While this is a rather small amount of contacts for an enterprise business, I would suspect that most small businesses could work well within this range.  Like a lot of small businesses, the largest obstacle to hurdle was to manage conversations with clients a long with information that needed to be shared with other employees whom would be working on their projects.  I found that Capsule easily had the best features for managing conversations with with clients and client data.

The only real purpose of this article is to check back in after 1 year of use and report my experience.

Things I Love

• Capabilities of free account – 250 Contacts = AWESOME
• Contact & Company management
• MOBILE WEB INTERFACE
• Task Management (More useful with paying account, so each employee has can their own account)
• External Integration – Alot of companies are building integration with Capsule

Things I Do NOT Love

• Would be fantastic to have a conversation/thread style log for phone and meetings with contacts
• Task conversations would be very helpful.. This would allow more of a project management functionality

Capsule has added a lot of new features this year.  I am excited to see what is in store for 2012.  Any one else using Capsule, I would love to hear our feed back.  So far I think this is a fabulous Saas CRM.

Could not copy file.: /public_html/wp-admin/css/theme-editor.dev.css
Installation Failed

 

The error message was quite frustrating.. We tried different FTP users, changed (chmod) permissions and still no dice.  Finally I decided to check out the server FTP configuration and compare it against our shared hosting environment and WALA!  On our shared servers we use ProFTP and on this dedicated server we were using Pure-FTP.  For what ever reason, Pure-FTP doesn’t sit well with Fantastico installations of WordPress..

I changed the ftp server over to ProFTP and boom, upgrade was successful!

Happy Coding!

So if you’re uploading or download to a Unix machine from a Windows (DOS based) machine the FTP client should auto-detect everything nicely and convert.  But for those developers out there whom wind up transferring massive projects, lets face it, you can’t simply download 100,000 files when you want to.  So, like many of us, we will zip up (or tar) an entire site and download it as 1 file, then upload to server and uncompress.

However, because we’re simply transferring a compressed file, the FTP client will never convert all of those awesome files formatted with DOS style line endings.  So I bet your next question is “so how can I fix all of these files without editing each by hand?”…

No fear this isn’t that hard  :-)

The Solution

The solution is fairly simple, use dos2unix, or fromdos depending on which flavor of linux you’re running.  But if you’re wanting to convert more than 5 files, this starts to be time consuming again.

So, if you would like to recursively find all files which have offending line endings, and pass those along to be converted we need to grep for those files, and then pipe the results to xargs so that for each file found we can mimic a call to dos2unix for us.

egrep -Ilr $’\r\n’ * | xargs -p dos2unix

Explain it please…

For the lovers of all things linux, you’re probably familiar with egrep and grep, they are outstanding search tools.  I have added to my egrep a couple arguments.  The lowercase L (-l) tells grep to print each file out with it’s path.  The capital “I” (-I) tells egrep to IGNORE all binary files… Because after all if you have 20,000 images out of the 30,000 files why waste your day having egrep search against those files.  Lastly we have the lowercase “r” (-r)” which tells egrep to search RECURSIVELY through all sub directories.

The output of this search is then passed (PIPED) to xargs.  If you’re not familiar with xargs, essentially it will take each line of output from this (each file name and path) and pass that to another command for you.  So if egrep finds 10 files that matches the search, xargs will combine those file names into a command for you.

xargs -p dos2unix then is essentially just replacing man for machine

The -p tells xargs to prompt you before executing each command, which I high suggest if you’ve never done this before.. Don’t get your self into a mess.. and ALWAYS BACKUPS FILES FIRST!

Wondering how those work, here’s an excerpt from their website…

You’re probably wondering what you’re supposed to do with these points, right? It works like this: 1 Point = 1 Penny (everything from this point on is the same)

100 Points = $1
500 Points = $5 . . .you get the idea
1,000,000 Points? = our kind of Shopper!

Since SpaceBound also owns several other web stores and has access to outstanding prices on electronics and Software some of their deals has been better than expected!  Still looking for late Christmas gifts or just trying to cashin on post-Christmas deals, give PricePlunge a shot, I think we’re going to see some awesome growth with PricePlunge in 2011!

For all of your fellow small business owners, lets face it… You have special needs.  You have no budget, the economy is sunk and to make matters worse you don’t know the first thing about the web; after all you’re spending 16 hours a day just trying to do YOUR job.

Over the years of working with small businesses we’ve become very acquainted with the challenges that they face.  So we thought this time around we would share some of our secrets in keeping a lean mean technology robust company up and running efficiently.

