Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Magento Connect Manager Requires Write Permissions to All Folders

This is what I get when I try to install a Magento Extension:

Error: Please check for sufficient write file permissions

Your Magento folder does not have sufficient write permissions, which this web based downloader requires.

If you wish to proceed downloading Magento packages online, please set all Magento folders to have writable permission for the web server user (example: apache) and press the “Refresh” button to try again.

So, in order for Magento to be able to install extensions, all files and folders need to be writable by the web server user.  This seems to be a very risky solution for an application that has access to a payment gateway.

Surely there can be a more surgical approach to permissions - for example, I imagine most extensions work with just the following folders made writable:

  • app/code/community
  • app/etc/modules
  • app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template
  • app/locale

I am sure that a security audit on a Magento system will fail with this policy.  Hopefully, with the new Magento Connect Manager (v2.0), extensions will not compromise the security of the application.

Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Real Blogs Don’t Buy Ads On Google - Really? REALLY?

Mike Arrington effectively said that a blog should not buy traffic if they were a ‘real blog’.  hmm.  Let’s think about this a moment.

Using analytics, it is easy (or, if not easy, possible) to segment your users into different buckets.  For example, three buckets of engagement, high, medium, and low.

Using an ad server, it is possible to report on the revenue that is made from advertising per visitor.  Not just the ads that a visitor sees during the session, but across sessions over 30 days (or even better, lifetime value of a visitor).

I bet that Techcrunch’s most engaged users make them over $5 per month.  How do I arrive at this number?

  • eCPM: $5 (very low estimate), meaning 1000 ad views per month per engaged visitor
  • 6 ads per page (count’em!), meaning 167 page views per month per engaged visitor
  • This means that the highly engaged folks only need about 8 page views per work day to make $5 per month!

If Techcrunch bought traffic and tracked the percentage of engaged visitors they attract for a particular search term, they could optimise their spending pattern accordingly, and vastly increase their site traffic and net revenue.

My team did this for a BBC property in the UK, and tripled traffic (and more importantly, vastly increased revenue net of paid traffic).

Can you imagine Amazon saying that they are ‘too much of a premium brand’ to buy traffic?  Don’t they spend about $500K or more per day or something on Google Adwords?  Ecommerce is no different than online publishing - they are just way ahead of online publishing when it comes to segmenting and measuring their visitors, and applying this data to online marketing campaigns.

I suggest that Techcrunch consider buying traffic, and imagine being 3x bigger, more net revenue, 3x more well known than they are today.

I am sure Engadget is smiling all the way to the bank.

Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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A VC: Mobile First Web Second (continued)

Fred Wilson wrote a post about how companies build their mobile presence first, and their web presence second, showing a shift in how people use the internet.

I would probably modify this idea, with the following:

API First, Mobile Second, Web Third

The most important consumer of your product in this age is not necessarily a person, but a machine.  By building your API first, a mobile presence and/or a web presence can be built on top for your users.  In addition, other companies can use your site to add value to their own - your product leverages the network effect before either a mobile or web presence is built.

Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Lego Cubestormer robot solves Rubik's Cube in sub-12 second whirlwind (video) -- Engadget

I used to get $0.50 in grade school for solving Rubiks Cubes.  An automated Lego Mindstorm Rubik’s Cube solver ticks some of my favourite geeky themes.  If only the robot was in the shape of the Millenium Falcon!

Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Microblogging - Creating an Enterprise Platform From a Consumer Product

Microblogging is the practice of providing quick updates which are published out to your ‘followers’ or ‘friends’.  Consumer microblogging platforms (e.g. Twitter and Facebook status updates) are major ways that people keep updated on what others are doing in an extremely efficient way, and something that did not occur until recently.

Five years ago, if I wanted to update a group of people with a message, I would have sent out a group email.  There are a number of reasons that this method is inefficient (e.g. maintaining who is on the distribution list, annoying those who do not want to hear my updates, using the same platform for casual updates as important 1-to-1 messages, etc.).  Facebook and Twitter have been so successful in the consumer space because they provide the perfect platform for status updates.

The interesting thing is that microblogging is not replacing email - rather, it is additive to email.  My email inbox is still as overflowing as it always has been - however more people know what I am doing because of my Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts.  These products have changed how the world communicates with each other.

However, when it comes to work related matters, I still am using email and IM as my primary communications platforms.  I was very excited to hear the story of StatusNet a few months ago.

StatusNet is an open source microblogging platform, which is perfect for enterprises for two major reasons:

  1. StatusNet can be customised and integrated into other corporate information systems (e.g. using corporate LDAP for login, integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, etc.)
  2. The highly private communications data that is generated by employees can live behind the corporate firewall, so that it is totally owned by the enterprise.

I think that StatusNet has built a recipe for the ideal enterprise microblogging platform.  FirstMark recently invested in Montreal-based StatusNet, and I also personally invested and joined their board.

We run StatusNet here at FirstMark to communicate with executives from our portfolio companies.  Start using StatusNet for yourself!

I am excited to be working with the StatusNet team, and look forward to helping them bring microblogging to the enterprise.

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Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Health and Human Services finalizes meaningful use for electronic health records - O'Reilly Radar

The body of this O’Reilly Radar post gives a pretty fair description on the state of healthcare data (spoiler: its in pretty bad shape).  It will take decades for physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare institutions to move from paper to data, or to format data into a usable format (e.g. there are competing and inadequate standards, etc.)

It is great that the U.S. government is kick-starting this process.  It won’t be easy, and I assume that there will be years of reduced efficiency until the network effect takes over and provides efficiencies of scale.

I look forward to the day that data is as efficient in the healthcare markets as it is in the financial markets.

Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Mobile, desktop or cloud: Where does the future of open source lie? - O'Reilly Radar

Deciding how cloud based services avoid vendor lock-in is certainly going to be a topic of discussion for the next few years as more services move to the cloud.  Open source will need to adapt to the cloud if it is to remain relevant.

Posted 2 years ago
by switzer

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Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions

The all singing all dancing email validation regex

Posted 3 years ago
by switzer

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Self-Insured Employers | Health Insurance.info

Notes about self insurance for corporations

Posted 3 years ago
by switzer

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Advertising Manager for Wordpress v3.4.18 Released

Hi -

I just released v3.4.18 of Advertising Manager for Wordpress yesterday.  It contains a fix for including PHP code in your ads, and it is also tested with Wordpress v3.0.

Please upgrade, and don’t forget to rate Advertising Manager on the Wordpress plugins site!

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