Did you know that changing your geographic target in your GWT site settings can have an impact on your rankings? The impact can be positive in one regard and negative in the other:

Google explains the Geographic Target setting (more info here):

If your site targets users in a particular location, you can provide us with information that will help determine how your site appears in search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region. If you don’t want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted. (Note: If you do this, your site will probably receive less traffic from Google.)

Example #1:  A USA-Based Site Catering to the USA and Canada

If the owner of this website were to set her site’s setting to target users in the United States there is a very real possibility she will be limiting her visibility on Google.ca’s “Pages from Canada” search; where part of her clientele is searching. On the flip side it is quite possible she would increase her foothold on USA-based searches; searches on Google.com. In this scenario it  is best NOT to set her site’s Geographic Target (totally leave it alone) which will mean stiffer competition; a necessary sacrifice since she is targeting two geographic markets.

Example #2: A Canadian-Based Site Catering Exclusively to Canadians

In this scenario the Canadian site owner is targeting Canadians only. As a result, she should set “Canada” in her site’s Geographic Target setting in order to benefit from the possibility of higher rankings on Google for Canadian searches. She could end up having less top rankings on Google.com (vs. Google.ca) but that is not a concern for her so the decision is a simple one.

So What About the Unlisted Setting?

I do not use the Unlisted setting because, in my opinion, it provides unnecessary information to Google. After all, if you just leave the Geographic Target setting alone instead of choosing “Unlisted” the impact should be the same without introducing yet another variable to consider if your rankings falter; the more variables the harder it can be to determine the culprit that triggered a lower ranking.

If you would like more information on the Geographic Target setting here is a video from a Google engineer:

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Intuit Brainstorm actually the result of a project that started during unstructured time. It is designed to better manage innovation efforts begun within organizations of 500 or more employees to properly leverage its crowd sourcing capabilities. Intuit has supported employee innovation for some time. Until Intuit Brainstorm, they used a structured database to track the efforts. This tool was not fully used and, when used, it was updated only about a third of time.

Intuit Brainstorm was designed by employees operating as innovators, rather than as a tool for senior management to track the status of efforts. It was designed to meet the needs of these innovators. It enables innovators to build a team, get help, grow ideas, and collaborate. As a byproduct, it also tracks the status of efforts, but in a more accurate manner than its predecessor because of the increased participation. Here is a screen shot of the home page.

Currently, there are over 200 ideas preparing for release, representing a wide variety of innovations for both internal use and the marketplace. There are over 4,000 comments on these ideas. One of the new products is ViewMyPaycCheck which allows the employees of small businesses to view the details behind their pay check in the same detailed manner often offered by large organizations with comprehensive HR systems. This new product was developed in three months through Brainstorm.

Within Brainstorm there is an auto-generated activity stream where anyone can see comments on ideas in the pipeline in a real time manner. You start the process by adding you idea by adding your idea through a lightweight submission form. Brainstorm will instantly show related ideas to your idea upon submission. So you can connect with those team members.

Team members can edit the details of a registered idea and others can provide comments. These comments can start a threaded conversation. Contributors take these comments seriously and Brainstorm added the ability to edit comments at the request of users. You can recruit people and people can also request to join a team. The system also makes recommendations on who might be a best fit for the team based on their activity and tags within the system. You can place help wanted ads asking for help. You can also get updates on the tags you follow.

They added Outlook integration to allow you to reach out to other employees and bring them into the Intuit Brainstorm network. The system also indentifies top contributors to provide recognition. You can see the most active, top commentors, and top taggers over the last week, last month or all time. Adding this “leaderboard” increased comments by thirty percent. Brainstorm increased participation in innovation by 500% and increased ideation by 1,000% at Intuit. Here is a sample leaderboard.

Senior executives are able to track the thousands of ideas by such factors as: area, most active, and other statistics. There is also a comprehensive search. You can find both ideas and people who might be able to help with them. I think this is a great tool and I look forward to its arrival on the marketplace. Innovation needs more than creativity to grow. This tool was built from the innovator’s perspective by innovators so it has the right focus and approach.

