Monthly Archives: December 2015

Other SEO Keyword tools – Google Keyword Planner is a little dead

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First, I got an email from Yoast and a friend (one of my web-clients too who does Short Term Missions Training and cross cultural training for businesses) asked me about keywords for his new website. I told him – “ask people who are your fans to tell you keywords. Ask your customers. You MIGHT know your keywords- but others will more likely know your keywords”. Well, after reading some books, I was correct – this is sound advice. Now – some links to help you ….

Here is my short list of instructions … I think my friend has a really good chance at rating high Continue reading →

I think making a dll in TSQL might be easier than a custom function

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What I am trying to do is feed in a small string and it will filter some values out for me. This might be easier to do in visual studio than in a TSQL function. Here are some notes on my findings.

I am simply feeding in “ABCD” and it will match the 2 letters AB and CD and filter out the corresponding values. So if I feed in ABCD from _ABWXYXCD_ITEM1_ITEM2_ITEM3_ITEM4_ then I expect the output _ABCD_ITEM1_ITEM4_

Simple right? Phhh! Not quite in TSQL. Super easy in c#, but I have never made a dll before.

Here is a start to my TSQL that would be part of a function. I thought to myself – lets stop while we are ahead… Continue reading →

Double click AutoCad Entity – event handlers in VBA – some musings and findings

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I want to double click a “goto this P&ID page” block and … have it go there. The block has the filename (mostly) in the block’s attributes. This should be a nice tool to make people’s workday nicer and save time to focus on quality – not just getting the job done. Note I did not say – to reduce hours. Reducing hours only is not helpful to anyone – not the customer, not the engineering firm.

Navisworks COM API – a little old and REALLY cantakerous. But I finally I can ‘FIND’ an object by name

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So about 4 hours of hacking and I FINALLY figured out how the whole thing is put together I want to drive Navis from Excel. Why? Because all engineers and managers use excel!. We are using Navisworks Simulate 2013 (or internally the com API is NavisworksAutomationAPI10). The key to understanding all we need to make this work is

I am using VBA – because that is native to Excel -put it in an add-in and everyone can enjoy without having to know or do anything – just click and “Trust Macros” and zoom to the part of interest.

Next, I knew one person online who seemed to ‘get it’ and use it successfully is Xiaodong Liang as well as a co-worker who worked with Navis who said – yes, look here and there (in the GUI interface). Next, know where the help files are Continue reading →