Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Commercial web scripts worth your money

Open source scripts are great and all, but sometimes authors of web scripts need to make a few extra bucks or even a full time career from their hard work. This blog entry is dedicated to some of my favorite commercial web scripts that I have purchased in the past, and why I decided to drop my hard earned cash on them.

The first script I would like to talk about is vBulletin. This forum script has two price ranges that might seem steep for most casual web developers. A $160 option lets you run the script indefinitely with one years worth of updates, the $85 dollar option leases the script for one year at a time and as long as you continue your annual lease you can keep getting the latest updates. Both of these options only let you run vBulletin on a single domain for a year and get you access to view all of the content on vBulletin.org, a support forum for vBulletin. vBulletin.org offers a lot of great modifications, templates and other amazing resources for helping you setup your site. vBulletin is worth purchasing in my case because it offers a humongous amount of features that you can control from the administration panel and the vBulletin community has a lot of great module authors willing to contribute their mods for free. Pligg’s forum runs about a couple dozen mods at this point in time, and every one of them is free. When I first purchased a license a year ago when Pligg first started I hesitated because $85 seemed like a lot when you compare vBulletin to other open source forum scripts like phpBB or Vanilla. If you have a chance to run a handful of open source forum scripts and then run vBulletin you will immediately see a difference in features that help demonstrate why it’s well worth your money to purchase a vBulletin license.

The next script that I use on Pligg.com is Mint. Mint functions as a very clean stats package for your site. Think of it as Google Analytics, only usable. I’ve always hated Google’s stats program because it’s really ugly and difficult to read at a quick glance. Mint makes things as easy as possible to read and offers add-ons called “peppers” to give you even more advanced stats. Mint costs a one time fee of $30, $19 to upgrade to the next major version. I’ve had to pay for both the original fee and the upgrade and I haven’t been amazed by the difference between Mint 1.x and Mint 2.x. Let me also mention that Mint’s website design is pretty awesome and I applaud them for their original design and interface.
See a demo of Mint by clicking here.

Tufat.com is probably one of my favorite commercial script sites because everything offered by the author is just $5. The author even has a few free scripts like osDate and MyBackup (highly suggested). Don’t think that paying just $5 is going to bite you in the butt in the end, Tufat scripts include free upgrades and they even have a support forum. Some of his more popular scripts are FlashChat and FlashBB.

Posted in General, CMS, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Itzle Beta 2

I’m a huge fan of online social networking applications like 3bubbles (blog post) and Gabbly (blog post), and today I registered for a beta account with Itzle, a new app that provides much more than just a chat room. Itzle provides a virtual identity for chatting, including the ability to create your own custom character to represent you online. Right now you can only alter the characters hair, skin, pant, shirt and shoe colors and you’re stuck with it being a male. Besides having your own personalized character on screen for each page you also keep a profile and friends list. The profile can list lots of great data like your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, your web page, your blog, your bookmarks and a lot of other options. The best profile field has to be the Flickr support that will display your latest thumbnails from flickr in your profile. The presentation for Itzle is slick and innovative. Before I get into the details let me explain how Itzle works.

To use Itzle you must be using Firefox and register an account from their site. Currently they are in an early beta stage and are only have 653 spots left. Second, you use the Itzle bookmarklet and place it on your toolbar for easy access. When you’re visiting a page that you want to chat on click on the bookmarklet and it will ask for your login details through an Ajaxy transparent popup. After you log in it will redirect to the Itzle link for the page you are on. For example, pligg.com’s would be http://www.itzle.com/http://www.pligg.com/. This page will have the usual pligg.com page in the background and at the bottom an Itzle toolbar for chatting and managing settings. On the top part of the page with the web page appears any characters currently visiting that site. You will see your own character also on top of the page and you can direct him to stand on other parts of the page by left clicking anywhere on the page (besides where the links are of course).

