Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

Small businesses who are considering the purchase of a shareware package for a shopping cart system for an estore ought to think long and hard about a few things:
1) Documentation may not exist
2) Implementing the system may require "second order" customization, meaning changes to the package code itself
3) Search engine friendly pages may not be an option
4) Server load may be heavy at busy times

Documentation may not exist
Since the package is actually a series of software programs that work together to process the sale of an item, absence of documentation will not be an issue for you if you are, yourself, a programmer, or if you number programmers among your staff. In every other instance, missing documentation means that repairs, modifications and additions to your site will require excessive amounts of time and effort. Should you find a programmer with whom you can work to tweak the program, you may well have to live with that person for ever, at least as far as your website goes.

Implementing the package may require "second order" customization, meaning changes to the package code itself
Once the underlying code of the package is modified, what was shareware is now "unique_to_you" ware. Features of the package, such as the control panel, may not work properly as the result of customization. Once again, if neither you, nor any member of your staff is a programmer, whoever modifies the package will need to be your friend, perhaps for ever.

Search Engine Friendly Pages may not be an Option
The web pages published by the package will include information pulled from a database along with HTML tags and scripts (programs) that manipulate the database information along with the tags.

All of these operations will be performed "on the fly" or, in other words, on demand; page addresses may string together several parameters, meaning the code required to collect the database information, with a result that the address of the page is very long and, necessarily, unfriendly to search engines.

Server Load will be Heavy at Busy Times
Memory will be needed to run the programs that will make the package work. At times when your site is busy, package performance may be at its worst. Visitors will wait and then wait some more for pages to serve, etc.

For all of the above reasons I will only use packages that are well documented. In addition, the packages I use will output static HTML pages that will be friendly to search engines and a light load for the web server. I also strictly limit customer expectations to features that can be enabled from the package's control panel.

You can find out more about my web publishing efforts at Best Plain Web Pages.

A shopping cart system that meets my criteria is ShopSite

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

The macro recorder included in Microsoft Excel is a neat feature. I find it quite helpful as the recorder produces 99.9% perfect VBA code from the recorded macro keystrokes. With the computer producing VBA code, learning VBA syntax becomes a substantially easier task.

The online prompts, invoked by hitting the period character, are also very helpful as the prompts suggest the next step in building the program's "word."

I recommend working with the Microsoft Windows version of the Excel product, rather than with the Macintosh version. I have found lots of inconsistencies between the two. The most annoying inconsistency is the manner in which files in either comma separated values (.csv) or tab delimited (.txd) are saved. I experienced repeated errors as I attempted to upload a .txd file created on one of our Mac systems to a shopping cart. Once I switched over to a Microsoft Windows XP Pro System running Excel 2003, the file uploaded fine.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

Apple's Automator is a curious effort to spread the good word about scripts and task automation to a non programming audience. Apple is to be commended for taking the step, but the tangible effort, itself, is not worth much. What cripples Automator is the entirely counter intuitive manner in which it works. Apparently, though targeted to a non programming audience, the familiar problem is that a programming crew put together the operation of the product and, thereby, left the audience behind.

Let's look at the following: the example workflows work for wierd tasks; for example, resizing images, speeding up yet another itunes task, etc. Real requirements for business types who are using a Mac, like backing up, should have example workflows, but don't.

Without a schematic of how steps are intended to work together to result in hands free and useful actions by the computer, the non programmer can't follow the process and folds. Here we go again, another Dashboard (I will write on this other solution without a problem feature in a later post).

If Automator offers a view of the applescript, or javascript behind the Workflow, I can't find it. The debugger bombs erroneous routines, but doesn't provide a clear indicator of where the problem may be.

I would welcome a useful Automator. Mac OS X is a great operating system that gets a lot of my attention. Much of what I do with Mac OS X is repetitive and certainly a good candidate for a useful Automator, but I need something more useful than today's package. Hint to Apple: make it better in yet the next version of Mac OS X.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

The O'Reilly® publishing company offers the Safari Online Bookshelf on a paid subscription basis. if you need to learn something about computers, for example, programming, you may want to consider a subscription to Safari.

Pro
Most reference books are expensive, in the range of $30.00 or more and up. At $19.95 per month for a virtual shelf that can include up to ten reference books, the monthly subscription fee, obviously, can be a bargain. Consider as well that access is immediate, saving a trip to a bookstore. Another plus is the online search feature, which can save a lot of effort that would otherwise be required to leaf through pages to find what you need. Finally, electronic books take up no space, putting an end to clutter in an office, library, or even a kitchen table.

Con
Books must stay on a bookshelf for at least 30 days. Why do I need to keep a book for which I need a quick reference on my shelf for 30 days? O'Reilly® Customer Service tells me that I can purchase the flexibility to "skim and can," but at an additional cost of $10.00 per month, $29.95. Another $120.00 per year spent on the service may not make sense; in fact, I decided to pass.

