• Small Business Summit 2007
  Tuesday, February 13, 2007
  Crowne Plaza Hotel, New York City
• The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
• Essential Tools Every Blogger Should Have
  Good suggestions in general, but…
  • Most laptops on the market will do (we personally recommend AMD 64 based machines), just stay away from the “crippled” chips out there (if it is a $500 USD laptop, there’s probably a reason for that)
  • Unless you’re doing a lot of design work (coding, graphics, video, audio, etc), two monitors would be overkill
  • Adobe Photoshop is an excellent product, but if you only need to edit photos, GIMP (open source, GPL) should do fine and there are other free or cheaper options out there
  • Of the WYSIWYG editors, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver is at the head of the class, but give Nvu (open source, MPL) a spin first to see if that meets your needs (and budget)
  • Most digital cameras on the market these days will suffice, but the Canon DSLR’s are quite nice if you have that sort of budget and want to carry around a large camera
• Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed
• Zune Goes Discount, Contributes to $289 Million Loss for Microsoft
  Does any Microsoft product these days make an initial profit?
• Web Design Contracts: Why Bother
• 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines
• WordPress Plugins: Bible Verse of the Day, Our Todo List & Share This 1.4

The WordPress Email Notification Plugin v3.0 is still being developed, but in the meantime there is an issue with v2.3.1 which could allow spammers to use the plugin to send mass e-mails from your server. To address this issue we have created an alpha version of v2.3.2 which we need users to test before we release the beta version and then the final version of 2.3.2.

If you are interested in testing the alpha and beta versions, please contact us and we will e-mail you the new files.

Development of version 3.0 of the WordPress Email Notification Plugin is currently underway, though behind the original schedule.

Update: What’s New?

The majority of the updates for version 3.0 are focused on improved performance with WordPress 2.x and preparing for added features in subsequent releases.

Here are a few of the new highlights:

• Better WordPress integration - This will make it easier to get the plugin up and running and will automate most of the installation.
• Improved delivery - This will fix known issues with large mailing lists and notifications being sent multiple times in some instances.
• Add the unsubscribe functionality via a form - Currently the unsubscribe option is only available in the e-mails that are sent to subscribers.
• Localization - This will allow for language specific messages.
• Database updates - This is needed for improved delivery and will allow mailing lists for multiple WordPress blogs to run in one WordPress database.

Update: When Can I Get It?

We still do not have a scheduled release date, but we’re shooting for a September 2006 release. As always, since this is done in our “free time” that may get pushed back due to the client projects that we are involved with.

Update: How Can I Help?

There are currently three ways you can help.

1. Sign up to be a beta tester. In order to make the plugin run more smoothly with Windows servers, we’re particularly looking for users running WordPress on IIS or Apache on Windows and preferably knowledgeable with PHP coding (WordPress plugin experience is a plus as well).

2. Sign up to help with localization of common text messages and documentation used in the plugin.

3. Make a donation via PayPal donation to help “free up” our time. This would be a huge help, so if you’ve found the previous version useful, please consider dropping a few dollars in the bucket.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know.

For those of you who have been asking or wondering, we have begun development of version 3.0 of the WordPress Email Notification Plugin. This version is going to be geared toward the 2.0.x line of WordPress and is going to change a handful of things in an effort to make it integrate better with WordPress and function smoother and more consistently.

What’s New?

We’re keeping mum on the specifics at the moment, but rest assured that we are planning adding a few of the features on the current wish list for the 3.0 release. Anything that doesn’t make the 3.0 release will be included in a future release as time allows.

In the meantime, please let us know which possible new features are the most important to you and let us know if you have anything to add to the wish list.

When Can I Get It?

Right now we do not have a scheduled date, but we’re shooting for a mid-late April release. Since this is done in our “free time” that time frame may get pushed back due to the paid projects we are involved with.

How Can I Help?

There are currently three ways you can help.

1. Sign up to be a beta tester.

2. Sign up to help with localization of common text messages and documentation used in the plugin.

3. Make a donation via PayPal donation to help “free up” our time.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know.

One of the greatest things about WordPress and the WordPress community is that the plugins and themes are all released under the GPL License but for some people this poses a problem, and I can understand why.

I think the GPL is great, and I think that the original authors should always get credit for their hard work, in the form of a link back to whatever site they want. I also believe that providing a service is much more reasonable when it comes to WordPress, but I wish there was a better structure to compensate the individuals that take massive amounts of time out of their day to create beautiful themes, and plugins for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of WordPress users.

I am sure that if Michael Heilemann was given even just one American dollar for every five Kubrick and K2 installs, he would need to buy another apartment to hold it all. Think about that for a minute next time you complain about a plugin, theme or even WordPress, as the majority of the people that make the software work as well as it does, are doing so for free, using time they could instead be working on a project that would make them money.

[via Blogging Pro]

David has some very valid points on WordPress development and open source software in general. I’ll expand on the topic a bit by focusing on the WordPress plugins that Watershed Studio has released.

So far for the month of January the WordPress E-mail Notification Plugin has been downloaded 813 times and the WordPress Category Posts Plugin has been downloaded 101 times. So lets be liberal and say only half of the downloads result in the plugins being used. That would leave us with a total of 457 “in use” downloads between the two (not including people who download once and install in multiple places). You can do the math and easily see that even small donations of up to $5 from everyone that downloads and uses a plugin in any given month would add up quite nicely and encourage a faster development cycle and more responsive guidance. (For the record we’ve received a total of $5 this month in donations.)

Could the development cycle be sped up? Of course it could if you didn’t have to worry about paying the bills. It would be nice to have the luxury of doing something for “the greater good” most of the time, but the truth is that money does indeed talk. In our case new releases of our plugins have occurred either when we “get around to it” (downtime in which we’d otherwise not be getting paid anyway — which isn’t all that often) or people have came to us with sizeable donations in order to “free up” some time to work on a specific functionality.

But money isn’t everything and is *not* our motivational factor behind releasing open source software. When it comes to Watershed Studio, there are really two goals from doing so.

1) To give back to the open source community. Open source is a lovely thing and to be honest if it weren’t around we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today with the vast knowledge we’ve gained through picking apart other projects. And while we’re not working on the internals of WordPress, we’re doing what we can to add value to the software so they can be freed up to hone the core system.

2) Promotion. We honestly could not buy the amount of promotion we receive from people all around the globe. (A few examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) Roughly half of all our traffic comes from sites like these plus through the major search engines for people searching for WordPress. This in turn gets our name “out there” and leads to projects. Thus that is extremely valuable to us because it does lead to helping us pay the bills.

So there is a brief rundown of Watershed Studio’s take on open source software. If you have the means to donate to any open source project that you use, please do so. And if you can’t donate at the very least give credit where credit is due. In the end it will keep the development ball rolling.