Have you seen the documentary Waiting for Superman? The state of Open Source eCommerce reminds me very much of the premise of that film. Everybody knows that the world of eCommerce platforms needs an overhaul, but everybody is waiting for another Matt Mullenweg type to come along and fix the problem. What’s the problem exactly? The problem is the lack of 1 REAL one-size-fits-all solution to eCommerce. The “WordPress” of the eCommerce world essentially. An open source project so well put together, so well executed, with such a high level of commitment behind it that it becomes the #1 source for eCommerce businesses worldwide. Exactly what WordPress was able to do in the blog-publishing world not too many years ago. So what would this eCommerce platform look like? Here are a few details: 1. Lightweight File Base. No Bigger Than 25 MB Have you ever installed Magento? It’s insane! The [...]

The new open source content management system called Fork is getting  a ton of attention these days and for good reason. It’s awesome! I’ve building some sites lately using Fork and I must say I have been impressed with it’s organized infrastructure and clean UI. If you are an SEO you are going to love Fork CMS because of all it’s SEO options and controls. When first installing Fork, I found it a bit confusing following their install guide which is why I wanted to take a few minutes and create this quick “how-to” to help eliminate some confusion. Step 1: Make Sure Your Server Meets These Minimum Requirements: PHP 5.2 or higher (safe_mode=Off) The following PHP extensions should be installed and enabled:? cURL, SimpleXML, SPL, PDO (with MySQL driver), mb_string, iconv and GD2 graphics library. MySQL 5.0 or higher Apache 2.0 with .htaccess, mod_rewrite, mod_expires (optional but recommended), mod_deflate [...]

How Will Open Source Affect the Social Networking Industry? Welcome to the world of Diaspora! Founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg and his approximately $11.5 Million monster Facebook.com could care less about it’s users privacy. People are getting ticked off. People want some other place to go to connect with their friends. “Screw Facebook and Zuckerberg for not giving us what we want” says thousands of Facebook users. The timing of the release of an Open Source Facebook contender that has privacy of personal data as a strong suit could not have been more perfect. Diaspora which has been released this year (mid september 2010) is at the time of me writing this post, barely usable. But the project has received over $200,000 in Online Donations according to a report from Wired.com and more importantly is getting a ton of contribution from open source developers around the world. And… the project [...]

Recently I found myself needing to install the Google Adwords Editor application and ran into a few issues with this because I am running the most recent version of Ubuntu as my operating system. After a bunch of research and some troubleshooting, I finally had some success installing the Google Adwords Editor in Ubuntu using these 5 simple steps: Open up your Terminal and follow these steps… 1. Install Wine from the Regular Repository sudo aptitude install wine 2. Get the Winetricks Script wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks 3. Install vcrun2005 sh winetricks vcrun2005 4. Download the Google Adwords Editor (windows version) http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ 5. Install the Google Adwords Editor msiexec /i adwords_editor_en-US.msi That’s it! You are done! You should now be able to go to Applications >> Wine >> Programs >> Google Adwords Editor and run the application. To further this experiment I had a PPC expert use this application on Ubuntu for [...]

It’s no secret that the Google Chrome browser is the talk of the town when it comes to web browsers. And for good reason. Chrome is light, fast, and efficient in so many ways. I have found myself using Google Chrome more and more, primarily for things such as accessing all my Google Applications like Google Reader, Adsense, Adwords, Analytics etc. In the contrary there are still many Firefox faithful who won’t leave the open source browser anytime soon. But for the rest of you, this post is for you. There is still much good you can get out of using the Firefox browser. Here are some reasons I am still using Firefox (along with Google Chrome). 1. Contributing to an Open Source Project Let’s not forget, Firefox is a true Open Source project where developers and users from around the world are contributing to make it better. You can [...]

A common question I get at the office when WordPress is at the forefront of discussion is, “if WordPress gives away it’s software for free then how do they make money?” Recently at the Economist Innovation Conference in Berkeley, California, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg answered this question in front of a few hundred people in the audience. The answer he gave was simple. Back-up services, Hosting, Anti-Spam, and a few other paid upgrades for it’s WordPress.com user base. Back-up Services + Hosting + AntiSpam + Upgrades = WordPress Revenue $ Really? Yes Really! Even though there is not a large percentage of WordPress users who opt-in to these paid services, the total number overall makes WordPress as a company profitable. And more importantly profitable enough to keep the development of the WordPress project moving forward. How much does WordPress actually make? Not really sure. But for Automatic (the company behind [...]