I’ve enabled Google Analytics on this site in a an effort to see where all my visitors come from and how long they’re sticking around. I’ll post a review in a few weeks time and let everyone know what the results on the testing are, I’m interested to see where all my visitors come from.
As always if something is a little weird with the site please let me know.
I know its a little late… I trust that everyone has had an awesome holiday and is well rested and ready for the new year.
I switched the Twitter plugin for this site over lunch, the other one needed to be tweaked too much.
Thanks to @_enzo for letting me know about Twitter Tools a Twitter plugin for WordPress. It does a much better job than the old plugin I was running and saved me from doing lots of customisations to get it working/looking like I wanted.
I almost never post anything about the place I work, I try keep my work life separate from my online life, but I decided that this time around I’ll break my rule and post something. I share offices with a few other companies (one of whom I do a lot of development work for)… anyway Yesterday (Wednesday 18th December 2008) was the office Christmas party.
We went up to the Restaurant at Rhodes Memorial for lunch, we had good food, awesome view and great company. It was nice to spend a few hours with the people I see everyday and not talk about work, and instead tell jokes, laugh and catch up on each others lives.
PS: The guy without the shirt doesn’t work with us… Continue reading
I’m currently working on a little side project that involves doing lots of customisations to WordPress. (What exactly I’m up too will have to remain a secret for the moment, sorry customers orders.) I’ve been working today on writing a new plugin for WordPress that will turn it into what I need for my client, once the plugin has reached a use-able state I’ll start with the theme.
My development environment currently consists of WordPress 2.7 running on XAMPP for Windows (MySQL + Apache + PHP) with NetBeans 6.5 with PHP support. Netbeans works great as a PHP editor and its also a good Java IDE (although I’m not using it as that at the moment for this project.).
My biggest problem has been dusting off my PHP knowledge and trying to puzzle out the WordPress plugin API. There is alot of info on writing WordPress plugins on the WordPress Codex another useful link is this one on how to configure Netbeans for wordpress plugin development, I suggest you check out on the same page the info about creating a wordpress project and importing the source so you can have all the auto-completion goodness. The only thing I haven’t gotten working yet is XDebug so I can’t debug the PHP code or step through it in Netbeans, not sure why its not working but touch wood I haven’t needed it yet.
Anyone have any experience (good or bad) of implementing a Free/Open source ERP system? Which one did you choose? How did you do it? What was the final outcome?
By day I work for a company that sells and implements Syspro a commercial ERP system developed in South Africa. I work as a programmer/developer writing add-ons/mods/reports and applications that integrate with Syspro.
But I’m interested in finding out from people who’ve actually attempted implementing one of the Open Source ERP systems how it went and what problems they ran into. I’m curious to see if the Open Source model actually works from a clients point of view for ERP applications. I’m particularly interested if you implemented the product with out working with a partner company or a 3rd party doing the majority of the work yourself.
A quick search in Google brings up a rather long list of Open Source ERP systems and frameworks for building ERP systems and there are plenty of “white papers” about the implementation processes but they feel sanitized. I’m looking for real world accounts from the people who were in the trenches.?
In particular if you have any experience with the following ones (but any of the others will help):
Compiere
OpenBravo
OpenTaps
OpenERP (Used to be TinyERP)
Xtuple (PostBooks/Standard/Open Manufacturing)
Did you implement the standard system straight from the site? Or did you actually take advantage of the “Openness” and customise the application to your business?
I love cooking, I’m not sure if I’m any good at it (you’ll have to ask my girlfriend) but I do enjoy it. There is something therapeutic about chopping, stirring, frying etc something in the kitchen. Now that I don’t live alone I don’t get to experiment with all the crazy things I come up, which is a pity as alot of those turned out rather good in the past.
I’ve always loved Jamie Oliver as a chef, not because of his recipes or anything like that… but because he had this attitude of anyone can do this, it doesn’t have to be rocket science and its ok to make a mess in the kitchen. If you watch any of his shows you’ll see that he actually ends up with flour on his shirt and his kitchen looking alittle bit of a mess, he sticks his hands in and gets them dirty and the whole time he’s cooking he looks like he’s having fun.?
If you watch Nigella Lawson’s cooking programs you’ll see that she often cooks in a fancy dress (I remember a red one she wore often) and she’ll make something that when us mere mortals cook it we would end up covered in flour from head to toe, she won’t have a spec on her.?Other shows annoy me because everything is “prepared before hand” so they just pour the bowl of chopped onions in, you don’t see the guy chopping them with tears in there eyes… so it feels a little “un-natural”.
While searching for a Jamie Oliver recipe I heard about (I only own one of his books… they a bit pricey) I stumbled across his website. It’s actually a very nice site, its got a few free recipes, some video and a ton of info. But whats really impressive is that they have a whole community built up round the site with people contributing there own recipe’s or changes to Jamie’s, and they have stories on there too about when they cooked something or the time it went wrong.
Today I upgraded Stuff.za.net’s wordpress install to the latest release.
This new release is awesome, the admin system is unbelievably cool, looks really nice. I haven’t found tons of new features, but everything has been nicely improved. I haven’t found any major problems, as usual I updated the K2 theme I use. I’ve also installed and enabled the Akismet plugin so that I can hopefully stop all my spam comments, 8000+ spam comments since I launched this website. Continue reading
I’ve finally given in and gotten a twitter account (dale_nunns). I’m not entirely sure how it all works or what I’m supposed to do with it, but it sounded cool, looked cool and is something new to play with.?The final push came from a friend who we share offices with, he was showing me a cool new website design he’s working on that has Twitter integrated into it and was telling me about the communities that Twitter helps build and generally evangelising it a lot, so I thought I might as well give it a try.
So you’ll notice that there is now a “Dale On Twitter” section on the widget bar to the right of this site that’ll show my latest “tweets”, I’m not sure how well its going to work or how long I’ll keep “tweeting”, but I’ll give it a try.
Twitter is a sort of cross between?between IM (Instant Messaging) and perhaps Facebook’s “Status” field with some added web 2.0 social networking stirred in for good measure, its nothing particularly fancy. But you can “tweet” from cell phones, PDA’s and other devices. Tweets are limited to 140chars so you can’t type your new epistle which is probably a good thing.
I love this one comment on their about page “…?While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”, in answer to the question “How do you make money from twitter?”. I have to agree that really is an odd business model.
In case you’re wondering what a tweet is, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the terminology correct… but as I understand it one message that you’ve sent out via Twitter.
I’ve been spending some of my copious free time learning something new, Ruby On Rails. Before everyone gets excited and says “Oh no not another blog about RoR and how wonderful it is…” this is not one of those kinds of posts, in fact its got nothing to do with RoR actually.?
Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about RoR and trying various things out with it to see what can be done, how easy it is and is it actually something that I should try learn. I’ve got a few crazy ideas for some “web-enabled” applications and am looking for an easy way to rapidly develop the applications.