Open Source Business

Quick custom text ad placement in WordPress blog categories

tina — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:48:25 +0000

WordPress plugins abound for Google AdSense and other third-party text ad brokers, but what happens when someone wants to buy ad space directly from you, on a specific category page in your blog? You can easily add static HTML text ads to your category search result pages by creating category-specific page templates.

Because most WordPress themes have a single template for archives, aptly named archive.php, it’s not immediately apparent how to place a text ad on a specific category results page. But never fear: by default, WordPress searches using what it calls a “template hierarchy.” By taking advantage of the template hierarchy, it’s easy to make a special page that keeps your text ad where it belongs.

The template hierarchy works like this: if your visitor clicks on category #3, WordPress first looks for the most specific template: category-3.php. If it doesn’t find that, then it goes after the more generic category.php, and then archive.php, and if it doesn’t find that, it finally drops back to index.php. Armed with this knowledge, you can create a category-specific template using archive.php as a base. (Note: your categories probably have actual names, not numbers, but WordPress assigns ID numbers to categories, just as it does with pages and posts. If you don’t know the ID numbers off the top of your head, look in the administration panel under Manage -> Categories; the numbers are in that first column.)

To create your custom category page, open a copy of the archive.php file in a text editor and save it with a name that matches whatever category number you want to display the ad in — category-#.php. Place the static text ad into your new category-specific PHP file by surrounding the HTML code with

. Then paste that snippet, including the div tags, into the file, directly under this line of code: , as in this example. Save the file, upload it to wp-content/themes/your_theme, and you’re done.

Granted, this is static code in a dynamic page and therefore not the most elegant solution, but it works. You PHP wizards out there might have a better way to write this, especially for situations where you need to publish several different ads in different categories. In that case, we welcome your suggestions — or a new plugin.

Open source business plan for Mindquarry

tina — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:27:52 +0000

Lars Trieloff was already familiar with open source software before he launched Mindquarry as a business based on it. Trieloff studied in Germany at the Hasso Platner Institute, where he received a degree in software systems engineering. During that time he noticed that, outside of the software development industry, true collaborative efforts didn’t happen often, and when they did, there often wasn’t an efficient and user-friendly way to conduct that collaboration.

“I had the idea to create collaborative software that combines aspects from software systems such as wikis, version control systems, issue tracking systems, and mailing lists,” Trieloff says. “I was accustomed to using these tools, and I found it irritating that collaboration outside of the software development industry did not work. [At one job,] after spending a week setting up version control, wiki, and bug tracking, I was frustrated, because I could not convince my co-workers to use these tools, no matter how productive we might have been. Their complexity and power made them nearly unusable.”

That’s when he got the idea for Mindquarry. Mindquarry is open source, collaborative, and easy to use, says Trieloff. It’s designed to remove the usability barrier.

After the usability barrier comes what Trieloff calls “data lock-in. We allow our users to cross this barrier by offering an open REST API and standards-based storage. The third barrier is lock-out of users due to restrictive proprietary licenses. With our participatory open source model we are tearing down this third barrier.

“My original idea was not to make [it] open source,” he says. “I already had gathered experience as a user, contributor, and developer in open source, but had not thought about the business opportunities in open source until my co-founders Alexander Saar and Alexander Klimetschek and our investor pointed me in this direction. It then became obvious: what the world needs is not only better software for supporting the teamwork of knowledge workers, but that in order to make the software useable by everyone, we had to remove all barriers.”

Trieloff says he’s on the pragmatic side of the open source philosophy. “We are offering open source, not because I believe software must be free, but because I believe it is the best option for customer and vendor,” he says. “Since the late 1990s I have been using open source software. My first real open source software was PHP3 and MySQL. I chose them not because they were free, but because they gave me options to develop software that other proprietary systems did not have. This, of course, was a result of freedom, but freedom was not what made my decision.”

Mindquarry will generate profits through a subscription model through which customers receive maintenance and support. “For our enterprise customers this removes another barrier: uncertainty when dealing with community-created software.” Mindquarry is also available in a hosted version where small companies can, for a fee, take advantage of a pre-installed version of Mindquarry that resides on remote servers.