From here on out are all of the innovative ideas that Itzle came up with. Let’s say that your on a big time website (lets say Digg.com for example) and there are 80 other characters talking. The page could become cluttered with chatters pretty fast for lots of the larger sites so Itzle came up with the bright idea of letting users create channels for sites. This way you could split up a site like Digg into sub-topics rather than one large general lobby room. You could have 16 channels, one for each of Digg’s categories, and never have to worry about the rooms becoming cluttered with people. You can also create private, invite-only channels where you can invite just your friends to talk. The third tab in the Itzle panel is for recommending sites. If you are on a website that you would like to recommend to all of your friends click “recommend this url” and it will recommend the current url to all of your friends.

Making friends with Itzle is pretty simple, when you find someone you like talking to just left-click on their character and “befriend” them. The friendship must be mutual though, so don’t expect to befriend the entire Itzle community. You can also view user’s profiles from this left click drop-down menu that appears when you click on characters. Your friends list is kept on one of the tabs on your Itzle panel and it divides your online friends from your offline friends. You will also see a link to “add a friend” from this panel tab and when you click on it it asks for a user name. If the user is currently offline he will be presented with a message the next time he logs in asking if he wants to be your friend.

Posted in Sites, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

CrispyNews: We’ve Got Company

While reading up on Webby’s World blog I found an article that frightened me for a brief moment. It was about a fresh new site called CrispyNews that offers a service vaguely like Pligg to beta testers.

The good news is that we don’t have to be worried about them and making all of our hard work obsolete because their goals are seperate from ours and their style is distinctly their own. Rather than letting users take their script onto their own domain, they are stuck as subdomains of crispynews.com. The site is aiming to be more like a Digg divided up into many dozen sub-categories (eventually hundreds or even thousands) that all share the same database of users. This lets you go from a page for sports to a page featuring american idol without having to re-login. Besides just the ability to post and vote for stories the site gives users the ability to upload images to attach to the stories and they also have a very simple forum on each site. The major downside is probably the layout and visuals for the site. All of the subdomains have the same look, and a plain one at that, and every section is pretty limited. Check out the site on your own, or even sign up to beta test your own CrispyNews site and let us know what you think of it. There might be some great ideas that the site has that you might want to let us know about.

Posted in Sites, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Gabbly

Two posts back I talked about 3bubbles, a very useful third party chat script that makes it easy for anyone to create their own chats for individual posts. Today I will talk about Gabbly, a similar program with some fresh ideas. 3bubbles and Gabbly differ enough so that they really aren’t competing for the same spot, but Gabbly seems to really have the best features available for a third party chat script. One of the best things that Gabbly has going for it is that it doesn’t require a user to register to benefit from the script. You simply enter your own url after gabbly.com/ (ex. http://gabbly.com/pligg.com) and it will take you to your own domain, mirrored through their site, and overlay their chat program on top of your web page. Pretty snappy right? Well, this is only useful if you are willing to redirect your users to the gabbly.com/yourdomain.com page. Lucky for us, Gabbly offers us the ability to embed their chat rooms into our sites. Sure, this doesn’t allow for the same functionality as the popup version, but I’m not going to complain. The only downside that I have noticed so far besides not being able to run a popup version using your own url is the slow load times. When you load a page with the embeded code it takes several seconds for the chat room to show and load. The embeded chat also keeps you stuck on one page because you can’t navigate away without losing the chat room. The popup version sticks in your browser window until it’s closed or a new url is entered into the address bar.

On the plus side, Gabbly is well organized program. What I mean by this is that the user names are color coded well to help distinguish users, the ability to dock the popup on the top, bottom or right side of your browser is a plus and last but not least conversations are logged in a RSS feed for every chat room created. This is probably one of the best features, especially since RSS is starting to become a more commonly used tool. It would be great if down the road they allowed users to register or associate web links with their user name, but as is Gabbly still tops my list as my favorite third party chat script. Unfortunately I don’t see it as being the right kind of script for Pligg in it’s current form, but perhaps down the road with a couple more features I will be able to reconsider that.

