This post is guest blogged by Nathan from NotSoBoringLife.

Have you ever had a really great idea but just didn’t know how to make it happen? Maybe you just don’t have the time to code a site from the ground up. I spend the majority of my days in front of a computer and still couldn’t code a site or application. I’m guessing you may be in the same boat. You should consider outsourcing your project. Outsourcing may not seem like a viable option because it’s to expensive you because you don’t have enough contacts. I’m here to let you in on a little secret.

Head over to RentACoder or GetAFreelancer to see exactly the type of outsourcing I’m referring to. These type of sites offer the people with the skills to make your vision a reality. All you need to know is exactly what you want. This is important because in order to hire someone you’ll need to document exactly what you want them to do. Making concrete and distinguishable requirements is key to outsourcing on these type of sites. You can save hundreds of dollars and end up with a very high quality product.

Here’s how it works
You document your requirements and post a maximum price you’re willing to pay. Coders will bid how much they’re willing to complete the task for based on your requirements. You can ‘interview’ the coders to ensure they are qualified and accept a coder you feel can complete the work. Both sites have a decent arbitration system in the event you and the coder can’t meet eye to eye. Here’s where it really important to document all the requirements of the site or program.

My most recent outsourced project to RentACoder was the Field of Dreams theme you’ll find currently running on NotSoBoringLife. This project ended up taking a little longer than I had hoped but in the end I received exactly what I wanted and for a very fair price. In the past I’ve had log files parsed into a database for analysis and photoshop work for some marketing material.

Conclusion
Next time you’ve got a million dollar idea don’t let the ‘how am i going to do this’ stop you.

I just received an email from AGLOCO telling their members that the Viewbar will be released soon. This is the first time I write my thoughts about this …mmm what should I call it. Here are some thought from the mail:

Members will be invited to download in groups of 50,000 a day for a two week period, with Members contacted in the order in which they signed up

Don’t these guys have the means to get strong enough servers to serve their Viewbar to everyone at the same time? Why extend such process over 2 weeks? So the Viewbar will be out and some will be earning, but I would still have to wait…

Shortly before the first set of download emails go out, you will receive an email notice that the AGLOCO website will be ‘out of service’ for a few hours – this is necessary for us to move the Viewbar download system from the test server to the main servers.

You have got to be kidding me. Your site needs to go down to put a download system in place? For a couple of hours? Hmm, maybe it would be easier to put the download system on different servers and link the website to the other servers. Why? Because this way your website does not have to go down and IF your download system somehow affects the servers, it won’t affect your main website.

You will accrue hours in your AGLOCO Member account (current maximum is five direct hours a month)

All this commotion for just 5 hours a month… My next question: What will I earn with those 5 hours of serving?

The initial Viewbar release will be for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 Pro and 2000 Server. Later, we will release Mac and Linux versions of the Viewbar.

I didn’t expect it to be different! If their last release period was set at somewhere between April 2 and 16, and after that they still claimed that they were on track to release in April, then I don’t even want to know when this Viewbar will be available for Mac and Linux users.

To be a sustainable entity in the long term, AGLOCO makes Member cash distributions from its positive cash flow (revenue minus costs). Therefore, please do not expect a check after the first couple of months as it will take time to collect revenue from advertisers and this revenue must exceed costs in order to make cash distributions to Members

In other words “We started a company and we invite you to come work for us. However, we will start paying you when we make enough money to pay our own salaries (I’m guessing those will definitely be counted in the ‘costs’). So after we’ve managed to take care of the costs (and our own salaries) we’ll share the remainder with the millions of workers”. Very promising. After spending so much time on the promotion of a product that is still due for launch, it’s still trial and error if it comes to making money. What happens if the revenues of the first 3 months are not what they were expecting? Can we then expect a mail saying that “it didn’t work out” so we get nothing?

Oh and they add the following to that paragraph:

We will be keeping Members informed of our financials

Conclusion
AGLOCO may become a great company, providing people a way to make money while browsing the Internet, but with everything that’s going on before the actual release of the program, I’m starting to wonder how much more delays will occur, mainly in payment. What surprises await everyone when this program really is launched? We will only know once the AGLOCO Viewbar is finally launched, preferably this year.

Book
Might I suggest How to Become a Professional Con Artist?

A couple of days ago I stepped on the Technorati train, taking part in a favorites exchange. However, I deleted that post.

While I was writing the post, I had my doubts. I also stated in that post that I usually don’t partake in these kind of exchanges. However, for some reason I went ahead and spend about an hour creating that post, adding all the blogs to my favorites.

