Yey! Today PWW celebrates one month online. Happy B-Day to you…Happy B-day to you..

We’re going to celebrate this by feeding our web-server cake…some downtime might occur.

So far we’ve manage to publish 31 posts, so we did reach our goal to write one post a day. In my opinion we’ve managed to write some really good articles.

If you haven’t been with us from the start, here’s a list of some my favorites so far:

• Building The Basecamp
• An article about some useful softwares for startups.
• Why Your Site Should Be Multi-Platform
• Does your site only work in one browser and you don’t think it’s an issue? Think again.
• The True Purpose of Google’s Secret Search Engine
• We reveal the secret of Google’s new beta-search engine.
• Commercial support is for old people (we use forums)
• An article about why Your company needs a forum, and what to keep in mind when you implement it.
• Choosing a CMS – Part 1
• A brief introduction to what you should keep in mind when selecting a CMS for Your company.

That’s just a few of the good articles we’ve published. Feel free to browse our archive for more goodies.

Today I read this article on Nongeek perspective: Things To Keep In Mind When Promoting Your Blog Through Comments – Nongeek perspective. As you might have guessed, it’s about using comments to get links to your blog.

This might seem like a good idea. If you’re a super commenter you can get your link into very many blogs with a day’s worth of work, right?

Unfortunately there are a few reasons for why these links aren’t worth much:

• They get ignored. Because of our contemporary ad clutter, surfers have become really good at ignoring everything but the main content of a web page. They came for the content and that’s what they’ll read if they have a choice. Meanwhile your comments are at the very bottom of the page, sometimes even requiring a click to get to! Sure, some people are curious about the comments and will read them but out of those people only even fewer actually click on names of random people unless your comment really blew them away.
• The links have the wrong context. Usually the link to your blog is described by your name. So if the visitor clicks on your name they get to your blog. This is what the search engines look at. What text surrounds the link? What might the linked to page be about? So those links are not very useful for your search engine rankings. Only people who actually search for you by name find your page – and unless you’re rather famous the number of people who search for you by name might be quite small!
• Your time is money. In order to make a good mind blowing please-click-the-author comment you need to at least read the actual article. Then it’ll take you another couple of minutes to write a thoughtful comment. So you spend maybe 30 minutes on each comment. Even if your day job pay is lousy, that’s at least $3.25 of income you just lost. Now do that for a 100 links and you just lost $325. You can buy Text Link Ads for less than that and still get more exposure with better context. (Full Disclosure: the link is Playing With Wire’s affiliate link to Text Link Ads.)

Rather than going out to comment for the sake of exposure I suggest reading articles you actually want to read, and comment for the sake of saying something you want to say. Save your marketing energy for bigger things and you’ll be happier, while the money you save can get you more exposure at the same time.

This weird and annoying problem I’ve spent quite some time on to solve today. The problem occurred on one of the websites that I administrate. The webshop on the site refused to go through with purchases from users accessing the website from domain.com, but worked fine for users accessing it from www.domain.com.

Don’t get me started on why the host doesn’t support mod_rewrite, but that was something that I didn’t have any power over, so I had to come up with some workaround.

If mod_rewrite had been supported, the problem would have been easy to solve. Then all I would have to do would have been to add the following lines to the .htaccess-file (I tried this and ended up with a 500-error):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com$1 [R,L]

So how did I solve this?
The solution is really ugly, and I’m not very proud of it, but it works for now. What I did was that I created an index.html-file (which didn’t exist, since the site is using PHP) like the one below:

Example-file (since the blog is restricted, and I cannot write html here). Right-click and save it. If you left-click on it, you will be redirected (duh!).

The next thing I did was a simple .htaccess-hack. Since my server loaded index.php before index.html, I added the following line to .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

(Apache looks for the files in the order they’re listed)

This took care of the entire problem. I never said it was a nice solution, au contraire, it’s really ugly, but it gets the job done.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve/solve this differently, please let me know.

Update 1: We describe a method to do this for a server over which you have full control in this article.

For an online company, a CMS is almost something required. I would go as far as saying a CMS is for an online business as a binders with indexes are to an accountant – it’s simply necessary.

