13. Publishing

Just ran across a new Open Source shopping cart system, Magento. We've been using Zen Cart for a while now, and it's great to see an alternative.

We actually really like Zen Cart. It's fast, clear, and customizable. From a quick look at the Magento demo and feature list, it looks like they're starting with Ajax in mind, but it doesn't look like there's that much different in the administration area. Will have to keep an eye on this one.

It's too bad the spammers are out to piss all over the public commons. Since I've started writing more regularly here, I've been getting inundated with pingbacks and trackbacks, and have to keep marking them as spam, a couple dozen a day. Don't have time to do this, so I've just turned this off...

The first thing to ask is, why?

At Freelock Computing, we've helped a few dozen companies get started with a content management system to manage their web sites. We've done a lot of work with the popular Joomla package, but have kept an eye on Drupal for customers with more sophisticated needs. Here's a great introduction to the underlying architecture of Drupal, providing a context for developers and site administrators to start using it:
Dr. Dobb's | What Is Drupal?

Search engines are crucial to marketing your business online, and Google is the most important of all. However, be careful what you do to try to get better search results--there's a difference between getting organic search results and trying to game the system. If you get caught gaming the system, you may be
Condemned To Google Hell - Forbes.com.

All businesses need a web site these days to be in business. It's more important than a yellow pages ad. But it can be much more expensive and take much more knowledge to create than a yellow pages ad. When you're struggling to get your business off the ground, how can you find the time and energy to put together a web site, too, especially if you're not a computer person?

Seth Godin is one of my favorite business authors, and yesterday he wrote a simple recipe for small businesses needing to put together a web site.

Seen on Rocketboom: There's a new documentary film in production about Wikipedia. It's a non-profit project, and they're looking for donations. Looks like a great project, and we're delighted to see the cover of our book in the trailer.

We've needed this sort of thing for a while:
Openoffice.org Label Templates for Ooo Writer free

Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don't: forked projects. What's that? It's when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original. It's practically the definition of open source, the ability to take the code and do whatever you want with it.

This frightens most business people.

Recently we were looking for a service to conduct a survey. We checked out a bunch of different services, including Survey Monkey, and Zoomerang. Each had limitations: memberships that run into hundreds of dollars per year, free versions with limited number of questions or analysis tools, etc. For some reason, we didn't even think of looking for an open source project. Well, there is one, and it looks like it does everything the services provide: PHPSurveyor.org