Why Choose Drupal
Posted by: palsikar on: June 5, 2009
Drupal is the most popular open source CMS on the market today, which essentially means that it is developed by volunteers who leave the freely available source code. Drupal is used daily by many people and communities to
manage their Web sites.
That’s because you can make a very diverse range of Web applications:
- Institutional sites (the universities of Harvard, the Government of Belgium, some sites NASA)
- Portals and community of any size (Amnesty International)
- Intranet sites
- Blog, blog multiuser (blog of Tim Berners-Lee)
- Directory content (MTV)
- E-commerce (Warner Brothers Records)
- Digg.com clones, emulates the youtube and flickr.
- If Drupal was found the optimal choice for these Web sites, is also likely to meet our needs. With this guide we put the foundation to deepen their knowledge of Drupal and realize what we have in mind.
Why use Drupal
Drupal is a CMS Open Source more efficient and flexible available. With the latest versions 6.x, have improved many things, such as the installation: if the first change was necessary to hand the configuration files, now you can easily install everything, with a wizard, directly online.
Significant improvements were made through careful analysis of usability and the consequent improvement of the administration, which now has advanced controls that allow us, for example, to design the layout of the blocks through drag and drop.
The community, which has made it possible to achieve these results, counts a number of developers, testers and users, providing constantly new ideas and products – often for free – in order to achieve the most varied features.
Ultimately Drupal offers stability, security and performance, and apparently has worked very well on ease of use.
History
Drupal’s history began in 2000 between the desks of the University of Antwer. At the university did not provide free access to the Internet for students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder decided to install a wireless router to connect ADSL to share the connection.
However, there was no system for sharing files and information, so Dries created a small interactive site that allowed students to send notes and useful to everyone. After university, the group of students decided to publish the site on the Internet, so that they could continue to communicate, so drop.org was born.
Once published on the Web, users of the site increased and members began talking about authentication, moderation, rating, as syndication and implement them on the site.
In 2001 Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org with the name of Drupal and open source license to allow others to use and extend the system.
Drupal CMS is a very powerful, but also a project that size and complexity, can intimidate the beginning. Following through and through the main theme of this guide to learn some ‘entire infrastructure, a Web site. Above all, remember that the experience is the greatest teacher: The more time passes trying to set up the site, the more we go between the secrets of Drupal and they include power and flexibility.
Drupal awarded 2008 Best CMS
osCommerce and Magento platform Differences
Posted by: palsikar on: May 21, 2009
I’ve worked with osCommerce and its derivatives for quite some time now. So had the architects of the Magento shopping cart before they came up with the idea of building a completely new Open Source shop cart. Given that osCommerce is widely considered to be the most popular Open Source cart, and that it has at last count 4766 community contributions from its 178,210 members you might wonder why they felt the need for a new cart. It is a good question, and here are my comments on one aspect of the question.
osCommerce has a very minimal release schedule. The Open Source philosophy of “Release Early, Release Often” is just not on the agenda. The last few releases have been backports of new code with minimal impact in terms of business features available in the cart.
Magento has, thus far, offered frequent releases offering significant new functionality long requested by members of the osCommerce community. Data export tools and a much improved backend are only the beginning – the difference is just huge. osCommerce is rather undocumented – and certainly so in terms of official documentation released by the designer. It has a person (one) responsible for developing or leading development of documentation – but little if any cohesive information pertinent to the current release. osCommerce does have established (if poorly understood) API’s for module development and a large body of shipping, payment and order total modules exists.
Magento has selected a professional PHP development framework on which to base development – offloading part of the development and documentation cost while taking advantage of organizations known for excellence in training. Varien has made an effort to get documentation in place with a wiki which, if not regularly maintained, does offer documentation by development team members which can be used to build shipping and payment modules. These are certainly very reasonable areas of focus for a project in this stage of its life cycle, and the practice bodes well for the future.
The osCommerce website features an active community forum with many involved community members. Quite a few of those members are technically accomplished and offer willing assistance. But there is little to no participation from the project members – announcements are few and far between and while many fans of the project constantly urge new members to wait for the 3.0 release of osCommerce – the 3 year wait for a release strains their credibility to the breaking point. If not further.
The Magento website encourages participation and has many actively involved members from both the community AND the project. The rapid move from the 0.7 release to a full 1.0 release is a welcome change. While it has resulted in some lag between semi-official Wiki postings on the APIs intermittent postings and updates by official developers offers a new hope that finally some balance between progress and stability will be available in an Open Source eCommerce project.
By now, the picture should be clear. You could say that the single biggest problem faced by the osCommerce community is the lack of an osCommerce project. Lacking this challenge, even the technical difficulties related to an EAV based database management scheme and the high demand for buzzword compliance placed on Magento coders is unlikely to hold this new kid on the block back for long.
Brand Struggling with Social media – Why
Posted by: palsikar on: May 21, 2009
Social media continues to grow globally in terms of adoption, usage, interest and impact in a massive way. It’s undeniably changing the way that content and information work particularly in terms of the publishing of consumer opinion. This has transformed the way that consumers relate to brands and the way that brands should operate, driving direct interaction, transparency and a more consultative approach.
However, we still operate in a system defined by the old media world and consequently big brand involvement is still in the main tentative and sporadic. From my experience of trying to get big brands to embrace the social revolution, there are a number of reasons why they have yet to embrace the real opportunities that involvement can deliver:
1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.
2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.
3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.
4. Social media needs a long term approach: To build community, distribute content, or get people actively involved in an application takes time. Marketing and PR work on short time frames and are wedded to sets of individual campaigns or short term objectives. Social media is not a campaign, it’s a permanent approach.
5. No guaranteed results: You book advertising and it’s guaranteed to work. For, example you book a web campaign on page views and you keep going until you reach your goal. This is what advertisers call a push medium, i.e. you choose when people see it. Social media is a pull medium; usage and interaction is totally dependent on the user choosing to do so. If it’s not relevant or lacks creative brilliance it will not work. This makes it hard.
6. The metrics are new: Companies are used to the big numbers of advertising, but these numbers are different. Advertising is measured in booked exposures, i.e. page views, while social media is measured in direct interactions, i.e. number of friends, number of views or number of users. These numbers will always be smaller, but not necessarily any less measure of success.
How do big brands take the proper approach to social media?
Fundamentally, it is about putting in place the right organisational structure with a social media department, which is responsible for a company’s long term approach to open their companies up to consumers and have a permanent social media presence. They should also work with marketing and PR to make sure that advertising, product development, research and communications all fit into the social media picture and all aspects of the company and the product are socially optimised. Certain forward thinking organisations, such as Intel and Ford, have already done this and this is the approach that should be followed.
There is also need for more and deeper research, to understand and quantify the value of engaging with consumers in social media versus traditional advertising. This is an emerging area that will see a lot more investment over the next year or so as is needed to show the financial case.
Lastly, companies need to look long term and understand the value that social media can bring to cultivate lifetime advocates of their brand. This is not about campaigns, but a permanent positioning. Hopefully, the current economy can help companies take this long-term perspective that has been lacking in the boom years.
Web 2.0 TO 3.0
Posted by: palsikar on: November 28, 2008
As we all see that everyone in the industry has made Web 2.0 their favorite buzzword for technology today. But now when we are on the cutting edge of Internet competition and as technology moves forward we soon be hitting with a whole new bubble of Web 3.0. This new Web 3.0 might turn the Internet into a huge database and our place in it will be to organize this source of information into parts that are suitable to us.
It entirely would depend on how we will make use of this new web to make search for information much easier, it can be our guide to the future of Internet technology. I’m not the only one to speculate about Web 3.0, but the companies and some famous bloggers also give a sneak peak at what the Internet’s future has to offer.
A lot of you who are reading this are bloggers, you might be interested to know about this shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 change in the technology. In this post I want to discuss about what do you want to see in the coming Web Technology that we might have missed in the existing.
Searching Information 
Today Web uses keywords to collect data into usable amount. Search Engines index the Internet en masse and present it to the end user in order of significance. They settle on relevance by using complicated algorithms. But Web 2.0 changed the basic way we searched. With introduction of tags users could describe anything as anything and search for items in a manner people look at it.
Web 3.0 will take this one step further. If you are searching for information on Mobile phones, for example, you would use the search engine as you normally would, but your results would be more specialized sub engines. I would find Nokia Search or Motorola Search. From there, I would be able to dig deeper and find items that have been tagged as relating to Nokia and sort them into their major categories (pictures, videos, blog posts, news articles, commerce etc…) Each of these could be captured as an RSS feed so that I can be alerted when something new is added to by search profile.
The engines will order these items in a new way combining the old and the new web. The strong tags that are used currently by these engines would be carried further but some importance would be given to that are flagged by communities as interests and votes.
Searching Validation
There will be a whole new approach to information, example if im looking for news on a particular item instead of information, my search will definitely be slightly different. Along with the specialized search engines, People Search would be available. One could type what they looking for like “Conservative viewpoint on Indian Nuclear Deal” for example and it would pull up results ordered by relevance (algorithms), tagging, and validation through user voting.
Searching Entertainment
Stumble Upon may be the closest comparison to how we will be entertained in Web 3.0. You fill out a profile, define your tags and then flip the channel. It will be a lot like services like Swicki as well, where you can interact with the content that you are seeing and generate communities around it.
Example: Swicki, StumbleUpon, Joost
Search for People (Social Networks)
Can you imagine a technology where you look for a friend and the search shows all the networks he/she is a part of and produce a feed around them. Wow! I can see the word social networks completely changed into “People Search”. If I put a proper name into the search engine of Web 3.0 it would provide the running profile of my presence on the web; it would show everything in the webosphere that has been tagged as belonging to me, ordered by community validation and relevance.
Example: Explode, Spock, The Gorb, Orangeply.
E-Commerce 
The entire advertising setting will change, as companies do their best to target the niche audiences produced by the inclusion of People Search and very specific subengines. Contextual advertisement will take second seat to product placements on sites, search results and subengines relating to the messages that companies are trying to get out.
Example: MySpace
These were all the basic changes that might take place in the shift of Web. I would like to continue talking about it in my next blog on Web 3.0 Designs. There is a lot more exercise in understanding how people will naturally take this transformation and we will discuss it further in my coming blogs.
Some Related Articles:
From Website to Web service
Web 3.0- You have seen nothing yet!
Web 3.0
Todays Web 3.0 Blogstorm
Define Web 3.0
The more Revolutionary Web
Web 3.0 and Beyond
Deadly Sins of Sales Teams
Posted by: palsikar on: July 7, 2008
Selling is hard work, but it’s even more difficult when the sales team starts exhibiting dysfunctional behavior. Here are the seven major sins of sales teams, along with some advice on how to cope:
- OVERCONFIDENCE. When everyone wants to make big numbers, there’s a tendency to sell too much, too quickly. Solution: Before closing, always make certain that the customer really needs your offering and that your firm has the resources to deliver promptly.
- GRANDIOSITY. If you’ve got a terrific offering, it’s all too easy to pretend that it’s a panacea. While some products do arguably “change the world” they’re few and far between. Solution: Focus on helping the customer, rather than converting them to a “product” religion.
- HUBRIS. Sales professionals know what worked in the past, but the memory of past success blind the team to changing customer requirements. Solution: Become obsessed with customer satisfaction and measure it through an objective customer survey.
- DEHUMANIZATION. Sales technology is great, but if it becomes too pervasive it can hinder the person-to-person interaction that is the core of relationship building. Solution: Use technology sparingly and use face-to-face communication for key customer meetings.
- OVERWHELM. During times of change, there’s a tendency demand more from everybody on the team, and management may pile on extra offerings, making it difficult for keep abreast. Solution: Stay focused on what the customers are buying today.
- STOVEPIPING. In every company there is a tendency for sales to view itself as the only group that’s really important; meanwhile, other groups start viewing the sales team as arrogant. Solution: Get other groups involved in the sales process by inviting them to meetings with key customers.
- STRESS. Sales is, by nature, a stressful activity. If a sales team isn’t careful, it can end up creating a sales culture where stress becomes habitual, like a drug. Solution: Make humor and laughter an integral part of your personal sales process.
Have I missed anything?
5 Common Challenges of Creating Coding Standards
Posted by: palsikar on: July 4, 2008
At one point in time, I did not believe that there is a company which main product are software could not have coding standards on their shelf. But guess what. I’ve found one. And I found more from reading blogs. In some software development company setup, different teams could have different coding standards and application framework they follow on developing their projects. While this setup will work to each team and still make profits, the stakeholders may not be aware that there are still more room for profitability by making software production more efficient by implementing
Coding Standards. But what are the challenges they will face when they start building their Coding Standards? Here are five common challenges for them:
1. The organization should find a team of talented and well experienced developers within their own organization to start developing rules and items for establishing and implementing “Coding Standards”. These experts will identify common points of software development process that are mostly the source of coding deviation throughout the development of the software project.
2. That identification process itself could be a daunting task for some developers.
3. The developers who will use and implement the “Coding Standards” may not embrace this rule at the first stage of implementation. So, code review on the first phase of its implementation should be done thoroughly and meticulously.
4. They might feel some friction because the coding style that they are very familiar with is now bounded by rules.
5. The programmers might feel confused at first because their traditional approach may no longer effective as before because standardized approach to coding has been implemented.
Advantages Of Outsourcing Projects To India
Posted by: palsikar on: July 4, 2008
The Internet is swarming with copywriters, web designers, software experts, project consulting personnel, financial wizards, artists, scientists, technologists etc who are acting as freelance experts or what we normally call freelance service providers in net jargon. Apart from a few (though the number is growing rapidly) freelance consulting organizations or portals, the majority of people are operating on their own and a cut throat competition is no exception on the web. Sometimes an unhealthy strife can be noticed between service providers and this result in some sort of distress, not only to the freelancers but also service buyers – who many times fail to make the most out of the immense potential Internet has to offer. Over and above, several English speaking countries compete with each other to proverbially “bag the order” resulting in intense activity and communication that requires a large amount of bandwidth. Broadband connections are certainly helping in solving several communication problems.
India -that mysterious land with a lot to offer, other than one of the 7 wonders!
English as a second language, but many in India consider it as their first language due to centuries of using this world tongue! The dialects are many, just like in England. The composition could match or even surpass the best Oxford or Queen’s English! Thoughts and inspiration in excelling in words can make many writers (authors) freelance in the profession of composing words into ideas that “have legs”! The software industry can boast of developments that even Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, or Linus Torvalds’ penguin can give it a standing ovation. What more does one need in terms of a multitude of talent at an economic cost – affordable and professional – more than one bargained for! It is no longer a mystery, nor a magic rope trick that has brought India as a forerunner in the freelancing field. Catering to all who wish to correctly outsource their projects has become a by word to the millions of freelancers and freelance conglomerations in India.
The Pros & Cons of Outsourcing Projects to India
If one checks out any outsourcing or bidding portal like GAF, Elance, RAC, Scriptlance etc it will become clear that a large contribution is made by service providers from India. The results therefore speak for themselves. India does have a large population as such and subsequently the distribution of freelancers on various IT careers is also large! Mostly this is considered strength for any nation! Sometimes of course a few providers do create problems through unethical and thoughtless actions but then this is prevalent in many other nations of the world. On a majority basis the freelance population of India is very useful for not only the English speaking world but also those who are not so proficient in this language. Therefore the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and India is looked upon as a good outsourcing prospect.
How does India operate in the Outsourced Jobs?
There are some very large organizations in India who provide a compendium of services in the information technology field. They manage to pick up large jobs from other countries. However, a majority of freelancers work independently, working on smaller projects that really cannot be handled by very large corporate companies or conglomerates. The advantage of smaller freelancers is that they have a better turn around time and are surely more affordable. In the writing or copy writing field India does score pretty high in spite of English being a second language! Many young people work from home and are today fortunate to have broadband connections that make their freelance jobs easier. Payments modes are also more flexible these days so that money transfer is more viable and fast. These environmental conditions have given a good boost to the freelance trade in India.
Meta Description: India has great potential as a country for outsourcing all information technology projects. There are more advantages than disadvantages.
How To Make Money Online With Elance
Posted by: palsikar on: July 4, 2008
What is Elance?