Posted in Sites, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

3bubbles Support

I can’t recall when or how I first stumbled across 3bubbles.com, but it must have been over three weeks ago when the software was just about to start beta releases. I was lucky enough to sign up for an account early on, putting myself on the top of the beta list and giving me a chance to test drive some very cool software on my blog. They have been slowly adding members to their exclusive beta and are doing their best to keep scaling their servers to fit the fast expansion. So before I go into too many details about 3bubbles, lets take a look at what it is.

As you can see 3bubbles is no more than your average chatroom, much like an IRC room. The difference is that IRC is for the web trendy, 3bubbles is designed to fit the casual browser. The simplicity of the software makes it easy enough for anyone with an internet connection to participate in conversations on your own web page. The current release requires that you popup a new window to chat, but I believe they are planning on allowing users to insert the chatroom into pages in the near future.

When open a 3bubbles chatroom page you are presented with your web page title (topic of conversation), the current roster for the room on the right side, the dialogue on the left, and the nickname/login area on the bottom. This is exactly how every other chatroom software has always been designed so no confusion here. The nickname area will let you login with any nick that you want, as long as it hasn’t been registered yet at 3bubbles.com. It would be a good idea to register your nick now with 3bubbles by the way. Once you have logged in with either your registered nick or a temporary one you are then announced in the channel as joining the chat. From there on 3bubbles acts just like every other chatroom you have ever been on.

How does 3bubbles differ from every other chatroom? For one thing, the 3bubbles chats all share a single user database handled by 3bubbles.com. This functions sort of like a chat-gravatar, a chatting account that can be used on any site using the 3bubbles chatrooms. This means that once you’re registered and logged into a 3bubbles account, you will automagically keep logged in to that same account when you switch chatrooms between different sites. At the moment this may not seem so exciting, but I imagine in the future they will start evolving user profiles by adding more fields to make things more interesting. Another great feature is that 3bubbles creates a seperate chatroom for every page it’s featured on. This means that the article you are reading now has a seperate chatroom from any other article on the Pligg blog. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good if you’re a high-traffic site with lots of opinionated people. Bad if you are a small amateur blogger who has only a handful of hits every day. Sites that don’t get much traffic are going to really dislike this software in it’s current state. A third thing that makes 3bubbles great is that they offer a simple way to add a small bit of social networking to your site/blog. By giving users the ability to talk to each other in real time you are adding a new element to your site that can really make the feel involved, and that keeps them coming back.

Why am I talking about 3bubbles? Right now it looks like we are going to build in support for 3bubbles into Pligg’s next Beta release. We will put an enable/disable switch in the administrator panel and a field for inputting your 3bubbles username, which is required by 3bubbles. The 3bubbles javascript will place an information bar that looks like this: , onto the bottom of your articles near the comments, trackback and tags area. This is only an option that we are building into Pligg, so you don’t have to use it. I would even suggest not using it until your site builds up a decent amount of traffic to support chatting.

Posted in Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Where is the Real Ajax/Flex Revolution Happening?

The other day I noticed some hits coming from a slashdot.org article and I went to inspect what the buzz whas all about. What I found was an interesting post that brings up a good question:

Andzik writes “Even with all of the buzz around Rich Internet Applications these days, using toolsets like Ajax and Flex, most sites that utilize these technologies seem to be incremental improvements, not revolutionary interface changes. Where does the Slashdot community feel the best opportunities are to substantially create different/better user experiences using RIA tools? What will be the killer app? Are we just not seeing them because the best improvements are being made to web based applications and not in the public space?”

On a related note, Vertigo asks: “Not so long ago everybody believed that it was a good thing to have the freedom to modify your software to suit your needs or to mangle your data in any way. But now that users are flocking to non-modifiable, one-size-fits-all web 2.0 apps like Gmail or Flickr, are we moving away from our open source ideals? Those services do provide many important benefits, but in the process of their enthusiastic adoption did we not loose sight of the most important issues?”

Do you think that the development of well written and web 2.0 software has changed to something that only corporate conglomerates have created? Or are there open source scripts out there that offer creative uses of web 2.0 technology?