Month: January 2008

Categories
business

At The Crossroads of Starting A Small Business

Starting a small business is not a simple business. Depending on whether entrepreneur is a refugee or a risk-taker, the choice of what kind of small business to start could be difficult. My personal choice even transformed. When I was starting a small web-hosting business I had no idea what I will be dealing with. Clients were the least of my concern, as frauds, spammers, scammers and other inventive people were trying to make money on my business. Mainly because of that I have decided to migrate to web design and web development – not even because I am a web developer myself.For people who are afraid to take a risk of an unknown venture there is an easier road to success – buying into franchise. As thousands of franchise opportunities exist on the market today the only problem that remains is that of a right choice. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources available both online and offline (Entrepreneur magazine is one of my offline favorites). Do your homework, research your franchisor, talk to franchisees and make a decision.

Oh, yeah, and Starbucks is not a franchise. Or I wouldn’t be doing web design.

Categories
Review

Flock Built-In Blog Editor

Flock – the social web browser built on top of the Firefox – has a built-in blog editor. When I first launched it I was hoping to have some sort of Notepad for quick and easy blogging. Something that would look like Performancing plug-in for Firefox.

Unfortunately blog editor from Flock falls short of any other editor, even the one in WordPress itself. Editor window is very basic. Although Flock’s Accounts and Services tab allows you to have more then one blog configured, you have no idea what blog your post is coming to. XML-RPC API that WordPress uses is called MovableType. Maybe they are the same, but for non-technical people this is more then confusing.

Ability to choose from half a dozen fonts and regular named sizes doesn’t quite cut it to be a quickie notepad for any blogger. I can hardly imagine anyone using this crippled tool. Unfortunately, as with the whole concept of Flock, a thing that tries to be too many things for too many people ends up being nothing for all people. Here’s my prediction for next year – Flock will flop.

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Categories
Review

Windows Live Writer Blog Editor

windows-live-small Next in our blog editor review is Windows Live Writer. Not sure what’s the version I am still downloading five minutes after launching a setup, but I hope it’s the latest one.

(5 minutes later) It’s the version 1366, which have to be updated to version 1367 via Microsoft Update. Downloading patch separately isn’t possible. You have to watch out for these things, you know!

The installation of this blog editor software wasn’t even close to the simplicity of previous packages. First – you have to download the installer. Then installer searches for Windows Live Writer installations on your computer and then downloads and installs updated core version. Then you have to go through Windows Update to …emm… update Writer to the latest version. Obviously, Microsoft doesn’t look for simple ways of doing things.

During the install process I noticed that Microsoft, being an innovator everywhere, uses the term ‘weblog’ instead of more common ‘blog’. Guess it makes some sense to people at MS, but it totally escapes me. While installing the Writer itself, the installer offered to poison my laptop with Messenger, Mail, Toolbar, Photo Gallery and Family Safety modules. I politely declined. Upon finishing the installation, the setup program decided that now it has powers over my machine and opened Windows Live homepage without even asking. But I expected that anyway.

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