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Blogs » Archive for September 7th, 2006

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The beauty of “re-purposing”

by Andrew Neitlich

You may have noticed a transition in my advice over the past 2 and 1/2 years. The shift has been from talking about selling services to selling repeatable programs and products in addition to services. That way, you are building something of sustainable value, and making something once to sell it thousands of times.

In my case, I now design web-based programs and sell information via the web. I don’t have an advertising model, but rather sell information to targeted niche audiences. In 8 months of building, I now have 6 cash-flow generating sites (and a few duds, too).

Anyway, just because a product or site is a dud doesn’t mean that you can’t turn lemons into lemonade, and that’s the purpose of this blog.

Here are two examples:

1. I created a site that sold book reviews to parents. It bombed. But I had 22 wonderfully written book reviews/summaries. So I started marketing those on another site I have that caters to parents. They now sell as a bundled group of reviews, not as a subscription. Results are positive. A bomb has turned into at least a marginal success.

2. I’ve done some research on my marketing books, testing a variety of prices. During …

Thursday, September 7th, 2006 | Posted in Selling Web Design Services | 5 Comments »

CouchDb: document oriented persistence

by Harry Fuecks

If you’re looking for something “interesting” to mess around with, Damien Katz’s CouchDb project is at the point of working prototype, the server implemented in Erlang (a hot topic in some places) and a demo client application (a simple forum) in PHP.

Firing up the CouchDb server on Windows is a breeze – follow the README. PHP-wise, you need the new http extension which is most easily done on Win32 by grabbing the most recent PHP 5 release (5.1.6) and the corresponding collection of PECL modules. Alternatively the most recent XAMPP (apparently) packs the extension.

The interface between CouchDb and PHP is REST – XML + HTTP – you can also point your browser directly at the CouchDb server (default – localhost:8080) and get around with a little help from the CouchDb wiki.

What is CouchDb and why is CouchDb interesting, given relational DBs etc? To an extent it’s hard to define – best starting point is probably Damien’s discussion of Document Oriented Development. There’s a quick overview here but still it’s difficult to find a truly selling argument. How about some code instead? Here’s a snippet from the demo app (couchthread2.php), which …

Thursday, September 7th, 2006 | Posted in PHP | 6 Comments »

Sep 6, 2006 News Wire

by Kevin Yank

• How to correctly insert a Flash into XHTML
  I was recently asked how to place a Flash movie in a file without violating XHTML compliance and without requiring JavaScript be enabled. This blog entry demonstrates the method I currently recommend.
  (tags: flash html standards)
• An Open letter to John Warnock
  Andrei Herasimchuk’s open letter to Adobe asking that several core fonts (Adobe Caslon Pro, Adobe Jenson Pro, Franklin Gothic, Frutiger, Futura, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Univers) be released into the public domain.
  (tags: design)
• Carousel Component
  Hear ye! Hear ye! Get your carousel components here! Carousels seem to be all the rage all of a sudden. This implementation is based on components of the Yahoo! User Interface Library.
  (tags: javascript design yahoo!)
• jCarousel
  This carousel component is a plug-in for the jQuery JavaScript library.
  (tags: javascript design)
• Prototype Carousel
  Lastly, this carousel control is a port of the Yahoo! User Interface version above to the Prototype/script.aculo.us JavaScript libraries, and is therefore better suited for use in Ruby on Rails applications.
  (tags: javascript design)
• Internet Pioneers on What Not to Do
  Fourteen of the people behind Internet pioneers …

Thursday, September 7th, 2006 | Posted in Industry Links | Comments Off