Guido Jansen

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Help! I’m going Mac! (blame Office)

Sounds kinda desperate, but maybe that’s a little true… I switched to an all-open-source ’strategy’ on the desktop (and laptop for that matter)  for the last couple of years (after many years of using MS Windows) and that worked quite nice for me. I used Ubuntu, OpenOffice and lots of more good open stuff. And when I make a choice for a software program I heavily (expect to) use, I always look at it being cross-platform (either as a native program or web-based), because of 1) I might want to switch to another OS or use the program on another PC and 2) The people I work with that use another OS need to be able to use it as well when needed.

But my job at Realvine (new since 6 months) requires me to work closely with our clients and (sub)contractors. And they all use MS Office…. For the last half-year I really tried to work with Office docs both through OpenOffice and Office in a WinXP virtualbox environment, but both didn’t work out. The first one doesn’t because it’s not as compatible as I would like it to be, the second one worked terribly slow.

So I need an OS that can run Office natively, that leaves two options: a windows solution or a mac solution. Both are against my private policy for being open, but apparently the (work) environment in The Netherlands isn’t ready for that so I’m willing to compromise… for a few years…

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Top 8.5 tips for getting started in ecommerce

At my daily job, some of the people who come to us for a Magento webshop run companies that already have a webshop and know what is involved with it. Some other people though have a retail store or a complete new business model but have little to no experience in the e-commerce field. This post tries to hand some tips to the second group.

Tip 1: Time and money estimates

Thought about a rough budget for the project startup, the maintenance costs and how much time it will take you to run the website? Good. Now triple that and I will assure you it will be a lot closer to reality then your own estimates.

Tip 2: Crawl before you walk

It’s great to think big. It gives your team a goal to work towards and keep in mind what the big picture is. But don’t start running before you can walk or even crawl. This is new to you, take the adventure on but do so step by step. Slice the big picture into smaller parts, there is no shame in starting small. No-one expects you to start an e-Bay or Amazon sized business overnight. Besides, being small gives your company agility, something bigger companies don’t have so you can move faster. In every project we see people having some for of hindsight. If you start big, you can’t always use that hindsight anymore because processes are now fixed and hard to change. If you start small, you can optimize processes and products much more easily. (more…)

Happy newyear!

I wish everyone a happy and successful 2010!

Now, bring me that horizon…And really bad eggs. Drink up, me ‘earties, yo ho!

F*ck you big time Open Source Matters!

Don’t like a rant? Then you might want to read something else…

So I’ve been involved with the Joomla project since 2002 (it was called Mambo then) and I’ve build many website with it ever since. I’ve been also giving back to the community a lot: I’ve been Dutch Translation Coordinator for Joomla, translated many extensions, started a succesful local community website and helped organizing several Dutch Joomladays. I actually spent (much) more time doing community work (‘giving back’) then doing (commercial) work on Joomla websites.

In the meantime OpenSourceMatters (or OSM, the legal entity behind Joomla) was always great in supporting the (local) communities. They wanted us to register Joomla domain names (which we already had), they made up rules for use of the Joomla logo and you even have to ask OSM when you want to use the string  joomla, jooma,  joo, jom or J! in the name of the extension (check here for all the rules). I think there are perfectly fine general international rules for brand-name and logo use, any further restrictions are a wast of time and just hindering community involvement and the spreading of Joomla. Guidelines are ok, but rules? I’m even questioning how such made-up rules will hold up in a courtroom. If someone is reselling products of a brand (like Adidas) in The Netherlands and registers a domain like www.adidas-reseller.nl there is nothing Adidas can do about that, it’s perfectly legal.

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Domains for Sale!

I had some nice website ideas (most have something to do with joomla or open source), but there are much more ideas than I can ever handle. The first thing that I did most of the time: register the domain. I thought that the end of 2009 would be a good moment to clean up the domains I’ve acquired but never used. So now it’s time for the domains to fly out and find others that cán do beautiful new thing with them.

So read on to see the list in alphabetical order.

If you’re interested in purchasing one of the domains, just go to the domain, click on the ‘This domain is for sale’ link from Sedo and make an offer!

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Magento feeds filter in place

Today I’ve put some filters in place on MagentoFeeds.com. The need for filtering is simple: There are many very interesting blogs around the world that post about Magento but also post about (lots of) other topics. Not that these other topics can’t be interesting, but they’re not relevant for MagentoFeeds.com.

Since the program I use for the website (Gregarius) doesn’t have a (proper) filter option I created this Yahoo Pipe to filter the feeds. It’s really quite simple: I can now use the pipe URL http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=799db951f0e2e8199b457130dbc7abc1&_render=rss&rssurl= and put that in front of any RSS feed to filter the posts in that RSS feed. Just added this in front of all feed URLs used on MagentoFeeds.com and presto: all feeds are now filtered on the words ‘magento’ ‘ecommerce’ and ‘e-commerce’.

You can test it on your own RSS feeds if you like or you can clone the Yahoo Pipe to adapt it yourself. The above is just a very small trick that can be done with Yahoo Pipes which is a great tool for everyone that wants to manipulate feeds. Try it and if you have any suggestions for me to optimize my filter: comment this post or send me a message!

Magento Feeds

After my post about useful Magento feeds at the Dutchento website, Erik van Rijn suggested to me that it might be nice to have a public website that aggregates useful Magento feeds so that we can all use it to get updated about the latest Magento news from all over the world.

So who am I to deny these needs?

So a few hours later, magentofeeds.com was born. Enjoy the streams, comment if you have suggestions for improvement.