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Archives for the July 2009

Site Rebuilds

Every once in a while I get the rare opportunity to work with someone who has big plans, a great idea, tons of energy and little to no budget. Most of the time I have to decline these projects, but this particular project is near and dear to my heart. Probably because it a family member and they are trying to re-establish themselves on the internet.

We've all heard the horror stories of people taking their businesses online, getting their "buddy" to build the site for them and then never really walking them through the process of updating the site or showing them all the features. Worse yet, is getting someone ( a client) to a certain point and then abandoning them because you've run out of web design skills and programming knowledge.

This is in fact what happened to a family member of mine.

Posted: Monday, July 27, 2009

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Which Micro Blog Is Right?

Recently I've been getting a lot of questions regarding Micro-blogging. You know that quick little blogging with 140 characters or less, that everyone seems so enamored with lately. Most people have heard of Twitter, as that's the platform I use, but that doesn't mean it's the best. Here are the four platforms that I'm looking at that seem to be the most heavily used, and probably have the best chance of surviving.

• Twitter
• Jaiku
• Yammer
• IDENTI.CA

Posted: Wednesday, July 15, 2009

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Finishing Off Old Projects

Have you ever had the chance to grab some free time and finish something you started a long time ago? Well, it appears I've finally hit that point in my daily activities, where I can do a side project of my own and finish something.

The finishing of a project that I've started is something I really really really look forward to. It's just the sense of self accomplishment that makes me feel so darn good. So, now that I have some time I'm going to finish that Tee Shirt site that I was so excited about before.

Posted: Wednesday, July 08, 2009

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PrestaShop Not To Bad

A few days ago I wrote about how a customer of mine was looking for me to implement an Open Source shopping cart for them. In order to do the best job that I could for them, I needed to install the packages on a local server and play with them a little bit. So installed the following and played with them:

• osCommerce
• zen-cart
• OpenCart
• PrestaShop

We already know what I think of OpenCart and Zen-Cart, but this PrestaShop is pretty impressive.

Posted: Friday, July 03, 2009

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Pay Attention To The Terms and Conditions

The other day I got one of those emails that your always excited to get: "Notification of payment received". Everyone likes to get email, especially the kind that's telling you that you have money waiting for you. So I eagerly logged into Paypal to see what item of mine has sold. To my surprise it was an embroidered hat that I create some time ago, living on a site that I have actually forgotten to take down. Luckily for me, I still had some stock of hats left and was going to fulfill the order.

It didn't even occur to me to see where this piece of clothing was being shipped to.

Posted: Thursday, July 02, 2009

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Enough With The Good, Show Me Some Bad

Today was one of those interesting days that seemed to never end. Some clients are just more difficult that others. Most clients hire you based on your expertise in a field, while some clients hire you just to get some work done that they don't have time to do. My current client, for the most part is easy to work with and values what I say, but there are always members of the team that "think" they know it all.

With that said, after giving demo's of various opensource solutions, I was tasked with yet another last minute task that needed to be answered sooner rather than later. The question this time was: "You've told me what's good about them, now tell me what's bad".

So here is my evaluation of misgivings in the OpenSource solutions I detailed yesterday.

Posted: Wednesday, July 01, 2009

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