This picture reminds me of taxi drivers in Singapore [pic]
Weekly Twitter digest for 2011-10-23
- Diving at Sipadan was alright. Not as great as I’d thought. The islands near it are much better with schools of squids, giant cuttlefish etc #
- What a sad day. EBook reader died, and so did my laptop. RIP my gadgets :’c #
- Nevermind! My laptop is saved. This made me really think about a faster, more effective back up plan. I would have lost days worth of work.. #
- There is something magical about food in Penang. Even the simplest noodle (mee) tastes great. All my meals so far have been delicious! #
- No need to get wasted, I have nitrogen narcosis. #
- I’m really starting to dig Malay girls. They have such beautiful eyes and even-toned skin. #
- What the hey. The hostel manager gave me a container labeled as “poison” to use on my bed bug bites. http://t.co/HC0uTFho #
- Just had the best cendol of my life in Penang. http://t.co/jkfM20ED http://t.co/IxxT3rF5 #
- Quote of the day: “Being ignorant doesn’t make you stupid, knowing something doesn’t make you intelligent.” #
Weekly Twitter digest for 2011-10-16
- I’ve summitted Mt. Kinabalu. No sunrise though
Via ferrata was okay…didn’t feel scared at any point though. I was looking for a thrill. # - My blog http://t.co/Wz9LSZGQ needs some serious work…everything is broken! #
- What an amazing place! You can already see the massively diverse marine life in the markets and the role that they play in this little town. #
- Saw a massive cuttlefish, turtoise, frogfish, and a bunch of nudibranches today! #
Unpublished notes and posts from the past
I’m a busy lazy person. There are tons of notes and blog posts that I haven’t added to my blog yet. Most of these sit in my note taking app – Evernote, wasting away.
The thing with my writing is that it’s incomprehensible. My thoughts flow faster than I can type and they’re hindered by me having to record them down. Evernote helps a bit since it helps capture my ideas before they take flight, and plus I can easily categorize them.
This doesn’t solve the problem of fully capturing my thoughts though, and so they are never published. If I publish them as they are when I first wrote them, nobody would be able to understand it. Even I have trouble understanding it when I go back to them.
From time to time, I’ll dig up my past notes and translate them into comprehensible English. I’ll be sure to add a label to indicate that it’s a note from a while ago (6+ months) to avoid any confusion.
CS-Cart vs Drupal (or Dedicated shopping cart vs CMS + shopping cart module)
There are loads of shopping cart solutions out there for your online store. The biggest players being Magento, Prestashop, Shopify, Drupal + Ubercart, Joomla + Virtuemart, and CS-Cart.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on each ecommerce solution and there seems to be plenty of comparisons between each cart. These comparisons tend to focus on the features of each cart, which does vary but are more or less the same after installing certain modules that fill the gap.
Sure, a web store must have functionalities that suit your specific needs but these can be easily extended through third-party modules, which are available for free from the community or purchased at a reasonable price. If not available anywhere, you can always hire a team of developers to create it.
What I’ve found to be a more useful metric for comparison is the resource use, stability, back-end interface and the scalability of the cart since these cannot easily be changed and make up the back-bone for the store experience and management.
From all of my research, I’ve found very little comparing the two types of shopping cart setups: a dedicated shopping cart and CMS with a shopping cart module installed.
The current setup for my online store is Drupal + Ubercart which falls under the CMS + cart module category. It’s a setup that is often recommended by web developers. And I can see why. Drupal is an extremely powerful CMS that can be extended to do anything, and it’s easy to develop for. Likewise, the shopping cart module, Ubercart, can also be extended easily. Seeing all the good things said about the ecommerce setup, I used it for Postertext.
Big mistake.
Ubercart feels like an extension of something else, which it absolutely is. The back-end interface pales in comparison to dedicated shopping carts like CS-Cart. Scalability is great on both platforms but you get more ecommerce-related opportunities with a dedicated solution. Also, I know I just made my point on functionalities, but they are made so much more usable with more sub-feature sets than what you would find in a cart module. In other words, Ubercart is a toy compared to a full-fledged ecommerce solution like CS-Cart.
Here are the opinions I’ve developed after my research:
Magento
+ stable even with 1,000+ products
+ many features
+ beautiful back-end
- resource hog
- extremely expensive, and pricing structure doesn’t make sense
- hard to develop for
Prestashop
+ huge community
+ light-weight
+ easy to design for
- ugly back-end
- most modules cost money
Shopify
+ very easy to manage because it’s a hosted solution
+ beautiful templates to choose from
- monthly and % fees
Drupal + Ubercart
+ powerful CMS
+ easy to extend
+ huge community
- module is flaky
- functionalities lacks attention to detail
- ugly back-end
Joomla + Virtuemart
+ tested and true, many stores use this setup
- built on very old programming
CS-Cart
+ medium-sized community
+ popularity is up-trending
+ beautiful back-end
+ cheap one-time payment
+ solid and growing roadmap (that they actually follow)
+ has common ecommerce functionalities in the core
- hard to create unique design
- built-in CMS lacks customization
- many developers have not worked with the cart before
A notable mention is Lemonstand. It’s a beautiful cart, inside and out but is too new for a serious business. This is a cart that I will definitely keep an eye out for.
Weekly Twitter digest for 2011-10-09
- I've been sleeping every day for the past 24 years. Why aren't I getting better at it? #
- I'm sitting on a curb in the middle of nowhere in Miri, working on my business – on my phone. Thanks technology! #
- If I were to become religious, I'd dedicate myself to Islam just for Islamic art: arabesque, calligraphic design, geometric art, colorthemes #
- World's highest 'via ferrata' at Mount Kinabalu climb, this Tuesday. Time to fight my fear of heights (and also altitude sickness?) #
Funny and lucid dreams
I’ve been waking up on some days laughing. The funny thing is that I become lucid in the dreams where I start to laugh only because I realize the dream isn’t very funny.
What a weird way to lucid dream (and perhaps write bad sitcoms).
WebeTalk: A chat room for web entrepreneurs
There has to be an IRC channel for entrepreneurs, I thought. Many months ago, I had searched all around the web for one but to my surprise I couldn’t find any.
But last month, I came across someone mentioning WebeTalk on an online community which I’ve already forgotten the name of.
It’s a simple but elegantly designed website with a web-based IRC client in the middle with the banner text,
“We are a group of web entrepreneurs who like to talk with each other about new ideas, internet topics, and various other things. Come join us today!”
It’s mostly quiet when I’m logged in, but I also happen to be on the other side of the world, assuming that most of the chat members are from North America. But having just logged in at 1:20PM (UTC/GMT +8 hours) there seems to be some short bursts of activity.
Not sure if you want to join this small WebeTalk community? You can find interesting stats on the channel here: http://webetalk.com/stats.php like my favorite, Longest Monologue.
See you there!
Weekly Twitter digest for 2011-10-02
- Just spent an entire day configuring and templating @assistly and I'm still not done yet. It runs a bit slow, but it's great so far! #
- After hours of looking around Aeroplan's site, I've finally decided to redeem my soon-to-be-expired points for gift cards. Instant cash baby #
- Stung by wasps. Helped a tribe member with an invention. Trekked in the mountains. Smoked from a bamboo pipe. Danced with villagers. gd wknd #
A quote on price and value
“There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.” John Ruskin