April 2007

Did you hear the reports about all that money to be made from online advertisements?  In 2006 alone, Internet ad revenue was estimated at $16.8 billion USD.  You have also likely heard of bloggers making thousands of dollars in just a short amount of time through online ads. If you believe this is another post about making money from online ads or how to optimize your site for the search engines, you are going to be disappointed.  I'm not here to tell you how to make money online but when you shouldn't be making money from advertisement on your site.

At first I was skeptical that this article was without bias regarding Wordpress.com since it was Matt Mullenweg's own blog that referred me to the story.  I was pleased to discover that the author, Jonathan Bailey, helped erased my skepticism in his well written article, Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free.  The first two paragraphs should get you interested in reading more.

Dries Buytaert had mentioned that when the Drupal developers came together at the Open Source CMS Summit he hoped they could make a video using Jeff Robbin's catchy Drupal Song.  I'm not sure the status of that video by the developers, but as a fan of Drupal I decided to beat them to the punch.

My son and I have become addicted to The Drupal Song.  In fact, when the song is playing in my house we quickly become The Drupal Boys.

This excerpt reminds me of long debates I had in my meteorology days over which is sunnier, "partly cloudy" or "partly sunny"?  I like Movable Type's answer to the long standing IT question...can just a blog be a full CMS?

There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares?

This past week saw updates for both Wordpress and Wordpress MU.  While both open source packages are blogging applications they are not quite the same software.  Wordpress MU is intended to run up to hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress. Hence the MU in Wordpress MU stands for Multi-User.

A security update is available in both branches of  Wordpress as 2.1.3 and 2.0.10.

A new version of Moodle is released with the developers stating that Moodle 1.8 is "a very high standard" and is "highly recommend production sites using older versions to upgrade to Moodle 1.8".  Moodle is a course management system (also called a learning management system) and used by educators to build online learning communities.

The most significant new features in this version of Moodle include:

osCommerce, an open source shopping cart, is one more step closer to reaching a 3.0 release.  Although the journey to completing the  osCommerce 3.0 software continues to take users and developers on a very long road,  Alpha 4 was released to the public on March 30th.  As a reminder,  alpha releases of osCommerce are for "testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release".  In other words, you shouldn't use the software for a "live" store.

We've already talked about the new features added in earlier alpha versions of osCommerce 3.0 so there is no need to mention them in this article.  New features in Alpha 4 that have been added to the shopping cart since Alpha 3 include:

• Administration Tool access levels (about time)
• Administrator Log
• Administration Tool batch action capabilities