Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems stat down and gave a good basic presentation on what Open Source is. For those of you who are not fully aware of what it is, and think that it’s just “Free Software” than I highly recommend you watch the video. Even for the rest of you who are highly aware of what Open Source is go ahead and watch it anyways as a friendly reminder of how you can help!

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You gotta check this cool free tool out! It’s called the Web Forum Reader - A unique internet forums reading software. The basic idea is for you to be able to read web forums in a similar way to how you read your RSS Feeds for blogs. Being that there are still so many helpful forums out there, this tool could be very beneficial for you and save you tons of time. Here is the explanation of the software:

“Web Forum Reader is uniquely designed for reading Internet forums and conferences. You can easily add your favorite forums to Web Forum Reader to stay informed about updates and changes on these forums without loading them in your browser. Web Forum Reader saves you time by showing new and updated topics while hiding topics you have already read. Web Forum Reader will also reduce the amount of data you download compared to regular reading using a browser. Use Web Forum Reader’s handy Resource Addition Wizard to add Internet forums and conferences.”

Here are the main features of the tool:

• Convenience: Mark new topics, recently updated topics, and topics that you have already read.
• Flexibility: Add various types of forums and Internet conferences.
• Precision: The built-in browser automatically scrolls the page to the position where new posts were added to the topic.
• Scheduling:
  The Scheduler feature will always keep you informed about changes in
  the forums you are interested in. Web Forum Reader will notify you
  about new and updated topics in forums as soon as they appear.
• Favorites: Mark your most interesting forum topics as your favorites. Be alerted to new posts in these topics first.
• Organization: See new and updated topics on all forums at once in one list.
• Efficiency: Reduce data downloads and save on bandwidth costs.
• Time savings: Show only new and updated topics while monitoring multiple forums.
• Ease of use: Join several similar forums into groups. Synchronize grouped forums with a single click.
• Multitasking: Use tabs to work with several forums simultaneously.

This can be a very helpful tool that will enhance your web learning. I personally subscribe to over 200 blogs because of the ease of use for getting only new information via RSS. But if this tool works the way it says it does, I can now benefit from some of the highly informational web forums out there like webmasterworld.com. Go download Web Forum Reader and try it out. It’s totally free.

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On the Webmasterworld.com forums I came across an interesting subject that I thought would be very helpful to many of you, since it was extremely helpful for me! A client of mine is interested in collecting credit card data from his customers through his website so that he can process orders offline. On the Webmasterworld.com forums in a thread titled “How to collect credit card numbers securely online?” a member of the community asked this:

I now accept customers’ credit card details by fax. I am wondering how to receive credit card info online and process them offline? how to store customers’ card info securely online? I do not use payment gateway, just collect and store creidt card details in a secure way online.
Can anybody give any suggestion.

The following is a response given back to a member of the community. THIS IS IMPORTANT INFO TO KNOW!

read up on PCI compliance - http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcicomplianceguide.html]PCI Compliance Guide. In a nutshell, this is a data security standard considered acceptable by credit card companies. It involves a rigorous auditing process that reviews your network security systems and methods of collection and storage of credit card information. This means your servers must be under your control, not on a shared or leased hosting, which is out of the reach for most merchants.

The second consideration is that you review your offline merchant account, you will likely be in violation of your contract if you use it for this purpose. This is why an online merchant account is structured differently and generally more expensive than an offline account.

The best option, really, is to relinquish yourself of this responsibility and set up an online merchant account, which places the responsibility of PCI compliance on them or the gateway that interfaces with the merchant account. You then only need to install an SSL cert on your web site and securely pass the info to them, without actually storing this data on your server.

Basically, don’t collect credit card data yourself. Make sure that it is being submitted securely to your Merchant Account Provider like Authorize.net. This puts the liability of holding credit card numbers in their hands.

But what if you don’t want the merchant account to bill the credit card right away? That’s what my client is asking for and that was a major question that I have. Here is another comment in the thread:

I do online processing and store ZERO credit card details, just the authorization information. What it sounds like you want to do since you post the sale later is to use AUTHONLY as a sales type online. With AUTHONLY it pre-authorizes the credit card which will “reserve” the amount specified, it will not actually bill the consumer’s credit card. This process is used for Book and Ship sales transactions, where a merchant gets an order and at a later date, completes the transfer of funds.