Trieloff says the idea of community is the most important aspect of launching a business based on open source. “If you are using open source software internally on mission-critical systems, or starting a company on this software, make sure to be involved in the community,” he says. He also cautions that “the community that creates large parts of the software must be understood to keep your requirements and the development in sync. Without your contribution, the community will hardly create the software you need.”

Four Twitter clients for Linux

tina — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:11:21 +0000

Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others’ updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client. Twitter clients make the service more usuable by automatically checking for updates from your friends and allowing you to easily post your own updates. I tested four Twitter clients for Linux on a desktop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

gTwitter

gTwitter 1.0 is nothing fancy, and that’s a good thing. This lightweight, easy-to-install, and easy-to-use Twitter client for GNOME is as simple as it could be. It displays updates from your friends or from the public timeline, which is all Twitter users’ updates, automatically, right in the gTwitter application. You can choose to see tweets themselves, or just view a summary of who has updated recently. You post your own updates from the status box at the bottom of the window.

The only thing that might make gTwitter too simple for some is its lack of an option for audible tweet notifications. For others, however, it might be nice to work without hearing a ding every few minutes that tempts you to stop what you’re doing and see what’s happening on Twitter. If you need to keep up with tweets and the lack of audible notifications is a problem, just set gTwitter to “always on top,” instead of the default behavior, which hides the window whenever you click on another window.

Developers say the project, written in Mono/C# and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, is still in beta. Direct message viewing and the ability to log tweets are near the top of the development priority list.

Twitux

Twitux 0.62 is another simple Twitter client for GNOME. It seems a bit quirky on first take; the client refuses to wrap tweets to conform to the size of the window. I had to scroll sideways the first time I ran Twitux. It looked better after a system restart, but it still cut off the right side of any tweets longer than one line.

Even worse, Twitux doesn’t have a built-in posting window. Instead, you have to go into the menu options or press Ctrl-N to be able to post. Twitux also doesn’t offer an easy way to reply to a tweet, instead forcing you to enter the username you’re looking for manually. Most other clients automate the process of replying and sending direct messages.

Twitux does offer a popup notification when you receive new tweets. You can select how often you’d like Twitux to check for new updates, and you can have it check only your friends’ updates or only the public timeline. Twitux also has a spellcheck feature that comes in handy if you’re concerned about making sure your tweets are spelled correctly.

Twitux is currently buggy, but it will be worth taking another look at when it’s no longer in beta.

TwitBin

TwitBin, which is a cross-platform Firefox add-on, sits as a sidebar in your browser, always visible while you’re browsing but not getting in your way. TwitBin features a clickable @ by each user’s avatar, making it easy to reply to a specific user. It also displays a clickable link to each user’s Web site (if available). Like the other clients, you can decide whether to get updates from just your friends or the entire Twitter universe, and you can determine how often you’d like to receive the updates. TwitBin autowraps tweets and shortens links to keep everything nicely formatted in the sidebar. However, you can also enlarge TwitBin up to half the width of your browser window, narrow it to about one-fifth the width, or choose any size in between.

Twitter widget for Opera

For anyone who browses with Opera, the Twitter widget for Opera is the best of the bunch. To install, simply click the Launch button on the widget’s page on Opera.com. Enter your login name and password, and you’re set.

Opera’s Twitter widget looks and works great. You can drag this widget anywhere; it’s not confined to the sidebar. You can set it to remain “always on top” or to behave like a normal application window, and you can resize the widget to make it larger.

The Twitter widget for Opera doesn’t come with many options, but you don’t need many. It checks your friends’ updates by default, keeps a record of your updates, and makes it easy to view and create replies and direct messages. Click on a Twitter user’s avatar or username, and Opera opens the user’s profile page on Twitter.com.

The only thing missing from Opera’s Twitter client is an automatic link shrinker. Also, you have to keep Opera open or the client will shut down. This one’s a keeper, though, and is my Twitter client of choice.

Conclusion

Is there a single best of show among these clients? If you like using Opera, its Twitter widget is my top recommendation. If you’re using Firefox, you can’t go wrong with TwitBin. gTwitter is a good, general, easy-to-use client. For now, I recommend not using Twitux, but that may change as the application matures.

