Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, business systems, HubSpot and general life experiences. You can read my posts here.

(If you are looking for the Content is King post by Bill Gates it is here)

I’m involved with three agencies in Sydney:

  • The first is XEN Systems. We help government departments and mid-large B2B technology companies with their sales and marketing strategy, including implementation and training in HubSpot 
  • The second is XEN Create. We provide premium graphic design services to companies, with a focus on using the latest AI tools, including Midjourney
  • The third is XEN Solar, where we help high quality solar companies (dealers, installers) with their sales and marketing processes.

I also co-host HubShots, the podcast and YouTube show focussed on getting the most out of HubSpot. We are the creators of the HubShots Framework.

Craig Bailey presenting

Latest stories

Internet hairdressers

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I’m sure this must be available already, but I haven’t seen it anywhere (leave me a comment if you know of one)… As I was getting my hair cut this morning I really wished I could have been surfing the net (my hair dresser isn’t very chatty and I kinda get uncomfortable looking at myself in the mirror the whole time). Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to have a little LCD screen at each...

Advice for would-be CIOs

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I don’t know if you read CIO magazine. I do because I plan on being a CIO in the next 5 years. Of course, I realise that reading a magazine won’t make you into a CIO, but it sure does highlight the skills you need to work on. Take last month’s edition for example. In the Generation Tech article, the following advice popped up (p37 June/July edition): “In part CIOs of the future will...

CLARITY: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)

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After chatting with a few people about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) recently, it’s clear that the technology is not that well understood (even though, in my opinion, Microsoft have done a pretty good job of articulating it – much better than say OBA for example). So in this post I’m aiming to give a high level overview of VSTO and clear up some misconceptions. As usual this is...

Corneliu – Anti-spam email encoding tool

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I’ve been meaning to blog link this for ages, because I use it all the time but always have to go searching for the URL… So here it is, Corneliu’s most excellently helpful Anti-spam email encoding tool. Put in your email address and it’ll return a nice encoded one that most spam bots won’t recognise (sure the smarter they become the less effective this will be, but you’ve still got a...

Mojave Experiment thoughts

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The Mojave Experiment has received a fair bit of attention in the last week or so. Some think it’s great, others deceptive. One comment I found interesting was Mary-Jo’s thought that if Apple had done this type of marketing they’d be getting applauded. Maybe. (As an aside, Adrian has a nice little discussion of whether the Mojave results are even valid.) Having pondered it a bit over the...

That useless Windows Shutdown dialog

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Rick Strahl explains how to get rid of the Windows Server Shutdown Event Tracker dialog – you know, the annoying one that asks you to put in a reason every time you reboot. I have to admit I had no idea you could even get rid of it (but then again I never looked). One of the comments on the post gives a good case for why you’d want to leave it on, but for most of us (especially home users)...

Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008

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At Wednesday’s SBTUG James McCutcheon gave us a quick rundown on the latest CTP3 of the Windows Live Controls (download here). Neil Roodyn and Nick Randolph have each put together quick videos on a few of the controls – Silverlight Streaming in Neil’s case and Virtual Earth in Nick’s. The videos are short (approx 10 mins give or take), clear and interesting – worth a look. Neil, Nick...

AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft v2 Beta

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Last December I thought the idea of an AddOn Studio for WoW was amazing. And if you missed the Ken Levy interview about VSX on .Net Rocks then make sure you give that a listen – he goes in to a few details about it. What’s this got to do with VSX? The main thing is that the Wow AddOn Studio is its own standalone IDE built with VSX (here’s a brief overview of VSX if you’re interested)...

Uses for Live Mesh

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I think I’m finally starting to get my head around Live Mesh. I have to admit to being under-whelmed at first (although in my defence I do think it was massively over-hyped when released), but articles like this one from ReadWriteWeb help clear things up. Sometimes the grand picture is hard to relate to, which is why having simple little Mesh scenarios like these can help. After reading each...

VSTO: VBA and VSTO

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As part of my preparation for presenting on VSTO (download slides here) at SBTUG this week I was asked a number of questions about how VBA and VSTO fit together. Things like: Is VSTO the VBA replacement? How do VSTO and VBA fit together? What is the benefit of learning VSTO? 10 million VBA developers? They’re important questions, after all there are reportedly 10 million VBA developers still...

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