4images gallery management script from 4homepages.de came out with their latest update / version 4images 1.7.6 . If you subscribe to their newsletter , you probably already know it .

The new version 1.7.6 of the 4images - Image Gallery Management System has been released!

This release comes with lots of improvements, bug fixes and minor changes, e.g.:

* Added possibility to sort by filenames in CP image search form
* Improved download of big files
* Added onchange javascript for “per page” dropdown
* Disabled download button in lightbox if there are no download permissions for all images in the lightbox
* Fixed issue with paging tags
* Fixed missing image name escaping in alt tags of thumbnails
* Fixed redirect bug in admin/admin_global.php
* Fixed problem with brackets in template vars
* Updated URL for ICQ status image
* Fixed sql query in download.php
* Fixed logout problem where guests can delete other guests sessions
* Fixed displaying non-active images on details.php
* Improved download of big files

Theres already a feedback thread on the 4images forum if you are really into German language . Since I am more of the English language speaking crowd , i skipped the first 2 pages . Lol . I guess they really got too many bug reports or frustrations from sites using 4images having large files for download … that they mentioned it twice in their newsletter which i pasted above
One of these days i must learn .DE language to better grasp what all the super members such as jan , nicky , rustynet ivan say in there . *sighs* At least V@no speaks more English . thank goodness for that .

In the past few weeks, I have been a little side tracked by the happenings in the Search Engine industry and also seo for my own sites. So i have not been posting about vbulletin and also invisionboard . But with every new release - be it from any of the big 3 in the forum softwares ( vBulletin , Invisionboard and phpBB ) , I am noticing the growth or development of the softwares is mostly being directed towards making plugins or addons / modifications as default feature .

Example : In vbulletin version 3.7, some of the major changes or additions are -

• Reciprocal friendship between forum members
• Public messaging along with private messaging
• User Picture galleries
• User created social groups
• Member profile page
• Profile page Design and Customization
• Social bookmarking and tagging

Earlier , quite a few of these features were also introduced in Invisionboard and they also have their official gallery component .

What are the advantages of these modules being added as features : The best possible advantages is that features means , they are coded by the official developers - thus most secure, most easy to template and continuous support. Any modification always have the difficulties of 2 types - one that they are often made for the developers personal forum , and directed towards the site’s goals, which may or may not be the goal of other users of the modification. And the other being , the weaning of support due to lack of time or rather “free volunteer time”.

What are the disadvantages of the mods being added as features : Yes, there are direct disadvantages , such as … a software’s growth is often contributed by the plugins and modification community. Most mods developers spend months of their volunteer time building a modification and even for supporting it and provide it for free , in the hope of getting some donation money or related work in the future. This keeps them interested in contributing codes and time , and even build sites for supporting the modification . This comes to a close / end , with their mods being adapted as default features - which makes them loose their credit / money / fan following.

But all that is for any kind of mods and features … but these current modifications , turned feature sets, IMHO are not necessary in a forum software … a Forum is a Forum , a forum can not be a gallery . Same way , a forum is a forum , and IMO should not be a social network site . A social network site comes with a plethora of features which is often unworthy of being in a forum , which is typically a Message Board . A profile page … earlier the profile of the poster was recognizable through his posts , his posting habits , signature and maybe his avatar . Now, with a full blown profile page in place , i feel , the identity , the secrecy , the charm would be lost . Now , we have public messaging ( read profile commenting ), along with private messaging . All in all , every new element is taking the members and their “friends” away from the message board to the frills and fancies ( like MS Windows software ) . Will this really increase the value of the individual messageboards ? I feel it will only lower the posting and discussion on topics and people will be so besotted by the features .

Why this has been done : I believe this is entirely a marketing decision , only to generate hype , and compete with other scripts , but all in all this only Adds to the workload of a typical forum admin and moderators as they will have to check for more places which might go against forum policies . Every addon module as large as a gallery , friends network and the same , will only increase a web and database server requirement . Furthermore, with every one speaking of the web 2 and social web, most companies are feeling a need for making their offering more web 2.0 oriented and the frills such as “friends” and”networking” and “profiles” are the key features seen elsewhere.

To keep to the main topic as well , vbulletin 3.7 also comes with some good feature sets , undoubtedly . These are :

• Inline Spam Management and Prevention Tools
• Thread Tagging
• Thread Prefixes
• Attachment Viewing Lightbox
• Post Edit History
• Navbar Notices
• New Human Verification Systems

Spam and spam prevention is a constant complaint or nuisance for any and every forum administrator - the more tools the merrier . Thread tagging helps in quicker searching and less repeat posts by noobs , Thread prefix - a mod i always sought after
The attachment lightbox would surely be a welcome addition for preventing the stretching of template / board width etc .
To be quite frank , I have not tested all of this on a liver big board yet , as this is totally a Beta version , but I will do so soon and update this post , so stay UPDATED through the FEED.