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Yesterday, while I was immersing myself back into my Twitville, now that I have found a method on how I can continue using Twitter as one of my Personal Knowledge Management tools, I bumped into what seems to be the latest take from the Did You Know? series of videos. Already on version #4. You can go and check it out by clicking on the direct link over here, or, alternatively, see the embedded version below:

As ever, this updated episode, from just a couple of days ago, is as provocative as you can imagine, with regards to our own use of social software tools out there on the Internet. The video clip lasts for 4:45 minutes and I can certainly recommend you to take a look and go through it. Lots and lots of new, fresh data, that will help confirm, once again, how there is no way back; how we are far too much immersed in our overall efforts of embracing this new set of social tools that make up the Social Web. Our Web.

The main overall theme from the Did You Know 4.0 video is eventually convergence. And what I really enjoyed this time around was how all of the new data presented has got a context, a success story, that rather we can relate to, or we may have been exposed to all over the place. This time around, there are plenty of snippets, and golden nuggets, throughout the video that will not only make you just go WOW!, but also go more along the lines of “Yeah, I was there!” Or, “Yeah, I saw / experienced that! Did you?” Just brilliant!

Like I said, if you have got 4:45 minutes don’t let it pass by just like that. Watch the video and enjoy going through a new reality. A reality we are all part of. A reality that, whether we like it or not, is starting to shape, in a big way, the way the world operates. And social software is right in the center of it! Yes, this is the kind of video clip that we can show to all of those skeptics who still think that Web 2.0 and Social Computing is a fad… Really? Well, maybe not … Judge for yourself.

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The advent of internet (more importantly broadband), and its extensive use in day to day life gave birth to the concept called Cloud computing. Cloud computing can be described as a dynamic way of computing over the internet where the resources are virtual to the user. This concept is a boon for many Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs), for the reason that they are able to avail software and hardware services without actually having to buy or maintain the entire setup.

We shall have a look towards Software as a Service model which is a part of cloud computing technology.

What is S-a-a-S?

S-a-a-S is a software deployment model focusing on providing licensed services of an application to a customer as per demand. SaaS vendors make the application available to the customers over the internet which can be accessed through a web browser, ruling out the need to install a physical instance of the application on the customers PC.

Today, SaaS is a phenomenon existing throughout various market verticals. Predominantly used in the technological industry, SaaS has also spread its roots into other market verticals such as – Financial services, Media, Government amongst various others.

Here is a play out of the ticks and crosses of SaaS;

3 advantages of a S-a-a-S subscription

1. Cost effective — A lot of startups and SMBs face a problem of coming up with the implementation costs by buying a complete licensed application, which by itself would bulk up the expenditures. SaaS helps them with it’s pay-as-you-use and use-as-much-you-need approach, hence reducing the setup and maintenance costs. This also trickles down to the fact that the company would have a faster on-boarding and access to the latest technology. If at any point the company decides a change in focus or direction, there is always the flexibility of terminating the service from the vendor or upgrading the current plan.
2. Multi-tenant Architecture — It’s like a multi-story housing society which houses studio appartments for students and the top floor has a penthouse for one who’s graduated to house himself in! They all however enjoy the common resources alike – lifts, water supply, broadband connection and more! As a distinct feature of SaaS, there is a single underlying application code, which is made accessible to any number of customers with each one able to apply a desired customization to meet specific requirements, without making any changes to the base code of the application. This architecture also ensures a single update to the application to reflect across all the customers.
3. Easy to maintain — Local installation of an application would require a dedicated IT team maintaining the application, adding to the capital investments. This would be taken care of by the vendor providing the service for monthly monetary benefits.

Grey areas of S-a-a-S

SaaS does not always fit the bill with all types of business needs. The cost-effectiveness of SaaS may have to be revisited in such situations.

1. Integration issues — Businesses today require a lot of inputs from various sources which typically range over multiple applications. This means integration of multiple applications sufficing different business needs. SaaS may fall short in such conditions as the model is fairly inclined towards isolated working of applications.
2. Security — There has always been a hype about implementing SaaS in context with the reason that it results in confidential company data to be exposed to the vendor. There would be a mutual company code which forbids the vendor from revealing data to any outsider. But there is a need to monitor the channel of communication through which the application is accessed over the internet, and also implementation of data encryption adds to the ballooning of costs incurred.
3. Pricing — SaaS vendors charge the customers based on the type of services requested on a monthly or quarterly basis reducing the initial cost burden to a large extent. But in the long run this turns out to be a costly affair. And constant developments and customizations would only add to the costs.

