Jaded
Is it just me, or has blogging suddenly lost its appeal? A couple of months ago I was writing something (sometimes several somethings) every day, yet just recently its been hard work to not only come up with something to write but also to feel the desire to write it.
I started this whole self-hosted thing because I wanted the extra freedom that would give me, as I was feeling somewhat limited by both Wordpress.com and BlogSpot. But having got it I’ve proceeded to play about with the technical side of it and haven’t been bothering much with the writing side of it.
I think what’s changed most of all is the amount of paid blogging that I’m doing; on this blog I’ve only done one or two paid posts, but over at the BlogSpot blog I’d been doing quite a few. Recently, though, the opportunities available to me haven’t been particularly inspiring or have specified criteria (such as no in-post disclosure) that I cannot comply with, so I’ve not been doing that so much. Which has lead to me not doing so much writing in general. (One of the advantages of paid blogging is that it makes you write - you have to follow each paid post with at least one non-paid post, so if you want to earn money you have to write quite a lot).
And I start to feel guilty; I see the readership stats dropping and I think to myself that I’m failing those faithful readers that I have managed to convince to read my stuff. Which makes it even harder to sit down and write something. So I take up what would have been my blogging time with other computer-related stuff: trialling new software, playing about with other revenue streams like Entrecard, reading forums. Even though I took the plunge and actually bought some blogging software, I’m hardly using it.
So help me out Constant Reader; inspire me, give me something to write about. It can be fact, fiction, or a mixture of the two. Suggest a subject and let’s see what I can come up with. Over to you.
Mac snobbery
I’ve just read an article over at TUAW, reporting on research that says that Mac owners are snobs. Apparently, they are more likely:
- to be perfectionists
- to use notebooks
- to use teeth whitening products
- to drive station wagons
- to pay for downloaded music
- to go to Starbucks
- to care about “green” products and the environment
- to own a hybrid car
- to buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year
I know that I haven’t achieved my perfectionist status yet, but there are a number of things on there that I hope I never manage. You can keep Starbucks for a start, and don’t come near me with hybrid cars and station wagons. And I expect a pair of trainers (or sneakers if you must) to last at least two years, so I’ll buy five pairs in a decade not a year. As for teeth whitening products… I’m British - we don’t do white teeth!
Personally, I think it’s just jealousy on the part of PC users because they know that a Mac is really what they want.
Shopping carts - the saga grows ever longer
The trials and tribulations we’re having at work with shopping cart software continues to be a pain in the arse. Every time you think you’ve found a solution and that yes, this is the one we’re going to use, something comes along and blows a hole right through your plans.
As I’ve written in previous posts, we’d been looking mainly at Zen Cart which seemed to have all the functionality but had a back-end so horrible that it almost made your eyes bleed. Coupled with this is the fact that a lot of what should be simple settings (like changing the date format) require major hacking around in PHP files. This is not the best solution for an application that is to be used in a commercial environment; time should be spent in more productive areas. But this is what was available to us and so we were (painfully) slowly beginning to get a handle on it and get it set up.
Then whilst browsing a tech support forum a colleague came across a reference to CS Cart; not one we’d heard of before, but they had an online demo that you could check out. Still open source (although not free) CS Cart is so much more user-friendly than Zen Cart. Changing the date format is the click of one option button, the layout is good, everything is sensibly arranged. Downloaded a trial version, loaded it up and within about three hours had got further than we did with Zen Cart in about 24. But then, just as we were thinking that we’d got it all sorted (and were starting to chat up the big boss for the $195 asking price) we discovered that it couldn’t manage VAT in the way that we needed it to.