However, since we’re just starting up, we still have no need for a CMS, a small blog is all we have to offer you at this point. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t have any experiences with CMSes. I have for instance been working with another company to migrate their old static (Frontpage-made) homepage into a modern CMS with a webshop.

The result? The company was extremely happy, and was surprised that I could create such complex web-page for that cost.
So what was the cost of the software? $0.

I guess you know us by now, and that you probably already figured out that I was using Open Source software for this, and that was the reason for the low cost. So what did I learn by setting up this CMS? What software did I use? What should one consider when choosing a CMS?

What software should I choose?
A good start is to surf over to Opensourcecms.com, where you will find pretty much every Open Source CMS/Blog on the market, set up in the default mode. Here you can both browse the admin- and frontend-interface. In addition to this they also have a good list of features for the different softwares.

My initial choice here was Mambo, because I liked both the front-end and back-end as well as the features.

Will my server support the software?
Most likely. Most of the more sophisticated hosts do run their servers on Apache with PHP4/5 with MySQL as the database-server. However, if your host do not run this setup, you might still be able to run the software, but you have to check the specifications on the software. Whether your server runs Linux (any distribution), FreeBSD or any other flavor of *nix, shouldn’t make any difference.

I want to set up a webshop that integrates with my CMS, what CMS should I choose?
There’re plenty of CMSes that can be set up with webshops, but I ended up choosing Mambo, because it could be easily integrated with VirtueMart, that is a sophisticated Open Source webshop.

However, I said that I initially chose Mambo. I’m currently in the stage of migrating away from it. The reason for this is that I did experience problems with the compatibility between Mambo and VirtueMart. They seem to work nicely together in general, but I’m having major problems with Firefox, which of course bothers me a lot.

The CMS I’m currently migrating to is Joomla!, which is a development of Mambo, where parts of the Mambo-development team broke away from Mambo and went their own way. Joomla! and VirtueMart are closely connected, and the VirtueMart-team recommends Joomla! rather than Mambo to run with their software.

Another reason for migrating away from Mambo is their upgrade to 4.6.x. This upgrade is a major upgrade from the previous 4.5.4-release, but it came with a big price. I’ve spent several hours trying to migrate over to the new release, but every time I ended up going back to 4.5.4 due to miscellaneous errors that occurred. In addition to this, when 4.6.0 was released as stable many people started to upgrade their sites, and most people ran into serious problems. A day or two later 4.6.0 was declared unstable. This lead many, many webmasters to spend several hours in this progress up upgrading, and finally having to give up and move back to the previous release (if they had a backup that is). I’ve read many stories in the forum from webmasters who had major downtime on their sites due to this problem. Sure everybody can make mistakes, but this was one severe mistake from the Mambo-team. If you’re trying to make a software that appears to business-clients, you simply cannot afford these kind of mistakes.

What is the major drawbacks of running Open Source CMSes?
So far, the only real problem I’ve experienced with this setup has been problems with VirtueMart. Sure, Mambo/Joomla! and VirtueMart does have a fairly steep learning curve for the average computer user, but once you understand the system it’s fairly straight-forward.

One word of warning though, don’t expect equally good forum-support for VirtueMart as in many of the other Open Source-projects. The code of VirtueMart appears to be something of a mess, where only the lead programmer knows how things really works. Their forum is filled with posts without answers, so don’t count on getting all your posts answered.

So what software would you recommend for an online business?

• Joomla!

• The CMS foundation.

• The webshop

• To make your site multi-lingual

• To handle downloads on your CMS

• If you need a forum on your CMS

I guess that’s it. That is the setup I would use if I were to set up a CMS for our company at the moment.

Stay tuned for the next part of the CMS-series. The next episode will include more in detail use of Joom!Fish as well as the migration process from Mambo to Joomla!.

Small update today. We just want to let you know that we’ve added a ‘add to Google-reader’ and a RSS-button on the very top of the page. This is pretty common, but yet very nifty. Just click on the RSS-button to subscribe to our page with your favorite RSS-reader, or click at the Google-icon to add this page to your Google-reader page. Just a small feature to let you monitor our posts more easily.