It is clear that SaaS being helpful to many SMB’s is still not every business player’s cup of tea. Having said that, with more and more businesses adopting the outsourcing model, SaaS would come across as an attractive prospect. But like any other business decision careful analysis is required before implementing SaaS to determine the productive values that could be derived through it.

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One of the initial players in the enterprise microsharing space is Socialcast who we have covered before (see Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison, Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise, and Socialcast Adds iPhone and Gmail Plug-ins).

Last week Socialcast released a priority broadcast message capability that gives designated participants authority to elevate need-to-know messages to a community in real time, separating this information from regular traffic and denoting its importance. Broadcast messages appear prominently in the network, highlighted with unique colors and triggering instant email alerts of a new broadcast.

This new capability was developed from customer comments and it is has been tested in over thirty companies. Organizations have broadcast emergency alerts, quarterly messages from the President, key promotions and congratulatory announcements; intermittent bursts relevant to everyone receiving the signal.

We like the idea of bringing important messages inside the microsharing environment because it reaches people where they are, through mobile devices and desktops alike. It also demonstrates leadership support and purposeful engagement with the tools. If done right, it may entice more participation from people throughout the organization because conversation happens around the broadcast within the stream, rather than in corporate email silos.

For this feature to influence the culture in 2.0 ways, it should be the content, not the sender’s seniority, that determines when this capability is used. It should broadcast important messages from those holding the corporate vision alongside those outside the executive suite. People at many organizational levels are privy to news that affects everyone and they should have the power to use it.
Someone in the transportation department may learn of a roadway accident that will have an impact on everyone leaving work. An ad hoc speaker in the auditorium could be announced by someone in community relations or PR. An imminent change to social media policy could be shared by a member of the peer council no matter their department. They each have a real reason to use the system and should have a mechanism to do so. At the same time, it should not be over used or it will appear as spam.

Senior leaders should likewise demonstrate they are listening to what employees are saying. They should also post regular messages, not only broadcasts, showing they want to be part of the ongoing conversation with all levels of the enterprise. This will demonstrate real engagement and allow them to gain the full benefit of these tools.

Broadcasting is one examples of an emergent capability not appropriate for use on the broader web, that can work well within the enterprise. This feature would not even be relevant to Twitter because users have access to only one follower pool and the system depends on its distributed nature. In an enterprise you can have layers of participation and parallel systems for those who aren’t microsharing yet. This feature can provide a greater sense of community within the enterprise as all levels of the organization can now respond to breaking broadcasted news through a channel that provides greater collaboration than email. We look forward to more innovations like this one within the market as it adapts to the needs of the enterprise.

This post was co-written with Marcia Conner. It first appeared on Pistachio Consulting’s Touchbase blog. Marcia is an enterprise learning and social media analyst and a 20-year veteran of the enterprise technology market. She writes the Fast Company Learn at All Levels blog and is Senior Enterprise Strategist for Pistachio Consulting. I have great respect for Pistachio and we have started to do some work together in the enterprise space.

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Step 1: Forms

Many website registration forms ask for a visitors date of birth and often their title (mr or mrs) or gender (male or female).

Example user registration form:

If we know the users selected title (for example Mr = Male, Mrs = Female) we can determine the users gender.

Step 2: Passing Information to Google Analytics

This step may require a small change to your website (javascript) in order to pass the information into your Google Analytics account.

Example of how the information is passed to Google Analytics:

pageTracker._setVar(‘Male18-24′);

Viewing the reports: In your Google Analytics account go to Visitors – User Defined report.

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From Cloud Computing

In this model, there are many requirements in the architecture that are specific to security, compliance, reliability, and scalability and are independent of the business functionality that will be deployed in the cloud. If you look at the image above, you will see many different endpoints where data moves from one cloud to the next, to SaaS solutions, and between virtual data centers. I call this the Cloud Infrastructure.

These requirements are also critical to the flow of data through out the cloud. Encryption, transformation, replication, backup/recovery, and many other tasks are key deliverables within any good cloud architecture. Then comes the services that transport business logic in and out of the cloud while inheriting the cloud infrastructure and data services that should be built for reuse. The following image shows a simple view of the separate performance layers of the cloud architecture and the order in which they should be tested.

