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.

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…

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)!

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.

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).

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!

A big problem I always had was following conversations in other people’s blogs. Some blog types provide RSS for comments, but that’s not enough.

I noticed some services have emerged allowing you to easily follow conversations in blogs:

co.mments.com provides a bookmarklet, which you click whenever you are on a blog post which you’d like to follow. Then you can track all these conversations from one place. Even better, it provides a single RSS feed where all new comments from all conversations you track appear. The downside is that since co.mments has to crawl all these blogs, it is somewhat slow (new comments appear 4-5 hours after being posted). Also this may get out of hand as more and more people start using the service.

cocomment.com also provides a bookmarklet, but you can only click it before posting a comment. This means cocomment only follows conversations where you have posted at least one comment (not always the case). Moreover it only tracks messages by other people that use cocomment. Obviously this is not very helpful at the moment, as most people on most blogs don’t use cocomment.

I am using co.mments at the moment, as it does exactly what I need. Of course it’s not good for real-time conversations, but overall I like it a lot.

Axosoft is doing a “social marketing experiment”, which basically consists of them giving 5 licenses of their software (bug tracking, helpdesk, todo management) for $5 instead of $495. The point being bloggers may write about it ;-)

The software looks pretty good, so I bought it even though I already have such tools. The nice thing is it includes Windows, Web and VS.NET clients.

If you’re interested check out the offer page. The offer will be valid until February 24th.

When the time came to setup my online shop, I looked around for available choices. It basically boils down to these two:

• Do it all yourself solution: setup a merchant account and payment gateway, accept credit card payments and maybe purchase orders, phone and fax orders.
• Go with an established e-commerce provider like share-it, 2checkout, Kagi, eSellerate etc. You can find a comparison of many such services at http://www.regshare.com/ and http://www.blackcatsystems.com/regservices/.

At the time I felt that a completely integrated system is more appropriate for business software. However I changed my mind and went with an e-commerce provider for 3 reasons:

1. Some people believe it’s more secure to give their credit card to an established company specialized in receiving payments, than to a new, small company.
2. I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to handle purchase orders, phone and fax orders. I don’t think it’s that complicated or demanding but then again I had no experience in this area.
3. At the same time I read an excellent article by Dennis Gurock, describing how they did their shop using share-it. I think their shop is very well done: clear and professional while offering multiple ways to order.

So I followed their advice while building my shop, only I took it a step further: I created a customer area, where customers can login to download the latest version of Magna CRM and find their serial numbers. Although I also went with share-it, it is because I find their rates and service good. I think the same shop could be built with any other advanced e-commerce provider.

In order for this to work I had to take advantage of the share-it serial number generator API. Share-it allows developers to generate serial numbers for their products in real time. They do this using a generator you provide them: either an EXE or a specific URL that is hosted by you. I used this second way, only I don’t just generate a serial number I also create an account for the customer area.

So, when someone buys something from my shop, share-it calls a specific PHP script hosted by me. They pass information like customer details and what he ordered (obviously they don’t give any payment details). In this script, I create a new account for the customer area and return the username / password combination to share-it. This information is then sent to the customer who can immediately login and download the product.

Advantages of this approach:

• The procedure is completely automated. The customer can pay and download his software without any human intervention.
• Exactly the same system is used for the trial version.
• The customer area can provide more benefits in the future (apart from product downloads and serial numbers)
• The generator script also works as an event for a new / returning customers. I use it to update customer details and assets in Magna CRM or insert new leads in case of trial sign-ups.

I started using the Firefox icon () for the “feed subscribe” action. I never liked either the XML or RSS icons. Even Microsoft will use that icon in IE7 and Office 12, so why not me ;-)

Grab it in many formats from feedicons.com.

This has been a hectic week for me, testing Magna CRM on all kinds of supported platforms: PHP4, PHP5, IIS/CGI, IIS/SAPI, Apache, Windows, Linux, Access, MySQL, SQL Server etc (I’ll write more on that in another post).

In the meantime, I played a bit with Squidoo. I had started a lens while it was on private beta, but now I put some content and published it. Being the unimaginative person I am, my lens is on CRM software.

Squidoo is technically interesting. It’s the most “complete” Ajax web application I’ve worked with (except Google maps). Other services like Flickr or Basecamp have some Ajax features here and there, but Squidoo’s lens editing page uses Ajax for everything. I think I mostly liked its interface as editing was easy and fast. Not that my jaw dropped like when I saw Google maps (or that fluxiom video teaser).

Famfamfam.com has 3 sets of icons, free to use in personal and commercial applications and of professional quality. I was so happy to find them, I even submitted this to WorkHappy.net

Enjoy!

I just found this new start-up, JadedPixel. They are building an e-commerce application:

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce application designed from the core to be simple, fun and beautiful.

They keep a blog detailing the building of Shopify and their search for investors.

Building a hosted e-commerce system sounds tough (every merchant will want to make customizations to the way the software works) and dangerous (if they go down I lose money). I guess (and hope!) they have thought of these issues and have solutions.

I use Google Analytics since it went live and I find it quite useful. My main problem are the titles of the various reports. I understand where Google Analytics come from (Urchin) but things are pretty hard for me to find. For instance to find your referrers, you have to follow one of these paths:

• Marketing Optimization » Visitor Segment Performance » Referring Source
• Marketing Optimization » Marketing Campaign Results » Source Conversion

I can’t remember this for the life of me. I would prefer a title like “Referrals” or “Came from”, because now I just click around until I find it :-)