Posts from — November 2007

Some users may want to integrate Quicktime movies into their knowledge base so they can show tutorials or videos.

Here are some tips for setting up the knowledge base to allow this.

Step 1.

Download the external javascript files from Apple’s website. (The download link is about half way down the page.)

Step 2.

Upload the javascript file to the “javascript” directory.

Step 3.

Open the template file articles.php and add this line at the top:

<script src="<?php echo base_url(); ?>javascript/AC_QuickTime.js" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step 4.

Add the new article from the administration and include this javascript code:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML('uploads/mymovie.mov', '480', '376', '',
'autoplay', 'FALSE',
'emb#bgcolor', '#FFFFFF',
'scale', 'true',
'align', 'middle');
</script>

Replace the mymovie with your actual movie name.

Tips

Make the height 16 pixels larger than the actual movie so the controller will display properly.

I recently installed SCPlugin for my Mac which allows a GUI interface to Subversion. One thing I haven’t been able to locate is the SVN export command. So every time I checkout I get all the hidden svn files. Luckily I found this great tutorial from Team BKWLD that uses Automator to recursively delete all the SVN files for a folder.

I also found an AppleScript named SVN Zapper from Alex King that appears to do the same thing.

Software pricing is a sticky subject because of the many different ways to price a product. In this article I will go over some of the most popular pricing schemes and discuss the pros and cons of each.

Per Version

The per version pricing is the way most of the bigger companies price. For example Adobe Photoshop, you can purchase the latest edition and use it forever but to get the latest edition you have to pay an upgrade price.

In my opinion this pricing model benefits the customer more than the company because you can pay once and never have to pay again if you do not need the latest edition.

One Time With Renewals

This pricing scheme is you pay once then have a fee every year to continue to recieve updates and support. From what I have seen this is what most small businesses use because the company continues to get some type of recurring income to help them stay a float and the customer only has to pay a small fee which makes the overall cost of ownership pretty low. The downside to this model is keeping up with who has paid and if they have a valid renewal.

Monthly

This is normally a hosted application that you would pay monthly for. This is a big benefit for the company because they do not have to worry about theft and they continue to receive monthly income while you use the product. Of course the company would also have a larger expensive in servers and bandwidth.

Free with paid support

Free or open source product but you do not receive any support unless you pay for it. This scheme is really in the favor of the customer because they may never have to pay a dime if they do not need any support.

As you can see there are lots of different pricing schemes and although each has advantages and disadvantages I personally like the first two options the best. I believe they have the biggest benefit to both the company and the customer.

Yesterday I spent most of the day getting the code we had already developed moved over to Subversion and also got Trac to manage our bugs and feature requests.

Now you can visit our bug tracker from our support area. The hope is by using Trac, bug reporting and fixing will be as streamlined as possible.

I would also like to mention cvsdude which is the company we went to offer these services. They have a low starting price and it takes all the headache away from trying to manually install Subversion.

ID-Ten-T Error
A term often used by tech support operators and computer experts to describe a problem that is due to the user’s ignorance instead of a software or hardware malfunction.

Here is a fun post where I will list out several dumb mistakes I have made with this site since starting it a few weeks ago.

1. Always Backup Your Data

I have been a windows users for probably the past 10 years. Basically since I started using a computer. At the beginning of this year I switched to my first Mac and I love using it however I keep really screwing up my sites when I perform upgrades. I have Transmit as the ftp client and when I upgrade I just put all the files and tell it to Replace all the files. This does not achieve the effect I want. Yes it replaces the files but also deletes all the files that are not getting overwritten. So basically I loose important files that would otherwise remain uploaded.

2. Never drop all your database tables

This one is pretty obvious but it caught me. While creating the install for 68kb I added this little portion of code to drop all the tables before installing.

$tables = $this->db->list_tables();
foreach($tables as $table)
{
    $sSQL="DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ".$table;
    $this->db->query($sSQL);
}

It seemed fine at the time because I was running on localhost and it didn’t matter if all the tables where removed. I uploaded this to the server and decided to install it in the same database as the site and guess what happened.

I am sure you guessed correct. Everything was gone!

The only plus side was Google had a few of the pages and posts cached so I could rebuild what they had.

Now that I have shared my stupid mistakes why don’t you share yours?