From Cloud Computing

The first thing to do is test the performance of your cloud vendor(s). Looking at the hybrid cloud image above, I would test the flow of data from the different endpoints. At this point there is no need to worry about encryption, transformation, business logic, etc. When testing the Cloud Infrastructure you should be testing the performance of the platform that the cloud vendor is providing. Do not add variables that are specific to the business problems you are trying to solve. For a hybrid solution, test the private and public clouds separately. Your tests should run for several hours with varying size loads. You need to ensure that the cloud can sustain heavy loads, handle concurrency, and consistently deliver solid performance for all transactions. Testing at this level will also help identify configuration and optimization opportunities for each cloud vendor. Once both the public and private cloud infrastructure is tested, then test the intercloud connectivity between them. Make sure this connection is not a bottleneck.

Once you are satisfied with the performance of your hybrid cloud, it is time to analyze the impact of encryption, transformation, data replication, and the various ways that data is being manipulated to address security, compliance, reliability, and scalability requirements. It is critical to understand the impact of these requirements on the overall performance of the system. If you skip this step, finding performance issues later can be like finding a needle in a haystack. People can waste a lot of time searching for performance issues in the business logic when the problem may be in the data layer. Manipulating data can be resource intensive and a potential bottle neck of the overall architecture. Spend some time testing this layer before overlaying it with business logic.

So now you feel good about the Cloud Infrastructure and you have iterated through the design of all of the data manipulation requirements. You now have a solid foundation for your business services. You can focus all of your energy on the the performance of your services. Test each service individually first. Then test the flow of data through the various combinations of service calls that the system is expected to perform. Put these services through rigorous testing and measure their performance for load, sustainability, concurrency, etc.

After the business logic has met the performance requirements, it is time to test the systems as a whole. Up to this point you have tested the system at different layers within the architecture and at different components within the layers. Now it is time to test the system holistically and in the eyes of the end user. It would be very expensive to find performance issues from the lower levels of the architecture at this point. That is why I recommend the layered approach to performance testing. What I also like about this approach is that you can start testing very early in the life cycle. For example, you can test the performance of the Cloud Infrastructure way before the development team delivers the business logic. This approach is iterative and agile and aims at removing performance risks earlier in the lifecycle thus reducing the risk of project delays.

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Factual and anecdotal evidence confirms that IT investments are inherently risky. On average, about 70% of all IT related projects fail to meet their on-time, on-budget objectives or to produce the expected business results. In one KPMG survey, 67% of the companies who participated said that their program/project management function was in need of improvement. Why? A number of leading factors for project failure were suggested by the survey, including the “usual suspects”: unreasonable project timelines, poorly defined requirements, poor scope management, and unclear project objectives. Granted, all of these factors can play a role in project success. But are they the cause or project failure, or just a symptom of some larger issue? In this article, we will discuss that the root cause for many of these common failure points is really the ability to lead projects, not just manage them.

Leadership: Missing in Action

One would think that the proliferation of certified PMPs would have increased IT project success rates. However, given the research previously cited, this does not appear to be the case. Certainly, PMPs are cognizant of the processes, techniques and tools that should be used to manage projects and have documented project management experience. We contend that certification—the PMP—is indeed important, but that it alone is not sufficient for successful project management. Having been called on to rescue and turnaround numerous IT projects, we have had the opportunity to analyze why a project gets in trouble. As we looked at several of these troubled projects we realized that there appears to be a common link: leadership is missing in action. That is, while the project manager may be focused on what needs to be done and may well know how to do it, he or she may not be acting as a project leader. While certification is a good foundation for knowing what to do, it takes true leadership to drive complex projects to successful conclusions.

The PMI Body of Knowledge specifies five process groups for project management: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Controlling and Monitoring, and Closing. These five areas are consistent with the functions of management within an organization. Managers are responsible for planning, organizing, directing, resourcing, and controlling for the purpose of achieving organizational goals. The certified project manager should be able to demonstrate competent management of the nine PMI knowledge areas: project integration, scope, time, quality, cost, human resources, communications, risks, and procurement.

However, the ability to manage each of these project areas still may not produce successful project outcomes. Our experience on client sites for both government and commercial clients reveals that project leadership, not just management, is the critical differentiator. Project management without project leadership is likely to result in project failure.

