Shopify (a nice online shop creator) revealed internationalization support a few days ago.

Even more interesting is the way they do translations: crowdsourcing. In their words:

Shopify brings the crowdsourcing concept to the internationalization problem. Any Shopify user can create their own language templates, apply to help edit other language templates, or simply utilize other translated language templates. The original creator of a translation will lead the translation team. He or she can accept and decline assistance and will be notified of any new language strings that come online with new content that affects the checkout process or the PDF order receipts.

A smart solution to a difficult problem. Since I support a multilingual application (Cheez - translated in 18 languages) I would like to have solved this problem in a better way. As it is people send me translations / corrections but I have to do the final editing, merging and including in the application package.

My DSL line was down for the last 2 days, so I had to fall back to dial-up (56kbps that is). I can’t believe how accustomed I have become to broadband! It seemed impossible to download anything… even mail seemed hard to cope with.

I’m glad it’s back.

I was playing with archive.org earlier today and I checked rapidsignal.com. The current site is not listed (strange) but I discovered the domain was used in 2002 - 2003. But it was only some kind of spam / ad site.

It’s been more than a month since the new layout for Rapid Signal was delivered to me. Still I had a lot of other things to look into and no time to upload it. Moreover I wanted to finish the new copy for the site (still only half-done).

Anyway about 10 days ago I decided to upload the new layout using the old copy and images.

It’s a clean layout using the same simple organization. It’s not overly modern but it was designed by a professional and it shows (at least in my eyes!). I found the designer through www.solucija.com.

It’s (not) funny how the simple act of getting the new site online (integrating with my custom CMS, uploading and testing) took me the better part of a full day. Plus I managed to mingle some mail settings and two mails with trial serials weren’t sent (fortunately I took notice of that quite soon).

Benji Smith is presenting 30 ideas (one each day) on his site. He’s currently at number 8 or so. You should read the relative post, 30 days: 30 ideas for his reasons.

Obviously Benji believes it’s the implementation and not the idea that matters.

So, I knew some bloggers make lots of money from AdSense (and other ad systems) and thought this was a business model for blogs and content sites.

Then I read the blog of PlentyOfFish.com owner. PlentyOfFish is (yet another) dating site, only it’s completely free. There are no paid memberships! All revenue is based on AdSense: check this post for a photo of a $900,000 (nine hundred thousand) check for 2 months and this post on how the business grew (in general it’s a very interesting blog).

I find it amazing you can make $5.5 mil / year from AdSense alone (and I guess PlentyOfFish has other advertising programs). I would still hesitate to do something similar, but it certainly shows it can lead to success.

Akismet is a service by the team behind Wordpress, that analyzes a comment and tells you if it’s spam or not.

The corresponding Wordpress plug-in (included in Wordpress 2.0) works great: I have disabled every other anti-spam plug-in I was previously using, and Akismet has caught ~500 spam comments (with only 1 going through).

The nice thing is you can use it for your application (just get an API key and a library for your language of choice). There are 3 licenses, including a commercial one.

Being a service has one big advantage: the system learns from many sources (thousands of blogs), so if a new kind of spam message is used (e.g. one resembling natural language and with few links) the system will learn quickly (because you don’t have to do all of the training yourself).

I’m wondering if the same system or one like it could be used for emails and whether it would be better to use that instead of building a custom solution…

The Chronicles of a Very Small Software Outfit is a blog by a mISV, sharing numbers (downloads, AdWords history etc) while staying anonymous.

LibraryThing the useful book cataloguing service by Tim Spalding (see previous post), just got a nice deal with Abebooks. Congratulations to Tim (and the new team)!

Barenaked App is a blog describing the building of Carson Systems second web application, named Amigo.

It’s extremely interesting as it details most everything: how they designed the application, budget information, hiring freelancers etc. The blog is live since February, but I only found it today (through WorkHappy.net).

Correction: The blog went live today… it just has posts going back to February.

DBxtra is a general reporting software, able to connect to just about any database. DBxtra for FogBugz is a customized version of DBxtra that only connects to FogBugz databases and comes with many preloaded reports (which you can edit).

Now, that’s probably a smart move although I wonder if the market for customized FogBugz reports is large enough to support a 2nd solution (Case Detective being the other one).

I guess if things go good with DBxtra for FogBugz we will soon see some new “DBxtra for xyz” variants.

One of the things I’m doing is rebuilding the Rapid Signal and Magna CRM site. I’ll hopefully have the new templates by mid-May, so I hope to have it online by the end of May.

This takes more time than I thought… It was the same with the screencast (on hold for now) and the press release I wrote (published in just one place for the time being). The only thing that feels easy and natural is programming ;-)

Anyway, it takes a lot of work to design the navigation, edit the texts and decide how to implement things like multi-language support (it’s strange how Magna CRM supports 2 languages but the web site only 1 language). I hope this constant feeling that something is wrong goes away after the new site goes live!

Interesting article with tips for screencasting (uhm, online “movies of software”). Some of them are pretty good (e.g. “Bear in mind that the user’s eyes will follow the active cursor, so if you’re switching from clicking to typing, have the mouse pointer stop near where the text cursor starts”). Saw it on BoS forums.

Fluxiom, a digital asset management web application, has been released today. I’ll certainly try it and the reason is an incredible video they had released some months ago.

It’s amazing how I still remember that video. I wish I had the same skills in video making. I’ve tried making an introductory video for Magna CRM and discovered it’s harder than it seems. Things like Wink make the process easier, but real-time video with voice is tough.

PlanHack is a task management tool created by fellow mISV Jesse Kim (his blog is here).

Jesse is currently looking for beta testers, so if you’re interested download the beta and give it a try.

PlanHack is a downloadable web application, the same way Magna CRM is, so you need a Web Server with PHP to run it.