Don’t get me wrong – I love Freshbooks.com.  But, I always have an internal argument whenever I sign up for a web app because I never really know where the data is!

That data, if you run an online business, is your absolute most valuable asset.

The other day, I found a free, online invoice system that I wanted to share with you.  It’s an open source web application meant to help manage and create invoices in a simple, straightforward way.

The invoice system really is nice.  As of right now, it doesn’t integrate with Paypal, so it won’t let you send one-click-and-pay invoices to your clients, but hopefully a developer will get it straightened out soon!

via siwapp – Free Online Invoice System.

If you’ve ever thought about operating your own microblogging service, I’ve got an app for you.  Obviously, dethroning Twitter isn’t really a possbility, but you might do one for your office or your family!

I found this cool open source server script for you to play with.  It’s called Laconica, pronounced “luh-KAWN-ih-kuh,” and is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short 140 character messages over the Web.

Users can choose which people to “follow” and receive only their friends’ or colleagues’ status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk.

Want to try Laconica without installing anything? Hop on over to identi.ca, the largest microblogging service based on Laconica.

via Laconica.

**If you’re looking for affiliate management software – check out Infusionsoft. I used them for all our in house affiliate programs and absolutely love them… Click here for a free demo**

I love open source software.  Truly I do.

About a month ago, in the quest of looking for good affiliate software to run campaigns for some of my sites from, I found an interesting little app called Affiliates For All.

Here’s a bit of a sneak peak:

If you are running an e-commerce site, you almost certainly have affiliates and need affiliate management software. Affiliates for All is the new affiliate management system that everyone is talking about.

It’ll do everything you expect from affiliate management software:

• Fixed commission rates or percentages
• affiliate cookie lifetime
• lifetime commission to the affiliate or just the first order
• emails to affiliates
• reporting

I like it a lot.  I have been using it and testing it for a little while now and it seems to hold up pretty well, even under some pretty serious affiliate linking stress.  Definitely, check it out here: Affiliates for All

Well we’re on this conversation, what do you use for affiliate tracking?  Clickbank? Or another paid affiliate manager package?

[img caption: I'm well aware that this picture has nothing to do with the post - but I liked it...]

A week or so ago, I posted about a web app, Are My Sites Up.  While that service is good, I found a better one :0)

The script: PHPwatch.

PHPwatch is a service monitor that’s able to send notifications of outages via email or text message.  Here’s a bit from the site:

The purpose of this system is two-fold: it allows administrators to easily check the status of many different services running on any number of servers and also allows developers to interface with the query and notification APIs.

To view a quick demo, click here!  It really is impressive stuff! And totally open source :0)  Let me know what you guys think!

URL shorteners are awesome.  The less characters, the better!  But what happens when that server goes down or some network issue prevents people from getting to your links?

Nothing.  Blank pages.

Better yet, why would you want to brand someone elses domain name?  Think about all the traffic and notoriety you’re giving tinyurl and is.gd?  Can you use that same traffic to your advantage?

I have a solution.  Build your own!  In fact, check out mine at j.dro.hn!  The software I used was Kissabe, an open source script hosted at Google Code.

The install is really pretty simple.

1. Get yourself a domain name from Godaddy and web hosting through HostGator.  Both are solid companies.
2. Upload all of the files to where you want it installed (e.g. the root of your domain name).
3. Create a new MySQL database called “kissa”
4. Import kissa.sql to your kissa database using the command line or phpMyAdmin (don’t use kissa_v1.sql)
5. Edit config.php and change the MySQL string with your database username and password. Make sure the path
   to your database is correct (if it’s not localhost).
6. Then edit create.php at line 30 or where is says
   $short_url = “http://kissa.be/$code”;
   to read
   $short_url = “http://yourdomian.com/$code”;
7. Then rename htaccess.example to just .htaccess
8. Start shortening!

Let me know what you think!

Project management software is big money.  For you to have something custom developed, it would run well into the thousands of dollars.  If you decide to go the hosted route, expect to pay about $50 a month for decent stuff.