Elance is a website forum, a marketplace that allows people from all over the world to actively participate in buying and selling their products and services. As a freelance writer you can offer your writing services with very little effort on your part. If you can surf the web, use email and generally communicate in English (yup, it’s the principal language used on Elance) then you are pretty much good to go.
– How Does It Work?
It’s quite simple; Elance is a subscription based website that charges you a small fee to become a member. At the time of writing basic monthly subscriptions begin at $30. Once you’re registered you can browse all the active (open) projects and bid on the ones that interest you. As a member you can even set up a personal store front (profile) and showcase your products and services to potential buyers (and it’s not unusual to get direct enquiries from buyers this way.)
– If Your Bid Is Chosen
If your bid is selected you will get the chance to decide if you want to proceed with the project or not. If you decide to go ahead then you and the buyer enter into an agreement (Elance provides templates and samples at no charge.) You provide the services to the buyer and the buyer pays you what they promised – simple.
Elance gets a small commission on all projects that are awarded. But don’t worry, there is no cost to you for winning projects – that’s the buyers responsibility and the buyer will be billed directly (it doesn’t even come out of the agreed project payments!)
– So How Much Work Is Available To You?
That’s a good question; after all if you are going to spend at least $30 a month on a basic subscription, you really need to figure out if the subscription is worth it. The number of open projects varies, however it’s not unusual to find between 150 and 200 writing projects available at any given time.
– And How Much Are These Projects Worth?
There are currently two types of project postings on Elance: BASIC and SELECT. If you have only chosen a basic membership then you can only bid on Basic projects. You will need a Select membership to bid on the select projects.
And the reason you would buy a select membership is simple – select projects pay more, are less likely to end without being awarded (yes there are people on Elance who post projects to “get a feel for the market” and have no intention of actually awarding the project!)
So back to the main question – how much are the projects really worth? Again, this data varies over time (I cover this and more in my new report on www.ElanceExposed.com), however here’s a quick ‘rule of thumb’ that I’ve found to be fairly accurate: If you multiply all the number of open projects by $250 and multiply that again by 70% you will get a fairly good idea. For example, 200 open projects X $250 X 70% = $35,000
– But What About the “Big” Projects?
There are big projects on Elance, they get posted infrequently but they are available. As you might imagine these projects are usually posted by companies – not people – and they usually pay 5 to 10 times what a regular project pays. With this kind of payout you can imagine the competition is quite high, however pitching to a business is not the same as pitching to a person.
– What About Gotchas And Other Issues?
There aren’t too many. The biggest one that springs to mind is that Elance currently does not offer a refund policy on their subscriptions. You actually have to get on board and sign up to get a feel for the Elance market. And to be quite frank, you really need to give yourself a fighting chance and sign up for three months.
If you signed up for a three month Select membership you would currently pay $150 USD. That’s not a huge amount of money, but it is a bit steep if you find out that Elance is not for you.
– Here Are a Few Elance Quick Facts:
* 100,000+ potential buyers visit Elance Online every week
* Web’s #1 consulting site and top 1,000 most visited site
* Awarded Best of the Web by Forbes (2003)
* Reliability Certified by the Better Business Bureau
– And Here Are a Few Neat Benefits of Using Elance:
* Easily market yourself to a global pool of prospective clients.
* Pitch your services at prices you establish.
* Make a profit as an independent consultant.
It’s true, thousands of service firms and individuals take advantage of Elance as a marketing channel. And Elance actively supports your efforts with aggressive online and offline marketing delivering high volumes of traffic.
– Remember, You Can Win Work 3 Different Ways:
(1) Answer the phone after people check out your online profile and work samples.
(2) Develop pre-priced ‘buy now’ packages that buyers can purchase instantly.
(3) Bid on projects – many buyers post their requirements directly online.
– Conclusions
Before you dive into Elance you might want to do some digging on the Internet to get a feel for what others have experienced. For instance you might want to find out more about the bid success ratios, the real differences between Basic and Select projects, how many projects will pay you more than $1,500 and so forth.
You can make money on Elance if you know what you are doing, and quite frankly all it takes is a little time and patience. Good luck, and happy bidding!