1. Virtualize! – Out with the old and in wit the new!  Many things we’ve done for years have outstanding alternatives that cost half as much.  Are you on a dedicated server.. Many?  Are you using Colocation for servers?  Stop the non-sense and finally go Virtual! Whether you’re using a service like Amazon EC2 or Storm On Demand from LiquidWeb,  you need to start spending your money wisely.  Going Cloud or virtualized servers using VMware will save you money, hassle AND be more stable.  To make the icing on the cake thicker and sweater you also have a lot more flexibility in a virtualized environment to change resources that belong to one server or another.
2. SaaS – Are you getting SaaS’y with me?  SaaS = Software as a Service, is a relatively new term but essentially means the “program” is hosted online.  Instead of buying a new software package every time there is a new version out, you instead subscribe to a service.  There are SaaS providers out there that do everything under the sun.  So stop spending thousands of dollars to re-buy software for every PC, every year.
3. OpenSource – It maybe new news to you but, for many of us who have been using Open Source software for decades we have experienced great cost savings.  We’re not saying that platforms that run on Windows, or that even Windows it self is bad, we’re just stating that in this day and age with the economy in shambles still, we have to start rolling up our sleeves.  The Open Source market has millions of applications to fit your needs.  Open Source programming languages are still the most popular both on the web and on the desktop.  80% of all web servers are running an Open Source operating system, and I’m not even sure I need to continue talking about this horse I’ve beaten dead.  Do not write off Open Source projects, many have the potential to saves you millions in licensing fees!
4. Partnerships – Sometimes when times get rough we have to resort to new tactics… Or in this case old tactics that are new to us/you.  Partnerships are as old as time it self.  Ever since man’s creation they have been partnering and conspiring together to reach new goals.  Do you work with another company’s software or product alot?  Are there companies that you refer most of your clients to?  Stop loosing out on your potential!  Speak with these companies and see if there is a mutual benefit, perhaps they need your services as well!
5. Alternative Work Hours – This is hard for most companies!  Lets face it, talented quality employees are harder and harder to find.  To many employees are lazy, self-serving and only looking out to make sure they get paid and could care less about the bottom line of the company.  In today’s business world, those with talent expect to be treated like they matter, like they have talent, and like their going to be well taken care of.  Start giving your workers choices of better hours.  If your employees are seeking a work-from-home program, try to incorporate maybe 2 days a month where they can schedule a work from home day.  Do you have employees who need to come into work an hour before most come in and then leave an hour early?  Try to accommodate those employees.  In today’s market you can’t keep taking, taking and taking, you need to learn to compromise if you want to keep REAL talent happy.

Of course there are so many other ways to to help your small business but we hope you’ve gotten some good ideas from this article and we’d love to hear your feedback.  Because here we are a lean mean Web Design machine, and the secrets we’ve learned over the years need to be shared!

ETHODE is in this position right now.  We are having trouble managing leads, and projects coming down the PIPE.  This week we spend some time trying to find the best remotely hosted (SaaS) CRM companies out there.  We found a good list but the winner is clearly Capsule CRM.

Here is a complete list of online Saas CRM’s that we tried.

• Capsule CRM (Free account will fit MOST small business needs)
• Oprius CRM (Runner up based on small number of Opportunities available in Free account)
• SalesForce
• LuxoCRM
• BatchBook
• Tactile CRM
• Relenta (Also offers a free version)
• Solve360 (Hands down BEST Interface, but plans start at $39 a month)
• ZOHO CRM

Why Did We Choose Capsule?

It’s easy.  They have an outstanding feature set.  This feature set is not limited to paying versions, and has all the tools a small business needs to get off of the ground with a CRM system.  There are no hidden costs, nothing to install and everything to gain.  This system just works well.  Looks nice, has a great interface and has a GREAT free pricing structure up too 250 clients which is by far the most we’ve seen.  On top of this, they do NOT, I repeat DO NOT limit the number of “opportunities” in the system on the free account making this PERFECT for those with less than 250 clients.

Absolutely a huge FAN of Capsule, now I just need to enter in all of my clients and integrate it with my Freshbooks account.  Oh yeah did I mention we use Freshbooks here at ETHODE?  Also, an OUTSTANDING service for accounting, couldn’t live without it.

• Multi-lingual backend now includes Spanish, French, German and Conversational Chinese translations.
  
• Red-lining : “what’s changed” tracks additions, deletions before publishing.
  
• Lucene/Nutch based site search.  The new site search can index many different file types such as HTML, XML, ZIP, OpenDocument, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), PDF, JavaScript, RSS, RTF, MP3 (ID3 tags).  Additionally, we have created an admin tool to allow a site administrator to build new indexes on a scheduled basis.
  
• New I/O friendly disk cache implementation speeds page delivery and overall throughput.
  
• JSP/Velocity integration tool eases legacy/enterprise system integration by allowing JSPs to be wrapped by velocity templates and content.
  
• Improved starter site ships with Events calendar, more demonstrations, Google Maps and Google Analytics.
  