I am sure most people are by now aware of Microsoft’s hostile offer to buy out the internet portal Yahoo! A lot of people have discussed about their views on the same . If Yahoo’s board of directors do accept to be taken over by MS there might be several changes to the company, it’s employees, culture, the portal , the services etc. Since Yahoo! has not yet given any proper response except the typical “we are looking at the benefits of the offer and those of our shareholders”. Instead of posting what I think could go or stay , I have put up a poll cum survey ( made free by Polldaddy), for the visitors like you to participate in. You can have your say which of the services of Yahoo you like , which stand a chance to be replaced by a MSN venture and so forth. Enjoy .

Shocking the search industry, Microsoft has officially submitted it’s bid to acquire the search and internet giant Yahoo! for a stunning 44.5 Billion USD. I do say , a shocking news, but many would easily say that such a bid was forthcoming, following Yahoo!’s recent downfall in share prices, clubbed with its sacking of near 1000 employees. Openly inviting the press in a conference call, the software giant’s CEO Steve Balmer spoke to Jerry Yang and the board of directors of the most popular website / portal of the world and express their interest in furthering the expansion and synergis-ing their resources and efforts to counter the search #1 , the big G.

Microsoft has proposed to Yahoo’s Board Of Directors that Microsoft acquire all Yahoo shares for $31, which is currently estimated to be worth $44.6 billion. Yahoo shareholders would get either cash or Microsoft shares (0.9509 of shares per 1 Yahoo share)

As a follow up , Yahoo! inc. accepted :

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today said that it has received an unsolicited proposal from Microsoft to acquire the Company. The Company said that its Board of Directors will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.

This would probably be too early to analyze what this means, what the repercussions would be on the search industry along with the internet / web in general. However, it would not be out of place to mention a few points i can think of :

This is not the first time MS has submitted a bid to acquire Yahoo! , the last time they did was in previous year almost 10-11 months back, when Yahoo! board of directors openly refused saying , it was no time for such offers.
Even with the current low Yahoo has hit , Yahoo.com is still the website with highest traffic in all internet - in every metrics available on the internet, and Yahoo! also has several important acquisitions which fare highly in the current social web - namely, Del.icio.us , Yahoo Answers, Alibaba, Flickr , Facebook to mention a few. Yahoo email, Yahoo finance rates pretty highly on the radar of very many users , ranking over Gmail and similar applications.

On the other hand , Yahoo! has lost lots of ground on the search front , where Google has grown by leaps and bounds and truly a synergy of Yahoo and MSN could be the only force which might even come close. Microsoft on the other hand might gain a good deal by coming close with the Yahoo Publisher Network users and advertisers - which does have a sufficient base and development.

My personal feeling : I always liked Yahoo as a site , as a brand ( which Microsoft does as well, as Steve Balmer said in his note - intelligent minds think alike ), and a place to be. Google never had that and even less in Microsoft . As a person who has been on the net since 1997, i somehow would not feel impressed by a MSFT-YHOO clubbing. But then , it might be in the best of interest of the shareholders of Yahoo - What do you think ?

As i mentioned in my previous post , that I have been reading extensively about search engine marketing , and also watching various videos - one of the best videos i saw was a seminar by Avinash Kaushik - the from Google Analytics team . The full session was full of various insights on quite a few topics such data analysis , creating a data driven culture in a organization, checking ones web site’s bounce rate, and internal site search analysis and visitor intent . I spent the whole of sunday afternoon watching the videos , which were as i said before fascinating and insightful.
I have decided to using Web Analytics to the most , as possible .
And to start with that , I have have been toying with the idea of using either Google Site Search , which has the free and paid versions or creating our own custom internal search.

The pro’s of using Google’s Site Search is that
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After the recent catastrophe, things are settling down and i have decided to start reading more seo blogs. Not just seo blogs, i have also been using as much free time i am getting to read seo books, watch seo videos and catch up on the numerous webmaster and seo blogs , by subscribing to their feeds. Every day you learn something new - and it is necessary to keep one’s self updated with the industry. I am currently subscribed to Matt Cutts, Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan , SeoMoz, Bill Slawski , Aaron Wall to name a few. I was truly not this organized in my reading before , even though i definitely checked those before too.
When i started thinking that i will do this, i wondered if I could do it with Outlook 2007 as thats something i use regularly to check for emails , so i might be able to check on these from time to time as well and not really have to open “any” site whatsoever for reading up.
MS @#!%^^# is hardly ever so rosy , that it will allow you to do what you want when you want it … ( and I am usually not a MS hater) . The first time added the feeds for seobook and mattcutts google only feed, i got
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CaRP is a free program which helps you get automated content for your website from RSS feeds on external websites. I have been using it for the past 2 years now - mostly to get blogs feeds or even directory rss on my website’s homepages.

RSS feeds are data feeds that usually contain headlines and excerpts from news stories, blog posts, etc., and a link to the full content.