Three Firefox extensions for Gmail

tina — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:53:13 +0000

Gmail, Google’s popular Web mail application, is already full of useful features all on its own. But Firefox users can further customize Gmail with a variety of add-ons. Some only change the appearance, while others add functionality that makes Gmail more like a personal planner than just a plain old email application. Let’s take a look at three Firefox add-ons for Gmail.

Extension series

The first extension, GTDinbox, is a complicated collection of helpful and semi-helpful features. GTDinbox author Andy Mitchell claims his add-on is based on the action management method popularized by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done, which is based on the premise that writing down tasks frees a person to actually get those tasks done in a more efficient way. GTDinbox tries to help Gmail users become more efficient by grouping and labeling email communications as projects and task-oriented to-do lists.

Right from installation. GTDinbox runs unobtrusively, making only a few default changes in the appearance of your Gmail screen. One of the first things you’ll notice is an option called “Compose Personal” under the original “Compose Mail” link. Click on Compose Personal and you’ll see a composition screen sans the usual From: and To: entry boxes. It provides a quick way of sending an email message to yourself.

GTDinbox adds a category called “Statuses” to your Gmail labels and places new labels under Statuses called “Next Action,” “Action,” “Waiting On,” “Some Day,” and “Finished.” All of your existing labels go under another GTDinbox-created category called “Miscellaneous.” By using these categories and labels, the extension hopes to help you get your inbox empty. That idea is based on another productivity theory authored by Merlin Mann, called “Inbox Zero,” which states that the fewer items in your inbox, the more productive you are. GTDinbox, Mitchell says, is highly compatible with Inbox Zero.

But how do you use all this to make it a worthwhile add-on? Mitchell has done a good job of explaining a typical process at the GTDinbox Web site. When a message arrives in your inbox, you have to determine if it represents an action that must be taken or a resource. Action messages should be acted on immediately, if possible; if not, you apply one of the status labels. You assign a project label to resource messages to group it with other related communication.

None of these GTDinbox features is unique, meaning that anyone could perform any of these functions with existing Gmail capabilities. GTDinbox simply makes it easier to get started with the GTD efficiency principles. The only unique feature of GTDinbox is the ability to right-click on any message and see a popup summary of its contents. It’s unique, but not that useful, since if you left-click on the message you can see the whole thing.

Overall, GTDinbox does what it is supposed to do, and will probably save you a little time in terms of getting your email organized, but it’s nothing even the greenest Gmail newb couldn’t do for herself.

A less complicated but more useful add-on is Gmail Manager, which helps you keep multiple Gmail accounts straight. To get started, register your Gmail accounts after installing Gmail Manager by selecting Tools -> Addons -> Gmail Manager from the Firefox menu, then click the Options button and add each Gmail account that you want Gmail Manager to keep track of.

The extension places a small icon in the lower right corner of the Firefox browser window. You can right-click on the icon and choose which Gmail account you’d like information for. Gmail Manager logs in to that account and gives you a small popup of statistics that shows the number of new messages in the inbox and in labels, with a small preview of each new message. This makes it easy for the “over the shoulder” email checkers (such as your spouse or children) to quickly check for new messages without disrupting your other work too much. Gmail Manager can also notify you when new messages arrive.

This add-on’s only drawback seems to be a lag time between the actual arrival of email in my Gmail inbox and when Gmail Manager reports that to me — sometimes a delay of several minutes. In spite of that one flaw, Gmail Manager is now a must-have for my household, if only because it keeps the compulsive email checkers at bay so I can get my work done.

Last, and tiniest, is dragdropupload. This little add-on is the simplest of the three, but for me the most likely to stay added to my copy of Firefox. Instead of browsing for the file you want to attach to a message, dragdropupload lets you drag and drop the file’s icon or file name onto the entry bar. This works best if you keep a window open for the directory in which most of your documents and other files reside. There are no options or settings to configure with this add-on — simply install it and you’re ready to save time, keystrokes, and mouseclicks.