• Multi-host sites will exclude system content by default, more cleanly separating content that lives on specific hosts.
  
• Multi-host sites log you into the host that you are viewing by default.
  
• Community contributed JSON Tool – server side JSON handling that allows you to consume and reuse JSON from remote systems – thanks Michael Fienen (@fienen)!
  
• Community contributed email Tool – scripting friendly tool allows email communication from within Velocity – thanks Chris Falzone (@chris_falzone)!
  
• A number of minor bug fixes and improvements.

UUJYVUC5N3XA

This service looks promising and while I do not really use any URL shorteners, they do offer a JavaScript implementation that you can stick in your head tag, and specify which domains to exclude.  This turning each outsite-link to a possible ad conversion.  This I can get onboard with.

I implemented the service into MyPraize.com and also my blog here at ETHODE to see how it works.. After 1 month I will give stats, analytics and we’ll how it stacks up for the rest of you.

Apparently FlexJson doesn’t really handle next objects or List<>’s very well.  Matter of fact I found it almost impossible to get the result I was looking for even after using their “include()” method to added in different object properties.

After toying around in a couple forums I finally stumbled upon someone mentioning Gson.  Gson is now my favorite thing for this week !!!

Implementing GSON was simple.

// Initialize Gson
Gson serializer = new Gson();
// Serialize almost any object.. POOF, done!
String jsonString = serializer.toJson(object);

Simple huh?  Have fun with Gson, and comment any tips or tricks you have for Json API’s!

Upgrading dotCMS

1. Backup your dotCMS directory and database. (I’ve had several upgrades fail and ruin a db, please make sure and back everything up)

2. Download the latest dotCMS and unzip it. (I experienced better results from using the latest “trunk” in svn and compiling then I did with releases zip from their site)

3. Copy your older dotCMS/assets directory to the newer dotCMS-Root /dotCMS/
Note: If you have changed where your assets live use your altered assets directory.

4. If you have changed velocity files or jsps on the filesystem you will also need to move them.  If you don’t
know what these are then you probably haven’t.

Note: If you have changed any language properties copy the file under /common/ext-ejb/content/*

Note: From a version prior to 1.7a you need to move your reports directory also.
5. Change new instance database settings.
Uncomment the database you are using in the config (/dotcms/tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml).

You will need to update the last part of the URL to your database name along with username:password.
The following is an example of a postgres config pointing to a database named dotcms

<!– POSTGRESQL –>
<Resource name=”jdbc/dotCMSPool” auth=”Container”
type=”javax.sql.DataSource” driverClassName=”org.postgresql.Driver”
url=”jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1/dotcms”
username=”postgres” password=”xxxxx” maxActive=”50″ maxIdle=”10″ maxWait=”-1″
removeAbandoned=”true” removeAbandonedTimeout=”60″ logAbandoned=”true”/>

6. Check your setting in conf/server.xml are correct.
This file is all new. Make sure that ip, ports, settings and ssl are all configured
correctly (configuring Tomcat is outside the scope of this document).
By default dotCMS will automatically run on localhost. If you need
the dotCMS to run on a particular IP address, edit the ./conf/server.xml file and search
the connector and server tags and add the address property on both. E.G.

<Server address=”208.250.1.102″ port=”8005″ shutdown=”SHUTDOWN” debug=”0″>
…
<Resource name=”jdbc/dotCMSPool” auth=”Container”
type=”javax.sql.DataSource” driverClassName=”org.postgresql.Driver”
url=”jdbc:postgresql://localhost/dotcms”
username=”postgres” password=”xxxxx” maxActive=”60″ maxIdle=”10″ maxWait=”60000″
removeAbandoned=”true” removeAbandonedTimeout=”60″ logAbandoned=”true”
testOnBorrow=”true” validationQuery=”SELECT 1″/>

7. If you are on a UNIX box, change the /bin scripts permissions,
add execution permission to *.sh in the bin dir.
> cd /wwwroot/test.dotcms.org/bin
> chmod 755 *.sh

8. Start your dotCMS using bin/startup.bat or bin/startup.sh depending on whether on UNIX or Windows.

9. Log into the dotCMS as an admin and goto CMS Maintenance usually under CMS Admin tab and do the following.
1. Execute Fix Asset Inconsistencies
2. Reindex all structures (very important, if you do not, then don’t be surprised if your hosts POOF disappear!)

Conclusion

All in all the process is pretty simple.  If you’re paying for a non CE version of DotCMS then they can simply upgrade you with a WAR file which in essence is just the new compile sources and once ran by your container (tomcat, GlassFish, etc) then it will perform upgrade tasks to the db and else where.  It’s fairly straight forward, but for those of you trying to save some dough this manual process is all you have at your disposal.