Basically you go into the remote control panel for the credit card processor and complete and book the transaction later. 100% secure, NO sensitive credit card, NO details stored on your server or premises, nothing an employee or hacker can steal. Do anything less and you’re at risk and you don’t want to be at risk because fines from Visa can be nasty, like $50K or some other ugly amount to cover their costs of damage control, and you can lose your merchant account.

Summary
Do not store credit card numbers on your own server! If you need to collect credit card data from your customers, only to charge the card later use the AUTHONLY. That way you pass all credit card and personal information of your customer right on to your Merchant Account keeping your customers information safe and secure. You can then bill the credit card at a later date through your web based control panel for your merchant account.

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Are you trying to build your own social network? Are you at least contemplating the idea in your mind? Than you are looking for Elgg- the open source social network platform. It’s open source, which means it free and customizable. It also means that it gives you a solid foundation to work off of. Elgg supports a variety of different plugins that you will find helpful such as the “Open ID” plugin which essentially gives your social network Open ID support. The invitation tool works like a charm with Elgg, giving your social network the physical capability to spread like a “virus” to many many users. I must say that I recommend Elgg to all as it has worked so well for me and my personal project Realedin.com - a real estate social network.

Fresh out of the box Elgg contains these fundamental facebook like features:

• Find and make friends
• create communities
• upload photos
• Your Profile Page

With some additional features of course:

• Your own blog
• RSS Reader

There are a few plugins I suggest as well. These plugins have worked very well for me in my projects:

• Bookmark tool
• Private Messages
• Suggestions Tool

And my final thought to round it all up. Many people have been throwing up Myspace Clone’s for the past couple of years now to build their own social networks. I cannot emphasize how big of a waste of time that is. Elgg is built on such a better foundation than Myspace ever was. Plus it has more features. Due to the fact that it’s a major open source project you will see exponential growth in the system in the months to come. So if you are serious about creating a social network of your own, than use Elgg. If you are not, and are looking for a stupid quick fix than go ahead and do a Myspace clone like everybody else.

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In my second episode of “Mind Behind the Madness” with the funny picture of the guy doing his best Albert Einstein impersonation, I share with you all of the “Blogging” oriented blogs that I subscribe too via RSS. I have found all of these to be extremely useful!

Blogging RSS Feeds

1. http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bloggingexperiment
2. http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogging-secret
3. http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogging-tips
4. http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogtrepreneur
5. http://blog-well.com/feed
6. http://feeds.feedburner.com/conversationmarketing
7. http://feeds.copyblogger.com/Copyblogger
8. http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyBlogTips
9. http://feeds.feedburner.com/eXtraForEveryPerson
10. http://feeds.feedburner.com/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney
11. http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb
12. http://feeds.feedburner.com/SuperBlogging
13. http://feeds.feedburner.com/tylercruz
14. http://feeds.feedburner.com/jcme
15. http://feeds.feedburner.com/NorthxEast
16. http://www.wordpreneur.com/feed
17. http://feeds.feedburner.com/YMMJ

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Someone recently told me that they use the Google Custom Search Engine tool provided by Google to create search engines for searching many of their highly researched resources online. They do it to search that particular website using the of course the world’s best search tool, Google! Another situation for me of course where the light bulb went on upstairs when I thought about the countless times I had tried using a search tool on a website to find particular information. What was I doing? Why not use Google and it’s algorithm to find what I was looking for? You can see where I made the connection.

Where I find this particularly helpful for me is with open source project type of websites such as Drupal.org, Wordpress.org etc. I am constantly searching those websites all the time for information. It’s part of what I do. Another example I could see this useful in is a sports journalist who needs to be able to quickly grab statistics on an athlete from ESPN.com or NFL.com. You get the idea?

The way it works is you go to google.com/coop/cse/ and with your google account, create a free custom search engine. You enter the domain(s) that you want your COOP to search. In the following examples case, I wanted my COOP to search the entire domain of Ubercart.org. It then gave me a special URL for my COOP which I “dragged” onto my bookmarks in my Firefox browser. That way I could easily access it at anytime I needed it.

I have found this method of research to be very very helpful for me. It has definitely improved and sped up my research time and cut away many many wasted hours in trying to find specific information.

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