical data I decided to use SQL temporal tables. I could have used database triggers to record table changes but after reading up on SQL temporal tables I decided to give it a try. Here is a good link to learn about this feature: SQL Server Temporal Tables Recipes .

One thing I like very much about temporal tables is that there are special queries that make querying on time intervals much easier, for instance you can do a query like

SELECT email, SysStartTime, SysEndTime FROM AspNetusers
FOR SYSTEM_TIME FROM @StartDate TO @EndDate
WHERE Active = 1 

This will retrieve all records with changes in a certain time period. Writing this yourself in SQL is more complicated. A good article explaining how to query temporal tables: How to query data on versioned temporal tables in SQL

This is what tables with history look like in SQL Server Management Studio:

That's it for now,
Bert-Jan

ProjectHours needs online marketing

ProjectHours has been online for a few years. It is reliable and there are some happy customers. Now the time has come to pay attention to expanding the customer base. I think the best way would be to look for cooperation with people that have experience with online marketing and support. My knowledge is primarily technical and I think it will be benficial for ProjectHours if I start working with someone with online marketing expertise. I have posted this message on LinkedIn as well. Let's find out if I can find some interesting people to work with!

Updating Windows 10 UWP app, added a privacy policy

I am adding the time feature to the Project Hours Windows 10 app. All is going well but I realized a really had to create a privacy policy because time management data is confidential information. That is why Project Hours has a privacy policy now! It is very basic, but it is a start..

Project Hours available on Google worldwide!

Multi-language site

So far, Project Hours was only available in the Netherlands. The English language was supported, but in a way that Google did not like, and therefore there was no real presence in the rest of the world.

I finally managed to sort out this issue. The most important fact is that a multilanguage site only works well in Google if the url contains the language of the site (i.e.  https://projecthours.net/nl)  and the web pages must contain certain tags that indicate in what (other) languages the page is available.

Project Hours now works as follows:

• https://projecthours.net :   this links determines the language of the browser and redirects to the appropriate language specific url (see below)
• https://projecthours.net/nl:  this link displays Dutch UI and content 
• https://projecthours.net/en: this link displays English UI and content

Simple, but it took me a while to get it right. The pages must contain the following tags so Google knows what the language scheme of the site is so the appropriate language versions of the site can be returned in Google search results.

The following tags are included in every page for every language:

Visibility on the Internet

To attract more potential customers, I created Google advertisements for each language with Google Adwords Express. The ads link to the appropriate language url (/en or /nl).  This is important, ads will never work with generic urls that display either Dutch or English! The ads are displayed according to regional language, so in Engish-speaking countries people will see the English ad, NL users see the Dutch ad of course.

Mind you, this is not for free, makes one realize how powerful Google is.. You pay and you are visible on the web, or you do not pay and it is very difficult to be visible..

With my Google account I can check user statistics for these ads.
This sunday morning, there was one click on the Dutch ad and 80 (!) clicks on the English ad.

Also note that all clicks come from smartphones!
That's all for now, hopefully Project Hours will have some international customers soon!
Bert-Jan