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Opening Up The Source

November 15, 2005 By 7 Comments

I’m a huge fan of open source software and web developments. I love the community spirit, the hackability, the freedom to customise, move and groove like its your own web baby you’re playing with (in the spirit of programming that is!).

Anyway, I’ve been toying with osCommerce for quite a while now (well, around a year to be exact) and I’m looking to implement it in two projects – strip it to the essentials, tame the beast, customise and drive. I’ve the reference to ‘beast’ once or twice… but its nothing to be afraid of.

Thats the joy of open source – you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.

Or at least I think so anyway. But then, thats just me being me.

Confident in what I can do in osCommerce – “sure yeah, thats no bother, I’ll do that” – I’ve started looking into Mambo as an open source CMS. Now, I’m not exactly the first one in the door at the Mambo party, it’s been around the block a while, but given its potential involvement in a project I’m involved in through Event Ireland

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is to highlight an article I found pretty interesting, tying osCommerce and Mambo together and taking a look under the hood at both systems for those who are unfamiliar with them.

The article was published by Water & Stone in Thailand, and originally appeared in the Bangkok Post a few months back. Click here to read the article. I’m going to do my own test installation and customisation of Mambo and we’ll see how things progress…. but if its open source, I love it already.

Update :

Well, I installed Mambo pretty easy… and then realised that the final version of Mambo, 4.5.2.3 has been replaced and is now known as Joomla… interesting. Perhaps I’m a bit slow to the Mambo game. I always preferred writing my own material or using a nuke (my, php, post etc.) based CMS…. was a relatively easy installation tho – so much to do though once you get in there!

Filed Under: Open Source

Analytics : Seeing What Works

November 14, 2005 By 5 Comments

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

We believe that web analytics should be simple and sophisticated at the same time. We’ve designed Google Analytics to have enterprise level capabilities and yet still be accessible to anyone who wants to improve their marketing and site design. Google Analytics delivers all the features you’d expect from a high-end web analytics offering, and provides timesaving AdWords integration features.

If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics is the only product that can automatically provide AdWords ROI metrics, without you having to import cost data or add tracking information to keywords. Of course, Google Analytics tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well.

I’ve just signed up for a dedicated AdWords account for my blog to begin testing both features but from running through the interface it seems like Google have yet again come up with another winner. The installation of the tracker is simple – a little copy and pasting of a few lines of JavaScript into your head tags and away you go.

Best feature? It doesn’t cost you a penny…. Check Out Google Analytics

Filed Under: Technology

Promoting Your Blog?

November 10, 2005 By 2 Comments

So I’ve been doing a little reading on how best to promote your blog. I’ve recently set up another blog for Young Irish Film Makers, which should hopefully generate more traffic for their site and organisation – once its promoted properly.

But how do you go about promoting a blog? What does your reader want? Do you actually have any readers at all? Its more and more the way to go (blogging that is…) so where’s best to start? I found two places this week that are helping millions of other blog users so I thought I’d try them out and see if they can help me at all!

First off is Technorati. If you take a look at the end of the page (way down at the end) you’ll notice a new Technorati link. They’re busy pushing themselves as the authority on blogging.

The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

Technorati displays what’s important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place. Technorati makes it possible for you to find out what people on the Internet are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics, or other areas of interest — all in real-time. All this activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting. Technorati provides a live view of the global conversation of the web.

Second is FeedBurner. This little ditty I only found this morning (shows how much attention I’m paying to the blog…). FeedBurner are bringing it all together and will most likely turn out like the Firefox of the browser revolution. No more worrying about XML, RSS2.0, RSS.92, Atom etc. Feedburner makes your blog feeds user and browser friendly, while also providing great ways to promote and publish your blog. Want to podcast with your blog? Make it available as a mobile edition? Improve pings? Email subscriptions and general reader usage? No problem…

Enter FeedBurner. We offer a full range of services to help you build awareness, track circulation, and implement revenue-generating programs in your feed(s). A slew of publishers (90,000 and counting) currently take advantage of FeedBurner’s services, many of which are free and have been called “awesome” by these same customers

Filed Under: Blogging

When Will People Learn?

November 9, 2005 By Leave a Comment

So this morning I was talking to the wife of the president of Togo who unforunately, as it happens, passed away a few short months ago and only went and left his wife with the horrible task of shifting $21,000,000 out of the country to invest in a business. So she hits me up… you can imagine the conversation…

“Ken, hows it goin, Marie here!” (thats her name)

“Ah Marie, Jesus, long time no see… hows himself keeping?”

“Ah sure you know, kinda died and stuff, so now I need your bank account details to help me move $21 million out of the country. I know you’ve recently started a new business, is there any chance of an investment?”

“$21,000,000…. God Marie, I dunno, it’s normally a $30 million buy-in but for you – no problem”

And so the conversation went on…

Yeah right. In fairness folks, when will people learn. Its the oldest trick in the book. The 4 F’s of conflict – find the enemy (or victim), fix them (keep them occupied), flank them (take them by surprise if you can…) and finish them off. The forgot to add a fifth – fishing. Or more precisely, ‘phishing’ – the technique of getting information out of someone under a guise. Working for a previous internet technologies company I had experience in dealing with people who had lost out financially in this situation, or in the simplest of cases just given up their password on the ruse of a ‘security check’ only to have their credit card details lifted, massive bills… you know the rest.

If someone offers you twenty million dollars as soon as you walk into the office, its bound to be too good to be true…..

When will people learn….

Filed Under: Mindless Talk

When Business Becomes A Pleasure

November 8, 2005 By 1 Comment

When business becomes a pleasure.

People say you should never mix both – keep them apart at all times. Unless of course you’re in a job that you love doing things that you love. Needless to say the business world has its pressures – demands from clients, demands from yourself, constantly trying to raise the bar and improve your own game while raising the standard of others.

So today I had the pleasure of asking a good friend of mine to become a part of our small but expanding business. No greater pleasure than working with friends, doing what you do best, day in day out.

The business started out from a friendship, developing to a partnership that works effectively and when you have the strength and resources in friends to further strengthen and add value to your own business then you’ve got to smile.

So two will become three as the workload has increased a lot more than we possibly anticipated with new avenues opening up daily, new ideas being tossed around and developed and a firm direction being put on what we’ve started.

Early days, but great days.

Filed Under: Business
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