It is , as the owner Antonne Roundy says, a script which converts RSS headlines and brief description / content into nice looking HTML to fit on your website, which could be made of HTML , PHP etc. I have also used it on the web design website, recently , but there i came across an odd situation.
Initially when i had used CaRP - the free version, which i downloaded when i had much less php knowledge, I could install it myself and configure it as well, without any hitch. Before CaRP , I had also used Magpie RSS feed parser for converting blog feeds at DiscussTV. Carp has provided somewhat much more functionality, includes good documentation along with a Video for help . Yet , even then if you can’t get it to work for your site, let me know - I can help out for a fee. Anyway, after enjoying a free software, I recently went back to the website , after receiving several of it’s subscribed email newsletter. The site , which nicely showcases all the various other scripts and services made me eager to try out their paid Jawfish service - which provides RSS to Javascript conversion.

Why I wanted that ? because even though I want to display external blog feed, i did not want to use any framed page - as i felt , it could be unhelpful for my seo attempts. So the only option was to get the feed via javascript . CaRP website said, the only way i could get this was by subscribing to Jawfish - and here is something I DONT recommend from GeckoTribe.
Why : Because they will provide you with a snippet of code , including their javascript source , and more often than not , there is a lack connection between your server and geckotribe’s server . Quoting the owner , Antonne :

I can only guess that the problem you’re seeing with Jawfish is caused by some recurring temporary internet problem somewhere between your server and mine.

The problem with Jawfish i faced : I had paid them for 1 year of the service and it specifically mentioned that there won’t be any refund .
The solution : As i did not receive any sayable service - I emailed the owner ( as their support ticket section was not manned , and only after waiting for 10 days i understood ), and I received his reply . He promised to refund the money ,

Current Status : I have not yet received the refund yet , but I am hopeful i will.

Current Status with my requirement : I am using free and friendly Carp which i have got working with iframe with the customizations i wanted . Google does successfully crawl iframes / frames , as I found by doing a site:www.websys.co.in.

The headline says it all

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL. Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration.

After reading about the news actually first on SitePoint’s Tech Times, i visited MySQL.com, which was happily displaying its latest press release . So the news is surely confirmed , what remains to be seen , what are SUN’s plans to do with their new acquisition . MySQL being one of the key components of the LAMP platform , will surely continue remaining as open source but it would be surely interesting to track how SUN help towards the betterment of the 10 million strong community of users.

Yesterday was suddenly an important day for my DMOZ editor life. I received feedback from a Meta editor, who started by saying “This is a unsolicited feedback…” . The exact contents of the full email is not something i should divulge here , but nevertheless i was critically questioned for my wrong grammar , however minimal it might have been.
Interestingly, I was also “promoted” , so to say and given wider privileges on the ODP and allowed to manage a full locality. I had actually applied for this category after being an editor for its sub-cat for some weeks. Considering the localities i edit in have considerably less webmaster submissions, and also relatively low number of sites to mine, this particular category is nothing large within the ODP … but truly what my meta scolded me for makes more meaning. An editor within such lesser number of sites should be even more meticulous in his editing style.
My additional category requests (mentioned above) were sitting for sometime, so I had opted to do some greenbusting (apply to help out in larger branches of the ODP without being a named editor ), and surprisingly I got that approved yesterday too.
For a visitor to this blog or a webmaster thinking about DMOZ : may take note about the ODP and its quality. People often ask why DMOZ says it has low resources , why the editors are not bothered with site submissions and things such as receiving reply for rejection and such. Surely it is evident that because the resources are used for maintaining the high quality of editing , wherever possible.

osCommerce is a versatile shopping cart script used by hundreds of websites. As a shopping cart script with numerous pre-built functions, plugins ( or user generated contributions) it is undoubtedly comprehensive. However , just to exemplify, some of the key features include :

• web based install
• supports unlimited products and categories
• includes options for physical goods and e-products
• includes taxation as an option
• accounting and invoicing
• customers and transaction reports
• newsletter subscription module
• product reviews
• banner management and statistics
• payment processing using several credit card and web payment options

and many many more .
In my opinion, it has too many options to be able to be listed , even though some of those functions or options might not be necessary for a website owner who requires a shopping cart system for his website. Now, not all of these are advantageous to a basic website operator / owner , and he may even be bit overwhelmed seeing so many options , and requiring to ensure that the ones which are not required are turned off / disabled. As the service provider / web developer / programmer , we often have to ensure that most of these options are turned off or in cases which can not be turned off from the Admin panel, are removed from the php files .
One of our recent osCommerce projects involved several customizations on the base script - one part of which was ensuring around 40-45% of the default osCommerce features be removed from being available in the admin panel , based on instructions given by our client. One of the major customizations we also did was , by default osCommerce allows one cart / shop inside it , but in this case the requirement was to setup 2 separate carts and ensuring that they be administered from one single admin panel. Now this is not a default feature , nor is any proper contribution could be found for this. So it had to be programmed totally from new. The end result was undoubtedly quite nice , as we gained quite a bit of experience in doing this. The end users / visitors to the site would login to the website and find a wine shop as well as a news and magazines shop and wherever they went or registered, they had to login only once and also on check out or buying, the admin would be able to track the customers or the orders from inside the same panel only.
below are screenshots .
Cart 1 and Cart 2.