Mark Baartse's New Blog
We have released another new blog on the Practical eCommerce website. We have been lucky enough to have Mark Baarste, who is the owner and operator of Shopping Cart Reviews, write a blog for us. Mark’s extensive knowledge of shopping cart software and the features that consumers and developers are looking for should provide some interesting posts.
Aside from that, we are hard at work with our new website. We have a ton of things to figure out still, and then to program into the site. It looks like we will be trying to ramp up our newsletters, as that has been one section of our site that has been neglected. Odds are we will consolidate into a single newsletter and fire it out more frequently. The site will be updated quite a bit more often than the weekly updates that we do now. Rather than basing our updates on the magazine, it looks like we will be shifting to daily updates, so get those RSS readers dusted off.
In addition to all of that, the new site will be geared towards finding articles more easily. While we have a surprise or two up our sleaves for the final launch announcement, currently I am immersed in creating a content management system that will give us what we need. I looked at Joombla and all those other CMS systems, but they are usually too flexible and not flexible enough at the same time. Since we need specific features, and features tailored to our needs, these CMS systems tend to be a big pain in the but since they are designed to be used by a broad audience. Besides, there is nothing terribly impressive about the programming in them, so I prefer to build everything custom so that we have control and options.
The big challenges of this one will be the ability to relate articles to multiple categories, multiple podcasts, and other articles. Podcasts get even worse, as we want to have them categorized, but also have the ability to relate them to specific article categories. Add to that the ability for the site to ping Technorati and other sites on every update, as well as a spider to search out incoming links (our directory will be changing) and I have a lot to do. It’s not hard, it’s just work.
If anyone has suggestions or feature requests for our new website, which we are hoping to launch by the new year, please send them to me. I’d be happy to look into accomodating requests, although now is the time.
