Numbr and Craigslist, making selling easier
On and off I sell a few items here and there on ebay and Craigslist. If you're not familiar ebay typically charges you a listing fee and then they get you again when you sell the item based on what the item sold for, they get you coming and going. Now September is an exception they're waiving some of their initial listing fees this month. We're all still waiting for Craigslist to start charging, but for now it's completely free. You can post stuff at any price including free, just watch out for the crazies out there looking for the free stuff. It's a great alternative to your local newspaper and I've sold a refrigerator and a sectional so far, items that would have been a little difficult logistically to list and sell on ebay, with Craigslist I just put the responsibility on the buyer to pick the item up. This brings me to the service I used in my most recent sale that worked rather well and was of course the right price, free. Numbr.com will give you a temporary phone number, even one close to local if you're near a major city, for a period of time from 1 day up to a month. The phone number forwards to whatever number you specify, numbr also offers other services like blocking calls from 9pm to 8am in your timezone and voicemail via email. I think when listing items a couple of things are really key, good pictures, a good descriptions, and ease of communication. Email doesn't quite do justice when selling a big item, so it helps if the buyer can call and talk to you and ask a few questions to avoid wasting their time and yours. It's nice to be able to screen out the crazies, without giving out your real phone number and personal information, the numbr service is not limited to use with Craigslist, but could be used in any situation where you'd like to give a number out but have it expire after a period of time, I could think of several ways to put it to use.
The functional mess that is Oracle JDeveloper
By corporate mandate I've been using Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3.1.0.3984, that version number is ridiculous and ought to tell us something, to develop Java EE web applications on and off for about 6 months now and I've never been so frustrated with a development environment in my life. I hear it from seasoned Oracle developers that the wizards are great, you can create web service in a few clicks, you can create an EJB effortlessly, and the application has come such a long way, my God how bad was it before. Honestly, I don't give a flying fuck what you can do with the wizards if the core application is unusable. Coming from an Eclipse/RAD background my gripes are probably slanted, I'm used to being able to do simple things easily and quickly without the IDE flaking out on me completely.
GreatWebGuy gets a face lift
Well, upon running into the theme we were using for the umphteenth time, we decided that it was time to change things around. Not finding anything that really jumped out and not wanting to start from scratch, we borrowed and modified a theme from web2themes.com I think it's definitely an improvement, but please comment and tell me how much it sucks, or how you've seen the same thing a hundred times. While in there, we took the opportunity to get rid of some plugins. Ajax-wp, while fun, really had no true benefit and it seemed to muck with the Share-this plugin. The bookmark this plugin was trashed in favor of the Share-this plugin too. While throwing out we also threw in a Google Custom Search, we've been checking out the google co-op project and thought it was worth a go, who knows maybe it'll improve search rank and Ad CTR. We'll try to post more regularly with some new Lighttpd, Ajax, and Java articles soon.
InstantUpgrade – My new favorite WordPress plugin
Suffering from an internal struggle, I love to be on the latest and greatest WordPress, but I'm also extremely lazy and don't enjoy the pain of upgrading. The WordPress upgrade process is annoying at best. If you follow all the rules and, back up your database, backup your old files, disable all your plug-ins, delete all your old files, upload the latest distribution, pray that it works and re-enable all your plug-ins, it's something that you might want to put off indefinitely.
Today "digging" around the web I found a review of the plug-in to answer my upgrade or not dilemma. The review was on GeekyGirlyGirl (I think I'm in love, don't tell my wife 
) for the InstantUpgrade plugin created by Zirona. This plugin is awesome, with a little bit of chmodding, after installing I was able to instantly upgrade to WordPress 2.2.1 with the touch of a button and fully expect all future upgrades to be as simple. I concur with the GeekyGirlyGirl's recommendation and I'm thrilled to enter the realm of hassle free WordPress upgrades.
Endeca Discovery Conference 2007
In Boston last week for the Endeca Discovery Conference. Endeca is a fast-growing Boston-based company that produces a search and navigation engine that's being used by several major websites around the world, they're growing by leaps and bounds every year. They have a different spin when it comes to search, they call it "Guided Navigation," it's basically the concept of allowing the user to decide how they find information and guiding them along with attributes of that information displayed at relevant points in time and enabling a user multiple paths to that information while allowing a business to also provide contextual information and merchandising tied to that navigation.
Endeca is in their 5th year and has just released version 5.1.1 of their product, with 64-bit support, key enhancements to their WebStudio suite for business users, many-to-many relationships, and a slew of other improvements to their platform. At the conference Endeca also launched a user-community site for developers called Eden, http://eden.endeca.com. The developer site is just a shell at this point, with paragraphs describing solutions, but no real solutions. The site has potential and probably just needs time to grow, at this point it's a little frustrating, offering the hope of information with a lot of dead ends. Endeca also hinted at the conference at the future release of an Ajax framework called UICL, providing a Web 2.0 integration point with their navigation engine.
All in all it was great to be in Boston for a few days, the weather was beautiful and the sites were fantastic, however the content of the conference could have been compressed into a day, since the same concepts and features were repeated over and over.