DataWebTect

After the failure of the “Thirty days to a web application” (Yes I accept failure), I started thinking. Is there anything out there that could cut my development cycle to a bare minimum at the same time achieving the functionality I needed. Then I stumbled upon “Drupal” and “Joomla“, two of the most finest CMS’s out there. I evaluated both of them and went with “Drupal“.

Drupal is just great. Although it took a while to configure some of the options which required you to post an issue to the support forum and searching through a maze of documentation. Their support is good within few hours I got an answer and fixed the issue. For some reason the USPS test link was not working and when I switched to the production mode it worked. Then I had the issue of showing the images and after few days I figured it out. The site is for an e-commerce application and is different from conventional sites. I also had a chance to play with the paypal sandbox and it is just great to have such a sandbox and thanks to paypal.
I will be writing about it soon and post the links. My plan is to go live sometime next week.

Guy Kawasaki has this interesting post on distribution, wherein he discusses ten important characteristics of the art of distribution. A thought provoking and interesting post which clarifies the doubts of Viral and distribution. The following example will stick in your mind

A viral product could have no distribution, and a distributed product might not be viral. To use a medical example, a person with hepatitis in the middle of the ocean won’t spread the virus, and someone with a non-contagious disease won’t spread it even if she were in the middle of Mumbai during the morning commute.

Dion explicitly explains seven ways to trigger network effects.

• Network Enable Your Application. - iTunes which has connectivity to the internet but is a desktop app.
• Enable Data Sharing and Data Defaults.  - Dion citest the example of del.icio.us/popular to examplify the situation wherein the users themselves came up with the easy way to find the data.
  
• Linkify Everything In Your Web 2.0 App - Advocates linking everything on the site.
  
• Syndicate Your Content - The whole social software is built on the syndication and suggests the software should have at the minimal RSS and Atom.
  
• Turn Your Application Into a Platform: - Essentially providing the API so that not only your site is benefited but many other sites as well. A good example would be the Flickr where there are so many sites which used the api to create mash ups.
  
• Open Up Inside Your Site:  - Similar to myspace allowing youtube to host the videos.
  
• Build a Viral Social Architecture.- The whole concept of sharing and gives an example of myspace which has a link at the bottom for emailing to friends etc.,