TechProsaic

My wife’s company Brindy’s Giftables is starting to really ramp up. One of my first real projects as a web designer was to create a shopping cart system for her business. It proved to be very challenging, but very rewarding as well.

The company makes tags and titles and such for scrapbooking pages & photo albums. While I don’t actually get into scrapbooking, what she does is very cool and I respect the skill it takes. But I can get interested in the making of their website.

As I said, this was my first effort. I think it turned out well, even if I didn’t really do anything creative. Mechanically, it works well. After some hours of research, I settled on a popular open-source e-commerce package called osCommerce. Basically my search criteria were:

• Uses PHP as the scripting language
• Uses mySQL as the backend database
• Is easy enough for non-techies to maintain day-to-day
• Is attractive
• Has an active development community

So, osCommerce met all of these requirements very well. I don’t think that it will validate xhtml, but that was not important to me at the time. The site has stood up to the test of time, and that’s what counts.

I may post more here about their site here in the future if I end up doing cool new web thingies for you to look at.

Share This

This is interesting and maybe a good way to avoid the dynamic IP issue with helping your family out with their computer problems.

TinyApps.Org : Free and easy remote access (through firewalls and NAT routers) with VNC reverse connections

Long story short, take advantage of VNC’s listen mode. Connection would be made from Mom’s computer to YOUR dynamic DNS, which you could easily build into a batch file. And then you would be controlling Mom’s computer. It’s like a client/server in reverse. (Actually it’s kinda like how X/11 works.)

Share This

While you won’t find a bigger Google fanboy than me, I have to say that the trend of new uber-search tools * Desktop etc, and “tagging” and “folksonomies” are, in my opinion, a fad. A lot of people will use a good indexed search tool over hierarchies, but I think that once the field clears (it’s something I’m kinda watching closely), people will go back to a heirarchical tree of some kind, and use an index as a complement to it.

This is what I’ve done with my email. I used to do several levels deep of folders when filing email. It’s become cumbersome, and very difficult to find stuff. Several months ago, I found an excellent Outlook plugin called Lookout (google it if you use OL, great great tool). It indexes stuff as the current bevy of search tools do, but it’s mostly but not entirely, limited to your Outlook data store. Anyway…after using it for a bit, I found that while it’s incredibly useful and much better than OL’s built-in search features in most cases, I still had to put my freaking email somewhere. Leaving them in the inbox is messy. Putting them in a single monolithic folder is…not right. So instead of the 3-5 level deep folders I used to use, now it’s more like 1-2 levels.

What do you do with your email?

Share This

Found this on the webpage of some game called Mono:

mono - part Asteroids
mono - part Robotron
mono - part Paint Shop Pro

Haven’t played it, no idea if its any good.

Get Mono!

(cred goes to Joystiq)

Share This