There you have it: three add-ons for Firefox that make Gmail more useful, ranging from full-featured to simple goodness. All I need now is a Gmail add-on that will take dictation.

Asterisk awakens open source love in telecom entrepreneur

tina — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:43:43 +0000

Marc Fribush, a former “Microsoft guy,” is a telecommunications industry entrepreneur who discovered the benefits of open source when he launched a turnkey SAAS telephony business based on Asterisk. “It’s really powerful stuff,” Fribush says.

Fribush’s previous company produced Web telephony software for the online dating industry. When that business was sold in 2006, he started looking for his next project and noticed an interesting trend. “We were looking at the Asterisk movement, and we started looking at some of the momentum,” Fribush says. “It was a big disrupter. And we thought that one of the missing pieces was a turnkey solution where the application was actually hosted.” Fribush partnered with his friend Michael Rand to launch Aretta Communications. “That’s really the start of my open source background. I’ve really always been a Microsoft guy. You get converted when you see the power of open source tools. Now it is the majority of our infrastructure.”

Fribush says that with open source he’s had to change his mindset on software support, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “When you come from a .Net background, there’s more professional support that goes along with that. With open source, the bulk of it is going to be community-based. You can’t expect to pick up the phone and have these applications supported. You have to find your answers another way. You just have to change your mentality.

“Primarily, we go to the community, but certain applications have professional versions. We start our development on open source versions, and if we have to we migrate up to the supported version. The code base is typically the same, and you can usually leverage a lot of the community-based support resources. I happen to believe that the community-based support mechanism is superior in many aspects. You can search on your specific error message and see a whole slew of other users who have experienced a similar problem. It’s a much more friendly support mechanism, as opposed to calling an 800 number and you don’t know if anyone else is having the same issue.”

Aretta’s customers have no objections to their telephone service being built on open code. “There are two different flavors. The early adopter enthusiast — a lot of those come from the Asterisk community, and they want it to be an open source product. On the other side is the day-to-day business user that just wants a telephone system that works. At the end of the day, they don’t care that it’s running on open source. We have the entire spectrum.”

One of the biggest benefits of building on Asterisk has been the low cost. “There’s no question that it’s a whole lot cheaper than buying licenses from Microsoft to do your development work,” Fribush says. “The other thing is flexibility. Open source really gives you tremendous freedom to make any kind of modification you might need to get it working in your environment. If I need the software to do something, maybe someone else has already developed it that way. And if we can’t find people locally, there’s usually always someone internationally that’s got really solid experience with the application. Dealing with those people, even on a contract basis, is a lot cheaper.”

Patience is a virtue when it comes to working with open source, Fribush says. “A lot of open source projects are on fast release schedules, and it doesn’t leave time to do a ton of testing. You have to be real careful before you upgrade to the next release. It could fix a problem but create others. When we first started Aretta, we would upgrade after every release, and sometimes have fatal errors afterward. There was really no need for us to upgrade. With open source, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Linux Today Managing Editor Carla Schroder

tina — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:15:02 +0000

arla Schroder says she just “kind of wandered into” her current life as a free software advocate and well-known IT journalist. “I don’t have much in the way of formal education. But I’ve always been mechanically inclined – your classic ripping things apart and figuring out how they work. I think that makes open source a natural fit for me.”

Schroder didn’t study computers or programming in school. She found formal education “horrible and boring,” and says she couldn’t wait to get out. Once she did, Schroder embarked on a curious path that led to her role as the managing editor of LinuxToday.com. “I’ve had a lot of different careers. I started out as an auto mechanic, and that lasted until cars got all computerized, and then it’s hard to stay in business” because of extensive and expensive equipment needs. Next up for Schroder were stints in landscape maintenance and housecleaning. “I got bored with that,” she says. “I seem to last about six years.” Then she learned massage therapy. “I was getting beat up doing that landscaping work.”

