Sometime ago I was looking for an online service to catalog my books, CDs and DVDs. I even posted on JoS forums, but no-one pointed me anywhere useful (people mostly complained that we don’t really need another social application).

The good news is that I found LibraryThing and well, it is another social application. It even uses ajax, tag clouds and all that ;-)

Although it only handles books, it does so very well. It has great importers, good search capabilities and a great layout. You can have either a private or a public account (in which case anyone can surf your collection). Very impressive work, well done!

The other interesting fact, is that this is NOT a free service. You pay $10 per year or $25 for life, otherwise the free account only lets you manage 200 books. It has 28.000 users and 2.000.000 books. The mISVer behind it is Tim Spalding and he keeps a very interesting blog. He has many great posts on the problems he faced when the time came to scale his application (read the comments too).

About a week ago I noticed that http://rapidsignal.com/ was sometimes having a PageRank of 6 (I see this in Google Toolbar). So I started checking http://www.pageranktool.net/ regularly, which checks a URL’s PageRank in multiple Google servers.

PR is constantly changing: sometimes most servers report a PR6 while other times half the servers report a PR5 and half a PR6. For two days now very few servers report a PR5. I hope it stabilizes on 6 :-)

I have no idea what triggered this change. It’s not like I suddenly got many new incoming links or anything. Not that I complain. On the other hand my position for relative searches hasn’t changed, from what I can see, so I’m not sure what’s the benefit of higher PR. Maybe better positioning will come in time or maybe I am not targeting keywords effectively.

Today I released the Windows Installer for Magna CRM I talked about some time ago!

It came out pretty well and I’m quite happy about it. It installs Apache 1.3, PHP 4.4 and uses Access as a database. Everything is installed under one directory and only 3 registry keys are created. Also it comes with a utility to easily change the configuration settings.

The reasons behind this were:

1. Offer an extremely easy way to install the trial.
2. Offer this as a permanent solution for small businesses.

Indeed it is now quite painless to install Magna CRM, either to check the trial or as a permanent solution. Moreover the installer handles upgrades too. Another good thing is that the download is about 2.1 MBytes (the zip version is about 1.5 MBytes).

The installer doesn’t run on Windows 95 / 98 / ME, but I believe this won’t be a big problem. The reason for this is for Apache to be installed as a service.

I will try to write a technical article on how I did it, what problems I faced etc.

BRK Studio released their Authorize.net PHP component. It looks very helpful and I wish best of luck to Ben. See also the relative post on his blog.

Ben is also working on isvManage a solution for Micro ISVs to offer their product for sale. I guess the Authorize.net component will be good for testing isvManage for real!