But in the days past, I have been thinking about this post constantly. Today I looked around and I noticed that I have a couple of great blogs in my feed reader that are not even faved by me in Technorati. So while I was cooking, I asked myself why I fave these blogs while there are blogs I’m reading daily, that I would not fave? I then decided to remove the post and add my real favorite blogs to Technorati.

To prove that nature has its ways, the first thing I saw when I sat down in front of my pc, was Darren Rowse’s post titled “Is Technorati Being Gamed – Do They Care? – Does it Matter?” with a link to Amit Agarwal’s Technorati Favorites: Not Worth It Anymore. I then remembered that I said once that I only link to blogs I can vouch for, blogs I trust. So why was I linking to all these blogs I didn’t know?

After looking at some of the faves, I started to wonder how long I would stay on such sites. These blogs are not worthy of my favor (hope this does not sound too arrogant). That’s why I decided to get rid of the fakes and add the real faves.

My favorites
Here is a (partial) list of blogs I have in my feed reader, and I would recommend to others without thinking twice:

• Problogger Blog Tips
• The Thinking Blog
• Daily Blog Tips
• John Chow
• Daily Domainer
• Seth Godin’s Blog
• Dosh Dosh
• Net Business Blog

Some other blogs I read are not related to this blog’s focus, but I’d recommend for nice reading:

• Infektia.net
• Not so boring Life
• QMusing
• Life after web
• Rebitran

Conclusion
I want to make this blog a professional one, rising to great heights. To do this, I think it’s important that my readers can trust me. That trust would be violated if I left a post here with links to sites I have never visited, or would not stand by.

So once again, my promise to my readers is that I will only link to sites and blogs I trust. In some cases I might link to a bad example, but I will make sure you know what that link is to.

If there is anyone who added me to their faves because I added them, please check if you’re still in my favorites list. If not, you are free to remove me from yours. Of course you can leave it there if you think my blog is worth your favor.

Book
For this post I choose to link to a unrelated book: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (Oprah’s Book Club) by Sidney Poitier.

I come across a lot of nice blogs while I’m researching for work and for my blog. Some of these articles may be useful to you, so I decided to post a couple of them every Sunday night.

• Roberto Alamos dot com: Robert mainly provides tips for bloggers to make money online, but the promotion ideas he supplies can be used for virtually any type of online business. The articles that caught my eye were How to make money online while being a small business not based in the US and How long can take for a blog to make a decent income?.
• jon lee dot see eh: This is the blog I have to compete against. Jon uses simple explanations to make his readers understand, like Image Options: Interlaced GIFs and Progressive JPEGs. He has a list of Acronyms All Web Developers Should Know. I might use some of his ideas in future posts.
• Daily Domainer: This blog provides news and information from the world of domain names.

Jon Lee’s blog inspired me to concentrate on the main topic of this site rather than writing about a lot of sidetracking issues. This is why I decided to keep this blog on the web presence topic and create a new blog for other topics. More about this new blog soon.

Update: My new blog is named Blogging Notes

With PHP5 a number of new functions were added. Understandably, these functions won’t work if your web server runs PHP4. But there’s a workaround.

PHP_Compat is a package of files with the missing functionality for older PHP version. Each file provides support for one function, and is usually named after the function.

How do you use it?

1. Download the package.
2. Find the file you need. Each function is in its own file, e.g. array_walk_recursive.php.
3. Place this file somewhere in your include_path.
4. Include it, e.g. <?php require_once ‘array_walk_recursive.php’;?>

The function is now ready to be used.

Note: Don’t let the PEAR website scare you. PHP_Compat can be used without installing PEAR.

Some of my friends seemed a little unclear about the different Ubuntus out there. One example is of a friend who asked how I can upgrade my Xubuntu installation to Feisty Fawn. “Isn’t Feisty Fawn the new Ubuntu?” and “What is the code name for the 7.04 version of Xubuntu?” are questions I recently heard.

Ubuntu, the base
The Linux distro Ubuntu is the base for several derivatives. That’s what all these derivatives have in common: They all use the same Ubuntu base. The main difference between them all is either the desktop environment they use or the purpose they serve.

I know what desktops are, but I was looking for a nice way to describe them and found this:

Linux offers graphical environments, similar to Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s Mac OS X, in which a user can interact easily with applications. The main graphical environments for Linux consist of desktop environments and window managers.

Window managers provide an environment for launching and managing applications with graphical user interfaces (GUI). Desktop environments provide a similar interface for GUI applications and contain additional applications to manage everyday computing tasks, such as reading email and Web browsing.

The derivatives
The are a number of operating systems derived from Ubuntu. Some of them are supported by Canonical and the Ubuntu community, others are local language versions, hardware specific versions and versions to serve a group or purpose.

Supported
These derivatives are fully supported by Canonical and the Ubuntu community.

• Kubuntu – Ubuntu with the K Desktop Environment
• Edubuntu – Ubuntu for Education
• Xubuntu – Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop environment
• Ubuntu Server Edition – Ubuntu for Servers

The standard installation of Ubuntu comes with the Gnome desktop environment. Gnome and KDE are considered “heavy” desktops, which probably look nicer and have a lot of nice graphical features, but may use more resources to display these nice features.. The XFCE desktop on the other hand is quite “lighter” than the other 2 desktops, using less system resource. This is why Xubuntu is “ideal for old or low-end machines, thin-client networks, or for those who would like to get more performance out of their hardware”, according to the Xubuntu website.

Local
Due to space limitations just a couple of languages are included in the Ubuntu installations. However, there is support for a lot more languages online. Some of the language specific versions of Ubuntu are:

• Finnish version
• Italian version (translated by CreaLabs)
• Japanese version
• Baltix – Lithuanian version
• Taiwanese version
• Dubuntu Simplified Chinese version
• Kiwi (Hungarian and Romanian)
• Polish version

Other derivatives
There is a not-complete list of derivatives on the Ubuntu site, but I’m highlighting a few here.

• nUbuntu – security testing platform
• Ufficio Zero – Italian derivative for newbie office users, by CreaLabs
• Arabian Linux
• Fluxbuntu – uses Fluxbox as the desktop environment
• Elbuntu – uses E17 as the desktop environment
• Ubuntu Christian Edition
• Ubuntu Muslim Edition
• Ubuntu Studio – for multimedia editing and creation
• Ubuntu Multimedia Center
• Mepis

Conclusion
The widely promoted Ubuntu comes with Gnome as default desktop environment. For people who are used to the KDE (and believe me, there are a lot) Kubuntu replaces Gnome with KDE. For those who still run low-end machines or those who want to get more performance from their hardware Xubuntu replaces Gnome with Xfce. But they all have the same base. So when an upgrade of the base is made available, it’s version number and code name extends to it’s derivatives.

I hope this clears up some misunderstandings there could have been about the different derivatives of Ubuntu.

Now learn more about Ubuntu in this book: Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional)

After my upgrade to Xubuntu 7.04, code named Feisty Fawn, I discovered that PHP was not installed. Before the upgrade I was notified that some packages would be uninstalled, including Apache2 web server, which includes the PHP installation.

I tried to install PHP4 using apt-get and aptitude, but I got the message that php4 is referenced by other packages, but there was no package for php4. So I went looking for answers.

I found some notes from Ubuntu developers saying that php4 would be dumped from the repositories, leaving php5 as package. They reasoned that supporting php4 is of no use, since most servers online have already moved to php5.

So I had to install PHP5 on my machine. In the terminal window (Menu -> Accessories -> Terminal) I did the following:

sudo aptitude install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-xsl php5-gd php-pear

To test if the installation was successful, I created a test.php file to display the php info:

gksudo gedit /var/www/test.php

In this file I added the following line and saved the file.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Then I tested to see if it worked by typing http://localhost/testphp.php. It did work, so I removed the test.php file again. After that I installed the MySQL server:

sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin

After the installation was finished, I restarted my apache server with

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and checked if phpMyAdmin was working: http://localhost/phpmyadmin.

It worked and I was happy to see that my databases were still there, so i didn’t need to restore my backups.

Conclusion
Since there are not too many differences between the 2 versions, switching to PHP5 should be no trouble. There are some new functions that make things easier, so download a php5 manual and continue enjoying PHP.

Related book: Professional PHP5 (Programmer to Programmer)

Once again, Darren Rowse had me chained to his feed, when he wrote about Tim Ferris’s new book “The Four-Hour work Week“. First he posts about how the two met and what got him inspired to set up an interview via IM with Tim. A couple of minutes later he posts part 1 of the interview.

The interview
No, I’m not going to copy the whole interview here. Some very important aspects are:

• Most of us work 40 hours (Tim did 80) weekly doing boring stuff. This made Tim realize that income has no value without time.
• Tim has some tips for bloggers who want to write their own book. If you want to publish a book, don’t sell it yourself. Get an agent, who helps you look for the right editors, publishers and deals. Also, publishers are not interested purchasing something already self-published.
• For writing, let no one decide for you when it’s best to write. “Identifying your peak periods in your circadian rhythm is key.” If your creativeness drops after 4 hours, make sure you don’t force yourself to go on writing (this is true for every creative art).
• For promotion, try to become a “quoted expert” first. Also spend $500-$1500 on media training to learn how to present yourself in both online and offline Q&A sessions. Thirdly, it’s also important to promote yourself at your publisher as much as you promote yourself at your readers , because they, and the people around them, will be a major factor at launch time.
• Be genuine. People tend to see through you when you’re just trying to sell something. Have genuine chats and discussions with people. Give advice, comment on their products/blogs, introduce them to others, just treat them as when you’re trying to make new friends.
• “NOTE TO ASPIRING AUTHORS: writing books is not a good way to make money. The benefits are huge, but not often financial.”
• When planning to spend less time on doing more quality work, make sure you also plan what to do with the remaining time. Relaxing on a tropical beach can be fun for about 3 hours. After that it can get boring. Fill the void with stuff that is exciting. “It’s exciting, and that’s what I think people should chase in life: excitement. Not happiness — the term is so overused as to have no meaning. Chase excitement and you’ll find happiness, but not the other way around.”

What’s this to me?
My wife and I have been discussing our life a lot lately. Seems that we both agree that we’re working our butts off to pay the bills, in pursuit of happiness. But I miss the excitement in life. I want to see new things, meet new people, discover new ideas, explore other possibilities. Reading about this book has confirmed that I’m not a dreamer. It is what people look for in life.

I am definitely going to buy this book.

Final note
This is part one of the interview and I’m looking forward to part 2. Even though it’s someone else’s interview, it has made a really great impression and I think it’s worth talking about. There will probably be more on this subject once the other parts are posted.

Get your copy NOW: The Four-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

A while ago I read a clear explanation on the OpenOffice.org website to why the product is branded as OpenOffice.org (OOo) instead of just OpenOffice.

The Why
According to the explanation, the company wanted to brand this suite under the same trademark globally. But in the Netherlands there is a company Open Office, that sells automation solutions based on Linux and open source software. They registered the trademark Open Office and that trademark can not be used by others in the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).

Since most Dutch speaking folks live in this area, the OpenOffice suite could loose its Dutch community and wouldn’t be distributable under that same name. So to distribute the suite under the same name globally, the suite was branded under the name OpenOffice.org.

Where is that info now?
For some reason I can’t seem to find this information anywhere. The only mention of this on the OpenOffice.org site I can find is in their FAQ:

The trademark for “OpenOffice” belongs to someone else. Therefore we must use “OpenOffice.org” when referring to this open source project and its software.

Open Office mentions the difference between them, their products and trademark and OOo. It is also very clear that they are not content with OpenOffice.org, since the name is very similar to their’s. Even though they praise the office suite, they make a clear note that the name is confusing.

De Benelux Merkenwet zegt dat gebruik van een “overeenstemmend teken” niet toegestaan is, “indien daardoor de mogelijkheid bestaat dat bij het publiek een associatie wordt gewekt tussen het teken en het merk”. In gewoon Nederlands: er mag geen verwarring optreden. De associatie tussen OpenOffice.org en Open Office lijkt ons meer dan duidelijk.

Translation:

The Benelux trademark law states that the use of a “resembling mark” is not permitted, “if, as a result, the possibility exists that, to the public, an association between the sign and the mark is conceived. In plain Dutch: There can be no confusion. The association between OpenOffice.org and Open Office looks more than clear to us.

According to Open Office, attempts to contact Sun Microsystems and/or OpenOffice.org were poorly answered with replies like “I have to contact our attorneys for that”, after which the silence took over again.

Even though Open Office says all this, they still think OOo is a great product.

The name of the office suite
I still see a lot of people referring to the office suite as Open Office. The developers insist that the office suite is referred to as OpenOffice.org and not OpenOffice or Open Office, because of trademark issues.

Summary
This article is not intended to put OOo in a negative spot. On the contrary I think Microsoft Office is an alternative to OOo (which I would not recommend), and not the other way around. Everyone should switch from MS Office to OOo, if you ask me.

This article is purely to shed some light on the issues concerning the trademark. Not a lot of people know why the suite is not just named Open Office, so I thought I’d share this.

I do find it strange that I can’t find the resources where I read this information. If anyone knows where to find tis information, please let me know.

Related book at Amazon: A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2 for Windows and Linux

I use Opera to test my work. But after upgrading to Feisty Fawn, Opera didn’t seem to be working. When selected in the menu, nothing happened. I tried to start it from the terminal, but I got some error messages about problems opening the device.

It seems that upgrading Opera to the latest version did the trick. Just go to the Opera download site, download the latest version for Edgy and Feisty and install. I removed opera first before installing, so maybe you might have to do that too.