In the early 90’s as a massage therapist in Portland, Oregon, Schroder found that most of her clientele were people involved in the high-tech industry. “They were all getting repetitive strain injuries. That was my introduction to computers. Before that they just hadn’t been on my radar. Then a friend loaned me her Macintosh LC-II. That was my very first computer. And it was fun. But there is something about the Apple way of doing things. I was like, ‘this is OK, but not really satisfying.’ Next was a Windows 3.1 PC. 3.1 was pretty much a fiasco. I was always dropping to DOS to get any work done. But that was more fun, getting under the hood.”

Carla SchroderWhile still a massage therapist, Schroder starting writing a regular column entitled “Happy, Healthy Computering” for a local computer publication called Computer Bits. That was the beginning of Schroder’s career as a journalist. She soon tired of writing about health and started writing about her newfound hobby: computers, and eventually open source software.

“I started gravitating toward Linux then because there were a couple of Linux writers at the magazine. I also started helping people with their computers – home users and small businesses. As soon as people know you can do anything with computers they start waving money at you. But [consulting] is stressful and demanding.” So Schroder focused more on her writing.

“On this one mailing list, one of the editors at Jupitermedia posted that he needed a technology writer. I was all over that,” Schroder says. “Michael Hall opened lot of doors for me. I’d been freelancing for various Linux sites on Jupitermedia Linux since 2002, writing nice gnarly Linux howtos of all kinds — desktop, system, and network administration. I also substituted for Brian Proffitt, the former managing editor and mastermind behind Linux Today and LinuxPlanet, when he took time off. Then Brian got a fantastic opportunity to work as the Linux Developer Network community manager for the Linux Foundation, which is the group that pays Linus Torvalds’ paycheck. So I said to the Jupitermedia bosses ‘Me! Me! Pick me!’ And after keeping me in suspense for a dreadfully long time — it was like days — they said OK. Which all goes to show how business networking really works. It’s not about going to events all full of strangers, and you wander around giving sales pitches about yourself and handing out business cards. It’s about looking for opportunities, cultivating relationships, and targeting the businesses that you really want to work for.”

Schroder says her new position as managing editor of LinuxToday.com is “pretty cool. I’ve been reading it since its inception. For the first time I get to read all the news and howto articles I want to, on the clock. It’s great. And I get to share the really cool ones with all our readers.”

Schroder sees her role in the FOSS community as anything but stereotypical. Instead, she identifies with other women in the open source world who are not your typical “hard core coder geeks who just want to put their heads down and not have to deal with people.

“There’s a multitude of jobs to be filled in the open source world that are every bit as important as the coding. People need outreach and need to know what’s available to them. I’m always into doing the hardcore howto’s. I take pride in not skipping over the hard parts — I don’t think there’s much point in putting out something kind of wimpy.”

Schroder says she admires FOSS hero Richard Stallman. “The man is brilliant. A lot of people don’t really understand how important and influential he’s been for the whole issue of freedom – the freedom to tinker is a good way to look at it. The GPL itself is a work of genius because it guarantees there’s going to be an ongoing ecosystem. People who take and modify this great code that’s been given to them? They’re going to have to give a little something back.”

Schroder hopes to take her message, that FOSS is for everyone, to the masses. “One of my biggest dreams, and this has been hard to do, is to reach out to a more mainstream audience. There’s all kinds of avenues for the geek crowd. The growth now is going to have to come from the so-called masses. I would love to find a way to get into more mainstream publications and start from a more fundamental level, to reach those raw baby beginners who have never had the opportunity to learn about Linux.”

A business built on open source, virtualization, and clouds

tina — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:42:46 +0000

ReadyTechs provides network support services for companies that don’t want the expense of hiring and caring for their own employees. Now CEO Gerry Libertelli says the company is using Linux virtualization to open a new income stream based on cloud computing.

Libertelli say he catches his existing customers at the end-of-life stage in hardware maintenance to offer them more than just virtual server administration. “We intervene in the hardware stream and say, ‘How about a virtual network?’ And that is starting to ramp up.”

ReadyTechs’ cloud computing and virtual network offerings are based on Linux and Xen. “We fully embrace it,” Libertelli says. He was an early participant in the Xen computing project, but as it grew, “we started to buy commercial suites like XenSource (now owned by Citrix) or VMware. But we always hated their licensing programs and the way they tried to limit growth. So we wound up back at Xen.org.”

Libertelli says his customers don’t mind the simplicity of a cloud based on a community project. “We pitch the idea that we’re pragmatic, rather than the latest and greatest. We know how to operate a cloud really effectively by using tried and true tools, and one of them is Xen. We showcase that we’re involved in the project. And they would much rather have their applications in a stable environment than a supercharged, always failing environment.”

A history of success

Libertelli discovered Linux in the late ’90s when he owned a large development company called G. Triad. That company helped launch some big sites, like toysrus.com, dowjonesuniversity.com, and smartmoney.com. “We were into ColdFusion, and J.J. Allaire adopted Linux early. We’ve developed on top of Linux ever since.”

Libertelli calls himself “more of an entrepreneur” than strictly a technologist. “I find myself always gravitating to the GNU-type projects. They are the best way to develop venture-backed applications. With the amount of creativity coming out of the community, and the value right out of the box, you realize a real benefit by always using [FOSS].”

ReadyTechs doesn’t just develop with open source, it uses it throughout the company. “The other day I was looking around the office and realized we use a lot of Linux applications. We’re not Linux purists, but it seems that when we need an application, the Linux option just winds up working the best. Not because it’s the best, but because we can touch it. We can modify it very easily and it ends up suiting us well.

“We didn’t set out to build the company on Linux, but we wound up doing that because everything just fits. We use Sugar for our CRM, Nagios for monitoring, and MRTG for bandwidth monitoring. It all rolls up into a little desktop we wrote. The lack of licensing restrictions makes [using open source software] more flexible. For example, Citrix is killing XenSource by not allowing you to touch certain things. When you’re building clouds you have to touch stuff.

“We still have to use Exchange, but we’re about to move over to an Exchange knockoff with a great feature set called Kerio.”

Libertelli says he used to be apprehensive about the perceived lack of support with open source. “I was like any business owner. But we have to buy so many support contracts for clients, servers, hardware, and you start to realize they’re not really interested in supporting you. It used to be Dell had this four-hour support contract and it was easy to get them to do the work. As time has gone on they have changed that. We went to Dell the other day and they wanted us to troubleshoot. You have to go through all the troubleshooting before they will dispatch a part. The more I see that the more I say I would rather rely on the community discussion boards. It’s all right there and I can just get it, rather than having to social engineer my way through tier one support.”

Libertelli says ReadyTechs gives back to the community in non-traditional ways. “We aren’t writing code and contributing it back,” he says. “But we do get to see the net effect of all the software as it is running on diverse systems, and we contribute back support. We keep an active wiki and dump chunks of it back into the community to help the discussion. Sugar rolled out a revision recently and we saw the broken parts within minutes. We let people know, and many people avoided upgrading to that release. We’re not stellar code contributors, but we do play a role.”

When it comes to launching a software development company, Libertelli says it pays to help your developers out by providing a good development framework for them. “The principal flexibility of open source is unlocked by being able to leverage many PHP or Java developers to produce your vision. You get a massive benefit when you have a prepared framework. It takes a lot of time and code to write something people have already coded over and over again. So marshal the efforts of programmers with frameworks and focus on the special sauce. Open source unlocks that ability.

“With a network company, the advantage of open source is even clearer. If you have a programmer, you can string together an entire systems desk by using open source connectors that work together, and that looks like a large network management company. The advantage is I get the same efficiency as a enterprise-grade product at much lower expense.”

Software configuration management built on OSS gives Virtusa a competitive advantage

tina — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:14:48 +0000

Virtusa, an IT services company founded in 1996, was using proprietary version control and collaboration systems to develop software for its clients until Sri Lankan founder Kris Canekeratne decided that a custom solution built on open source components was a better fit for internal use. As a result, the company ended up saving millions of dollars on licensing fees and acquisition costs.

Virtusa developers were already familiar with the power and flexibility of open source software, having participated in the GPL-licensed Sahana project for disaster management. Developers built Sahana in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. It includes registries for organizations, shelters, and missing persons, as well as modules for aid requests and volunteer coordination. The community surrounding Sahana was even more passionate, dedicated, and efficient than most, given the nature of the project, and Virtusa’s developers found that dedication contagious.

Based on its experience with open source, which included using open source components in creating client specifications, and the rising costs of licensing and acquisition in light of the company’s growth, Virtusa decided to bring the benefits of open source inside the company. It launched its Keystone initiative in 2006. Keystone is a software configuration management system that was built using a combination of open source components such as GForge, Subversion, and Tortoise, all on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and tweaked to fit Virtusa’s specific requirements. Virtusa uses Keystone internally to perform issue tracking, source code management, and document management.

Santanu Paul, senior vice president and head of global delivery operations for Virtusa, says the Keystone project has served as a great example to potential clients of the benefits of using open source tools and applications, and also stands as a testament to the company’s open source knowledge. But the benefits of using open source internally go beyond just showcasing Virtusa’s talents. Canekeratne and Paul estimate the company has saved $3 million so far, and stands to save at least $2 million more over the next couple of years.

Open source software has proven superior in flexibility, Paul says. “We realized we would have better control over our [infrastructure] and that gives us a competitive advantage.”

The biggest challenge of bringing open source inside the company was the migration from proprietary applications. “You build up a huge amount of knowledge and documentation. During the migration we had to spend quite a bit of effort and time” in training staff members on the new system and building a new knowledge base, Paul says.

When considering the use of open source tools and applications, choosing the right one based on the kind of license you’re comfortable with is important, Paul says. “Depending on how you plan to deploy components built on open source, you could get into trouble. Also, pick projects that are bite-sized to start with. Make sure your applications development team has done a lot of open source work. And set a budget for training.”

Social networking for sports sits on an open platform

tina — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:17:25 +0000

Sportsvite.com, a kind of MySpace for ballers, exists because Steve Parker and a few friends wanted to find a better way to organize softball leagues and other casual sports teams in their New York neighborhoods. Parker, who lists badminton as a favorite sport on his Sportsvite.com profile, says he has always been an advocate of using open source, and thought it would be a great idea to build an Internet service that would make it easier for people to team up for amateur sports.

“We started batting around the idea back in early ‘05,” Parker says. “But we had other full-time things going on, so didn’t officially launch until the beginning of ‘06.” Parker and his friends enjoyed the loose-knit network of leagues, but it was a “pain” to organize games. Their idea was to build a social network strictly for those who would rather play than watch sports. “We initially started out by putting out a very basic version of the site, focused on a couple of simple things. You could organize games with friends and put up a sports profile. As we introduced Sportsvite in beta we realized that the opportunity for an online community targeting recreational sports and amateur athletes was substantial.” The original focus has expanded to include the social networking concept so popular in the current Web 2.0 iteration, Parker says. In 2008, Parker hopes to provide what he calls “context” around different sports interests by including event listings, instructional videos, articles, blogs, and nutrition and fitness tools.

Sportsvite has seen some financial return in the form of advertising revenue from sponsors including Powerade, Puma, Kellogg’s, Coors, and Suzuki. A secondary form of income comes through management of sports league partner sites such as Denver Sports & Social.

Parker, a software developer with a background in open source, brought to the company a conviction that avoiding proprietary software was the only way to launch a Web 2.0 enterprise. “In every aspect of what we do, we use open source,” Parker says. “One of the major reasons we use it is the belief in its stability and availability — and of course, zero cost to get started.” Sportsvite.com is built on LAMP, a combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, a MySQL database, and the PHP programming language, and Java.

Parker says his friends, who became co-founders of Sportsvite.com with him, trusted his expertise. “They were cool with it. The conversation would come up from time to time earlier on, when they would be talking with someone else who would mention how .Net was pretty good. Then I would have to explain the pros and cons of why we were taking the approach we took, as opposed to using .Net, which straps you to Microsoft technology. They understood that and bought into the philosophy that there’s a world of [open source] resources out there, and it’s only going to grow and get bigger over time. We’ll have more and more options available to us as we expand the site.”