Reading books online would be great if we all had digital monitors with absolute clarity, brilliant contrast, etc. However, we do not all have such devices. For most of us, regular reading online can lead, rather quickly, to an expensive trip to an optometrist for glasses. Forget about the bargain of the service if you have to buy a pair of glass for $300.00 or more as the result of reading online.

The biggest con (no pun intended) is the nature of reference books, themselves. Whether, or not reading a reference book about a programming language will make one a programmer is subject to debate. After all, writing reference material is a tough job. The range of audience is very wide and "you can't please all the people all of the time." Nevertheless for a guy like me, it is a rare reference book that talks about technical stuff for a non technical eye and ear. This is all to say that the ten books on the shelf may not deliver, so be wary.

Recommendation
O'Reilly® ought to offer more flexibility at the $19.95 per month subscription level. As well, more effort should be spent determining the opinion of the subscribing audience about the materials, so "borrowers" can be forewarned prior to putting a book on a shelf for at least a month.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

This blog magnetized zero visitors until I set categories and tags for each entry. Curious that tags and categories would be so critical to blog distribution and so little discussed by blog publishing software vendors.

Consider that this blog is published with Movable Type. I couldn't find anything in the Movable Type documentation that highlighted the importance of tags (and categories) to my objective of getting my blog content distributed online. Only when I googled

movable type documentation tags blog distribution

did I come up with an entry from the Movable Type Developer Documentation dated June 8, 2005 where Brad Choate comments

"Today's "Tags" are yesterday's "Keywords". I'm a big fan of metadata and use it extensively both on and off the net. Being able to reference sets of data using a tag or two is extremely powerful. I'm glad to see services like del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati that are promoting and making use of it as they are."

Yes sir. I wonder how many other folks who want to distribute content online have stumbled around not realizing that setting tags and content for entries is critical.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

For my work for my page publishing business daily routines include equal doses of image manipulation, text file management and shell scripting. The Mac was the perfect platform given the underlying operating systems (Mac OS X, child of Free BSD) and the long standing relationship with Adobe®. I bought my first Mac, a Powerbook G4 in 2003 and, in the ensuing years have purchased a second Powerbook G4, and, last year a Mac Mini powered by an Intel Processor.

The Mac Mini has, until now, been a disappointment. To cut to the heart of the matter, I am sitting here with several proprietary applications that were written specifically for a Mac powered by a PowerPC chip. Those applications include Adobe® CS2® and Microsoft' Office for the Mac (2003). The Mac Mini performs terribly with both of these packages.

While I find Apple's Mac & PC television ad campaign to be cute, a better word might be "charming" with an emphasis on the verb "to charm." Having purchased a Mac Mini "before its time," I can attest to having been charmed by something devilish. After all, I now sit here post purchase of Adobe® CS3® (out an additional $600.00), when I would have been fine with a machine running Windows (and at least $600.00 richer) had I known that what I had as far as shrink wrap software wouldn't work on the Mac Mini.

Live and learn. Hopefully not the hard way.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

Think long and hard prior to scheduling linux migrations (for example, upgrading hardware, changing databases, changing web servers, etc). You must understand that planning this type of move includes many more steps than a comparable move for systems built on the Microsoft® Windows® platform.

I am in the process of upgrading hardware for two of my linux servers (both machines running Novell SuSE, versions 10.0 and 9.3) to Intel® Core Duo® hardware, complete with SATA drives and, for one machine, a GForce 7600 graphics card with an NVidia chipset. The upgrades have not been finished. I have hit lots of bumps, as follows:

1. The SuSE YaST installation program will not run (out of the box) on the hardware platform. I am working on a fix with SuSE, but why should I need a fix?
2. I had to remove the GeForce card. SuSE has problems with the NVidia chip set so, to minimize issues, I removed the card rather than attempt the total install with the card in the motherboard
3. Despite using the "tried and true" disk utility application "DD" to image the drive prior to migration, I neglected to open the image prior to the migration and, murphy's law being what it is, the image failed to open properly after the fact. Fortunately, I have the physical disk as well as archives of the critical files.
4. Had my schedule required static page production (check out bestplainwebpages.com for further info on what I do) I would have lost 4 production days this week. Fortunately, I am doing much more with scripts this week.
5. I have been without my MySQL database for 4 business days awaiting completion of the migration
6. I spent 3.5 man days on this "cost" project with no billable result

Given the above, it makes much more sense to design linux systems migrations from the ground up prior to embarking on same. The modus operandi must include

1. Verifying that the shrink wrap version of the Linux Distribution of Choice works with the intended hardware out of the box
2. Creating all images and ensuring quality by successfully opening all images on fall back hardware that will be available, post migration, should there be problems with the new hardware
3. Restricting the timeframe for the migration to after hours

Images are critically important in a Linux environment as, via an image, one has the best shot at preserving file permissions along with data and, thereby, ensuring that stuff works post migration. As well, if any applications have been compiled, imaging the applications within the disk context (complete with all file dependencies in place) is dramatically easier than recreating the dependencies, permissions, etc. after the fact.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved