Petri Vilén Blog

Media Centre - Shell appoints Jorma Ollila as new Chairman

Jorma Ollila, the CEO and chairman of Nokia has been appointed by Shell as new Chairman. Just a few days ago Nokia informed about the new CEO of Nokia who will take Ollila's big shoes next June and yesterday we heard Mr Ollila will lead the board room of world's 4th biggest company. He's the most succesful business man in Finland and I bet he'll make himself a buck or two working for Shell. :)

Villa Airiston Aalto

Just finished a project I've been working for a while. Villa Airiston Aalto is a luxory holiday cottage in the archipelago in the Southern Finland. You propably won't understand the language but you can take a look on the design I'm pretty proud of.

Blogs as project management tools

Blogs are very suitable and scalable for a lot of uses. With a password protection you can use for example TypePad as a communication tool with a client. And all the conversations, posts and comments - and files - are archived by date and categories. But with multiple clients there comes a little problem - like I do.

I don't want to always create a new blog for every client and project. It's just not so clever to do so - yeh, I'm lazy. If I could have a decent blog api with the abilities to have several client bloggers with permits just to entries concerning them it'd be very useful. Anyone knows anything like this?

Visited Naantali

We went to Naantali today with my girlfriend Sonja. Naantali is noted as the sunniest town of Finland and yet it has kept is promise - it has never rained when I've been there, that's a sum of about seven summer days in the last four years. It's very nice little town by the sea and it has a lot to give to the tourists: fine restaurants by the harbor, a cruise on an old steam boat called Ukko-Pekka, little art shops, cafés and boutiques - and the Moomin world of course.

It was a nice day although we were there just some four hours. It has become a tradition to visit there every summer because it's so beautiful and sunny. And I just love the cliffs just by the town. I also have a nice panorama taken from the cliffs to the sea and town. There's also the Finnish president's summer house in the middle of the picture.

Business Blogging Basics

Just found a good brief about biz blogs from CorporateBlogging.Info. It's a few-page-writing about the basics of BUSINESS blogging for the corporate people - not about just personal blogging. Again a very useful piece of reading, and helps you convince your clients to blog. I think I'll translate this for my personal use.

Writing again

You may notice that I haven't been writing much in here lately - nor ever - since today. I'm having some of my gymnasium matriculation exams this autumn and the other of them is the exam of English, and I guess writing my blog in the London language can't hurt. The exam consists of listening and reading comprehensions, grammar and a piece of writing which I hope will be better if I write a bit in here every now and then.

The exams take place in 23th of September so I'll have few months to revise and train writing. My English isn't that good or how does it seem? But I also have to study quite a lot for an exam about history and society. It's important for me that I'll succeed in that exam. But maybe I'll post something about this later. Now I'm having an afternoonish breakfast.

Corporate Blogging Survey 2005

I just found a survey about Corporate Blogging created by Backbone Media. I haven't read the survey yet but it seems like a lot of useful information and case studies. It also includes a chapter How to build a successful blog which should be indeed very very interesting and useful.

I believe this is at least one of the first comprehensive surveys about blogging and especially business blogs. This is a good base to start creating credibility for corporate blogs.

I'm linkin' it

At the moment I'm working on a project called Limbus. It is a social link archiving service that allows you to storage and share your links with others. I know there is del.icio.us already but I believe in free trade and the laws of the jungle. I try to make it better than delicious and at the moment it indeed does look a lot better - almost any site does in my opinion.

The features that I've coded already (PHP+MySQL) are:

• Registering and logging in
• Adding links via the service
• Adding links via a quick bookmarklet on the site you wish to link
• Adding private links which are shown only for you when you're logged
• Quick permanent links on the side of the link page to everyday pages
• Viewing links in a chronological order
• Tagging links and tag clouds
• Deleting links
• Changing your personal settings
• Favorite channels for viewing your friends' and hot tags at the same page. This could be your home page - also includes the Quick Permanent links on it.

The trick of the software I've coded is that it is suitable for a lot more than as a link manager. It is based on a MySQL database and uses meta and extra info for both entries and user details. This means you can create almost any fields you want to attach with an entry just by adding form tags to the Smarty templates and you're done. The script handles the rest. The same thing with user details. I can add for instance fields for user's hobbies, interests, location, bio and Skype contacts just by adding the input HTML in one template file. I think it's pretty wicked, eh?

Just by now I haven't translated the service in English - just Finnish version is available, though the code is commented all in English - but I think my ambition pulls me to publish it for global markets, too.

Would you find this kind of service as welcomed?

The Guild of Blogging Experts

It's half past two at night and my tired mind created The Guild for people who work in the blogging industry. I wrote a little manifesto that I hope will be noticed and replied somehow. If it works and people are enthusiased by it, I'm very pleased.

The main idea of the Guild I suggested we should form is to collect information from blogging experts to help each other so we could better develop the blogging business and our ways to do things with our clients. I hope it'll work.

Here's the manifesto with my crappy and tired English. :)

Welcome to The Guild of Blogging Experts. I'm hoping our community of fellows who work - or are trying to ;) - in the blogging industry stick together and try to consult and advice each other. The Guild is all about centering the knowledge, know-how and the people who own them. Some of us can setup every blogging software out there and tinker them all the way, some of us know how to convince the client that they NEED to blog.

No man's an island. Let's get together. Let's start from here and see if it is getting us nowhere. The Guild is all about sharing information, case studies and the know-how anything to do with blogging or wikiing.

Advanced swearing in Finnish

Marginaali teaches how to swear in Finnish. Very comprehensive.