Parker and his team are so confident about the benefits of open source that they’ve even been explaining the concept to potential investors. “We explain the technology we’re using, and how that affects our costs for building and maintaining the system. They were fine with it.” So fine, in fact, that a few “angel investors” in the form of professional athletes have pitched in capital resources to support the beta phase of Sportsvite.com. “I think people are really understanding more and more over the past few years how open source is very stable and it’s not just a bunch of free software.”

Like many companies using open source technology, Sportsvite’s IT infrastructure is self-supported. “You could pay for lots of stuff,” Parker says. “Production support, higher-level versions of the product. We’re not finding much need for that. The software is the thing, and the community is out there on the Web. I’ve found that we can stick with the stuff that remains free, which is the same underlying software [as in the commercial versions], and we’re good to go. Maybe at some point we may want to ease into getting some kind of higher end support, but there just hasn’t been a need yet.”

If there’s any challenge, it has been an embarrassment of riches and just too many choices — “knowing how to navigate all of the possible offerings out there, and making sense of it and dealing with the community in an effective manner,” Parker says. “There are so many competing frameworks. Sure, if you go with .Net, you don’t have to think about it because you’re going to use all of Microsoft’s stack, but if you’re going to choose each and every component, you don’t want to make the wrong choices. You don’t want to use an open source product that has a dying community.”

Thingamablog makes client-side blogging easy

tina — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:56:45 +0000

Thingamablog is a cross-platform GPL blogging application that lets you create, update, and maintain multiple blogs from the client side. Thingamablog even acts as its own FTP client when you’re ready to publish or update your blog with new content. The software is easy enough for beginners to use, but sophisticated enough that veteran bloggers will appreciate it too.

The application is packaged for quick download (less than 4MB for the most recent stable version 1.0.6) either in a Windows self-extracting installer, a Linux RPM, a generic ZIP format, or in source code format. A beta version, 1.1 v6, is also available. Download your preferred package, extract it, and install it according to the requirements of your operating system. You’ll also need to have Java Runtime Environment 1.4.2 installed locally, since Thingamablog is coded in Java.

Right from the start, I was pleased and surprised at how mature and easy to use this application is, even the beta version. To create a new blog, click File -> New Weblog. An interactive wizard guides you through the steps. First, you enter the relative path on the server where the files should be uploaded. For my Web host, it is /public_html/directory_name. Make sure you give your Thingamablog its own separate directory, but don’t worry about manually creating it on the server, since Thingamablog creates your blog’s directory automatically during the file upload.

Click to enlarge Next, enter the URL of your blog, which is simply the URL assigned to you by your host, with the Thingamablog directory name appended. The application creates subdirectories for archives and images on its own. One small nitpick is that the program doesn’t name the front page of the blog index.html by default, but instead dubs it blog.html, which unnecessarily lengthens the URL. I fixed this easily by clicking on Configure Weblog -> Front Page and replacing “blog.html” with “index.html,” then re-uploading the blog.

The wizard next asks for is the blog’s title and description, categories, and site authors (and in the beta version there is an option to post via email). You can then select from several included themes, and configure the application to upload the blog files to the remote host.

Thingamablog has a limited set of features that most blog owners expect, such as the ability to generate RSS feeds, the ability to create and maintain multiple blogs, and automatically ping your choice of blog aggregators. It doesn’t include any special bells and whistles for automatic search engine optimization, and unlike WordPress it cannot use plugins, but if you’re fairly adept with HTML it is simple enough to add your own keyword and content tags.

Click to enlarge The only deficiency in Thingamablog that could potentially be a dealbreaker is that it doesn’t allow your site visitors to leave comments. Since Thingamablog is a client-side application, the files on the server aren’t writable. One solution is to use a free commenting service like HaloScan. The only other option would be to recode it to allow commenting on the server side, a feature that Bob Tantlinger, the original developer, hasn’t added, probably since it would change the basic client-side nature of Thingamablog. Not every blogger wants or needs to allow discussion; for such bloggers, not having a comment option, which keeps away a lot of would-be spammers, could be a benefit.

The most recent beta version of Thingamablog was released in December, and there’s quite a bit of activity at the project’s discussion forum. Bob says a 2.0 version of Thingamablog is lurking somewhere in the future, but even now, this application could become one of your favorite blogging platforms.