Certainly, it is not our intent to redefine leadership. It’s already been defined as the ability to affect human behavior to accomplish a mission or the act of influencing a people to set and achieve goals. Volumes of business and strategy texts have been written about this critical competency. Check out your local book store and you will see numerous titles identifying leadership styles, leadership characteristics, and inspirational leadership topics. Some authors or practitioners have made the point that leadership and management represent two different skill sets and that either an individual has the characteristics and skills necessary for leadership or those more appropriate for management. Others have suggested that leadership is knowing where to go and that management is all about how to actually get there. We find this dichotomy troubling and perhaps at the heart of our IT project management failure rate. Instead, we believe that not only can project managers act as leaders, but in fact that they must provide leadership if projects are to achieve results.

A Closer Look at Project Leadership

Project leadership is all about shaping a team of diverse individuals (employers and contractors, some from different organizations) into a force that produces measureable project results. At our company, we recruit and develop project managers who can provide the leadership that complex IT projects require. At a basic level, project managers must be able to set the vision, define success, and determine the measurements of success. Then they must inspire, persuade, and lead the project team.

We argue that for project managers to become project leaders, they must demonstrate competence in three essential skill areas. Successful project leadership involves:

• Leading courageously

• Influencing others

• Acting with resilience

Leading courageously is a critical competency because large IT projects have a huge resource pool representing different organizations and job roles. These resources may see their tasks slightly differently and may not all be aligned with project goals. Furthermore, the sheer number of issues and risks may make it difficult to zero in on those tasks that are most critical. In this kind of environment, leading courageously can easily make the difference between success and failure. Leading courageously means clarifying what is important and taking a stand to resolve important issues. It also requires driving hard on the right issues and confronting problems promptly. Finally, courageous project leadership means being decisive and challenging others to make tough choices.

Influencing others is an essential competency for most projects, but especially for those with large project teams, numerous stakeholders, and different user communities. Influencing others means giving compelling reasons for ideas and suggestions and winning support from others, both within the project team and in the user and stakeholder community. It also requires the ability to negotiate persuasively and get others to take action. Finally, it means influencing the decisions of upper management, whether within your own organization or the client organization.

Acting with resilience is critical to project leadership and is especially important when projects are at critical stages or in trouble. When a project manager acts with resilience, he or she keeps the focus on project goals and refuses to give up. Sometimes it means being tough enough, in the face of adversity, to fight the good fight and get agreement on issues that threaten to derail the project. Or it may simply require being flexible enough to negotiate solutions that keep driving for the goal of project success, when others might give up and accept defeat.

Summing It Up

In this article we’ve presented the case that project leadership is the differentiating factor in project success, especially on large, mission-critical projects. Knowing what to do and being able to manage the nine knowledge areas identified by PMI is not enough on complex projects.

Successful project managers must lead courageously and be able to influence others to resolve some of the most critical problems that projects experience. And to paraphrase Churchill, they must never, ever give up; they must act with resilience even in the face of conflict and problems. To experience the project success that investments demand, assign project managers who can act as project leaders to your mission-critical IT projects.

A lot of things can happen to a blog over time and blog maintenance is a task that probably doesn’t get done as often as it should. When is the last time you tested your comments? Or filled out your own forms? Maybe looked at the site in Internet Explorer?!

It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at your site, as others do, from time to time to ensure everything is working, and displaying, as it should.

Here are a few things to help with your blog tune up and spring cleaning.

1. Upgrade your software.  If you aren’t running the latest version of your blog software, you may be missing out on features, security patches or bug fixes.  Upgrading could make for an improvement in performance for both blog authors and visitors.
2. Upgrade your plug-ins.  Just like with blog software, the plug-ins you run get updated from time to time to fix, update and improve.  Check those plug-ins to see if anything needs to be updated.
3. Remove plug-ins.  Sometimes a plug-in is a great idea, but you find out over time that you don’t really use it.  So why not remove it?  The less your blog has to load, the more responsive it’ll be.
4. Test in other browsers.  Take a look at your stats and see what the top browsers and platforms are to your site.  Then test your blog in those browsers to see if everything works as it should.  People sometimes look at everything through their browser, but forget that there are many others out there.
5. Test on smaller, or bigger, screens.  Every computer screen is different.  Some are bigger, some smaller; some have high resolutions while other low.  Again, it’s good to look in the analytics software to see what most people are running and check out the blog as they see it.  You may be surprised at how some designs break.
6. Fill out forms.  Contact forms, comments forms, lead forms, all should be tested to ensure they are working properly.  But don’t stop there, whom does the form go to internally and what’s the process to follow-up with the email?
7. Check 404 error page.  If someone does follow an invalid URL, what do they see?  Do they see your blog with a nice error message?  Or a generic server error page that may turn them away?
8. Check Google Webmaster Tools.  If you’ve got your blog verified, check with Google to see if they have any issues crawling your site.  You don’t want to miss out any traffic.
9. Search your blog.  Doesn’t matter for what, but you want to ensure the search is still working properly and the results page looks good.
10. Click around.  Just take a stroll through your blog.  Look at archives, random posts, and categories, whatever.  If something jumps out at you as an issue, then address it.
11. Check your title tags and meta descriptions.  Are they still optimized?  Do they look good?  If someone reads them, would it draw them into the site?
12. Check your external links. Just because the sites you were linking to six months ago worked fine doesn’t mean they still do.  Double check any blogroll or other links in your blog template to be sure they still go where they should.  You just want to be sure you know where you are sending your visitors.