VAT (sales tax) is a painful subject for shopping cart software, and a lot of them don’t seem able to get a handle on it. Based in the UK, we have to include VAT (which runs at 17.5%) in all of our prices for UK and EC deliveries, but not for deliveries outside the EC. Further, at the checkout we need to be able to show the VAT element of the total price. But while browsing the cart, UK consumers expect to see the full price, not the price without VAT and this is the bit that CS Cart can’t seem to get a handle on. If you set it to display prices with VAT then VAT gets charged for ALL deliveries, no matter where they are going. If you set it so that it shows the correct prices for deliveries outside the EC, then UK and EC consumers will see the pre-VAT price in big letters and the post-VAT price much smaller - until they actually checkout. No combination of settings seemed to rectify the situation.
I then read somewhere that CS Cart was based on X Cart, so I went to see if they had a demo version. Not only do they, but it comes ready set up for UK VAT and does everything absolutely as we’d want it to. But, it’s more expensive and there’s quite a bit of functionality, standard in CS Cart, that is an add-on extra - at quite a bit more money. Considering there’s no budget for this project and we were trying to do it with only free software, we’re now left in a bit of tricky situation - go for the cheaper option which has more functionality but can’t do the VAT 100% properly, or lose some of the functionality in return for being able to do the VAT the way it should be done?
If there’s anyone out there who has any experience using CS Cart or X Cart, I’d appreciate knowing what your opinion is. Is one better than the other, and if so, why? Is X Cart worth the extra money, or do you know a way to get CS Cart to do the VAT?
Going to back to Safari
For several months now I’ve been using Flock as my browser of choice. Built on the Mozilla engine, it is a very good browser - lots of new things (in built Facebook integration, for example) and quite fast. The in-built blog editor has also been a major plus point for it.
But I’ve found that it does like to lock up quite a lot which I don’t like. Every now and again, it just vapour locks itself and I’m left with no option but to Force Quit. Only takes a few moments, but it is annoying.
In addition to this, I’ve not been 100% satisfied with the way it deals with tags when posting blog entries to a Wordpress blog; this may be a limitation of Wordpress rather than Flock, but Ecto has no problems dealing with them properly. And that’s what I’m using for my blog entries at the moment. I overcame my reservations with it and am actually really happy with Ecto as a blogging client.
The final nail in the coffin for Flock (at least at the moment, I may go back to it in the future) is the WebKit version of Safari. Whilst this is development software, it is very fast (by far the fastest browser I’ve used on this machine) and it somehow feels right to be using Safari on an iMac. Even though it’s development software, I’m not having the lock-ups that I’ve been getting with Flock, and I prefer the way it presents drop-down lists and buttons (a small thing, I know, but it’s the small things that you live with on a day-to-day basis and they are important).
If you’re on a Windows system and aren’t already using a Mozilla-based browser (and even if you are), I’d recommend giving Flock a go; it’s the best of the Mozilla browsers and waaayy better than whichever flavour of IE you might be using. If you’re on OS X and you haven’t tried it, give it a go and see if you have the same lock-up issues I did. I’d also recommend you give the WebKit version of Safari a go - so far it does not seem to have any extra features, but it does absolutely fly!
Hosting sites
Part of “Going Self-hosted with Wordpress : A Wolfie Guide”
One of the subjects that is a bit of a minefield when it comes to going self-hosted is which hosting provider to choose. There are, literally, thousands of them out there, and there is often little to choose between them. Ok, you can take recommendations from friends and fellow bloggers (like the ones I’ve given in previous articles) but that only gives you a very small part of the market.
In an effort to overcome this difficulty, a number of sites have been launched that offer information to help you select hosting providers. So far, one of the best that I’ve come across is top10webhosting.com. They have a long list of providers, to help you choose the best web host for you. What top10webhosting.com gives you is a way to compare prices and specifications, filter providers by whether they offer certain things (cPanel, for instance), read reviews and check out in detail what each provider has to offer.
One provider they recommend (that I’d not heard of before) is HostMonster - which has been at the top of the recommendation list for 10 months on the trot. And it’s no wonder - $5.95 per month, 1500GB disk space, 15000GB bandwith, host unlimited domains. It’s an amazing deal and well worth taking a look at.
This post is sponsored by top10webhosting.com
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