That Software Guy April 2008 Zen Cart Newsletter.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Hawking talks at TED
Here’s the video. He thinks we’re probably alone in the Milky Way, either because we haven’t heard any radio waves from another planet – unless (yikes!) “civilizations don’t last that long because they destroy themselves.”
This statement was made in response to a question following the talk. Only one question was allowed, because the three sentence answer Hawking composed took eight minutes. He has an optical interface to a screen with blocks of words, and has to select the words one by one with the human-computer interface that has been designed to allow people in his condition to communicate.
E-Commerce for Everyone – an Amazon Storefront solution
I have blogged before about how I admire Amazon’s associate program. Their widget solutions make it even easier to sell targeted products on your niche website. But to take it to the next level, to create a storefront, you really need at least some web skills – HTML, CSS and probably Javascript.
E-Commerce for Everyone is lowering this barrier by providing a hosted solution for Amazon storefronts. This is an interesting idea; we’ll see if it catches on. The vendor claims that freedom of design and video reviews are the key differentiators of his offering.
Non-hosted alternative: Instant Associate Store.
Free alternative: Amazon aStore (many limitations).
Friday, April 4, 2008
Twitter 101
I have recently started using Twitter, and I’m enjoying learning about leveraging as an idea-generating tool.
Question: if you Tweet for business, is it T-Commece? 
Amazon gets rolling with M-Commerce
I was just complaining yesterday there should be more ways for me to send the rest of my paycheck to Amazon.com. Seems they were listening.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Dojo 1.1 Released
This is good news – I enjoyed using early versions of Dojo, and I had hoped they’d keep continuing to improve the product. Looks like they have!
Newsletter Discount for Zen Cart
I’ve added a discounting module to Zen Cart which allows you to offer a discount to newsletter subscribers, whether you use MailChimp or the native Zen Cart newsletter system. It’s called Newsletter Discount.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Merlin Mann’s Tactical Internet Pants
Quite funny – watch the video. As an aside, Merlin Mann seems incapable of creating anything that is not brilliant. I first heard about Merlin when I was scribbling some notes and putting them in my pocket, which a colleague of mine called a variant of the hipster PDA. I’ve been a big fan ever since.