Overall, it’s a good idea to take a step back once a year, or month, to look at your blog from a different perspective.  There are a lot of things that change over time and if you’re not looking for them, you may not know what’s really going on with your blog.

What other things should be checked?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Suppose we want to see how fast Yahoo can handle 100 requests, with a maximum of 10 requests running concurrently:

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.yahoo.com/

It will then generate output as follows:

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 1.889 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1003100 bytes
HTML transferred: 949000 bytes
Requests per second: 52.94 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 188.883 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 18.888 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 518.62 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 57 59 1.7 59 64
Processing: 117 126 7.5 124 162
Waiting: 57 62 7.0 60 98
Total: 175 186 8.0 184 224
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 184
66% 186
75% 187
80% 188
90% 192
95% 203
98% 216
99% 224
100% 224 (longest request)

As you can see this is very useful information, it returned requests at a rate of 52.94 requests per second, the fastest request was 175ms, the slowest 224ms

So the next time you are tempted to whip out cfloop and GetTickCount to do some benchmarking on a piece of code, give ab a try, it’s easy to use, and will yield much more realistic results.

Because ab supports concurrency, this has two big advantages over cfloop. The main one is that it allows you to test how your code runs concurrently, this can help you identify any possible race conditions, or locking issues. Concurrent requests are also a more natural simulation of load than loops.

Suppose you wanted to test multiple url’s concurrently as well? You can do this by creating a shell script, with multiple ab calls. At the end of each line place an & this makes the command run in the background, and lets the next command start execution. You will also want to redirect the output to a file for each url using > filename For example:

#!/bin/sh
ab -n 100 -c 10 http://127.0.0.1:8300/test.cfm > test1.txt &
ab -n 100 -c 10 http://127.0.0.1:8300/scribble.cfm > test2.txt &

The usage info from the ab version installed on my Mac (v2.3) is listed below. As you can see there are many useful options for outputting results, and sending additional data in the request.

Usage: ab [options] [http[s]://]hostname[:port]/path
Options are:
    -n requests Number of requests to perform
    -c concurrency Number of multiple requests to make
    -t timelimit Seconds to max. wait for responses
    -b windowsize Size of TCP send/receive buffer, in bytes
    -p postfile File containing data to POST. Remember also to set -T
    -T content-type Content-type header for POSTing, eg.
        'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
        Default is 'text/plain'
    -v verbosity How much troubleshooting info to print
    -w Print out results in HTML tables
    -i Use HEAD instead of GET
    -x attributes String to insert as table attributes

    -y attributes String to insert as tr attributes
    -z attributes String to insert as td or th attributes
    -C attribute Add cookie, eg. 'Apache=1234. (repeatable)
    -H attribute Add Arbitrary header line, eg. 'Accept-Encoding: gzip'
        Inserted after all normal header lines. (repeatable)
    -A attribute Add Basic WWW Authentication, the attributes
        are a colon separated username and password.
    -P attribute Add Basic Proxy Authentication, the attributes
        are a colon separated username and password.
    -X proxy:port Proxyserver and port number to use
    -V Print version number and exit
    -k Use HTTP KeepAlive feature
    -d Do not show percentiles served table.
    -S Do not show confidence estimators and warnings.
    -g filename Output collected data to gnuplot format file.
    -e filename Output CSV file with percentages served
    -r Don't exit on socket receive errors.

    -h Display usage information (this message)
    -Z ciphersuite Specify SSL/TLS cipher suite (See openssl ciphers)
    -f protocol Specify SSL/TLS protocol (SSL2, SSL3, TLS1, or ALL)

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