In this how-to podcast, we’re going to show you how to build your very own project management suite.  Your clients can log in.  Your people can log in.  Everyone can keep tabs on what’s going on, upload files, send emails, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

Here the podcast notes:

• We’re going to be using Collabtive
  • Install instructions:
    • Unpack the Collabtive archive in a directory of your choice.
    • Next, upload all the files to your webserver.
    • Make the following files/folders writable:   /files    /templates_c    config.php
    • Then open the installer in your browser.
    • Point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/collabtive_dir/install.php to do that.
• Commercial offerings and other services
  • Basecamp
  • GoalsOnTrack
  • GoPlan
  • ActiveCollab
  • Jira

All set!  Let me know what you think!

Servers are sexy.  They let you do all kinds of crazy things that most ‘normal’ rigs can’t.  That includes data mining and serving web apps and being an email dump for all your random gmail accounts.

But what happens if something goes wrong?  Where is all your data?  Will it rise out of the ashes of smoked metal and plastic?  Don’t count on it.

Over the last month, we’ve been talking about servers and how we can make them do some cool things.  We plan on keeping it that way.  But I would be remiss if I didn’t also show you how to protect your data as well.

I just found a top notch guide on HowToForge.com which walks you though mirroring your web server to another machine with rsync.

Here at the office, we have a web server and a file server, both RAID’d – but as an extra layer of protection all the web server files are getting stored on the file server as well.

The install is pretty quick and painless.  All you need is SSH or terminal access to both machines.

In fact, if you have SSH access on your GoDaddy or Mediatemple server, I think this setup will work for you there too!

Have a look and let me know what you think!

[Link to how-to guide: HowToForge.com]

JD

Most generally, the money you make with your website is from advertisers.  The most recent trend, aside from text link ads, is 125 x 125 pixel banners.

Today, I am going to show you how to install and deploy your own private ad server using OpenX.  That means you can sell your own ad and keep 100% of the profit!  This ad server is going be capable of running any size banner ad or text link you need to serve.

nH005 – How To Build Your Own Ad Server shownotes:

• Intoduction to OpenX
• Other ad servers and ad networks I mentioned
  • Buy Sell Ads
  • Text Link Ads
  • WordPress Ad Server Plugin
• The install process
• OpenX tutorials

Enjoy!

Team collaboration software is something we are going to see more and more of in the future.  With businesses struggling to survive in these economic conditions, they’re going to start waking up and realizing that technology exists that will let their people work from home!

I could get into all the ‘business’ reasons why it’s more productive to let your staff stay home and work – but I won’t.

Instead, we’re going to check out Mindquarry, a server-side/client-side application that will let you and your team do more without sitting in the same room!

Mindquarry is an Open Source collaborative software platform for file sharing (documents, images, media files, etc.), task and project management, team collaboration and Wiki editing that meshes simplicity and functionality. As a result, knowledge workers are able to connect with team members and share information from wherever they are, effectively improving team-work and increasing productivity within the company.

There are all sorts of cool features to the open source software like:

• The ability to work offline or online
• Undo/redo any team content
• Wiki server
• Coordinate tasks
• Form and manage teams
• Secure authentication

If anyone has used this stuff and has an opinion, please feel free to share!  If there’s another piece of software you like instead – let me know.  I’ll get it featured!

JD

RSS readers are a dime a dozen.  My personal favorite is Google Reader.  It’s got great integration and support which makes keeping up on news all the more easy.  But to me, that’s a whole lot of data that I could use more efficiently if it was on my own server!

Today, we’re going to show you how to set up your very own server-side RSS reader.  It’s going to poll the feed list every 30 minutes and display the new items in a nice, ajax style list so you can get through them quickly and efficiently.  It will also have a search function so if you forget a piece of news, you can search for it.

The open source software that we’re going to use is Rnews.  Its a feed aggregator that works really, really well.  There is a Firefox plugin available at Sourceforge so you can post any blog or RSS feed directly to your server.

The concept is relatively simple through the web installation wizard…  Here’s the install instructions: