Posts filed under: Technology
Is Magento right for your next ecommerce project
I recently launched a new ecommerce site using the open source package Magento. This is the first site I’ve worked on that uses Magento, so I thought I would jot down some of my early impressions.
- Tried the online demo, and loved the user experience and admin dashboard. Very polished UI for an Open Source project. (+1 for Magento)
- Huge download (-1 for Magento)
- Convoluted download process and scant details for the SVN checkout (-1 for Magento)
- The Zend framework. Magento is built on the Zend Framework, and in my opinion, the Zend Framework is like a hole in the head. Everyone has their favorite flavour of ice cream, so this is really just my personal preference, but coming from something like Rails to the Zend Framework is like running full speed into a brick wall. Does one really need an XML configuration file to point to the location of other XML configuration files? Yeeessh (-2 for Magento)
- Decent web admin tools to add products and create a catalog. Clients could (mostly) grok it. (+1 for Magento)
- Pretty straight forward to theme, although it could be easier. (+1 for Magento)
Totally subjective and largely meaningless score: -1 (Magento’s weaknesses slightly outweigh positives, in my opinion)
So in summary, Magento is a large, (overly?) complex code base with a great admin and frontend user interface. It’s fairly easy to skin, but I found developing custom functionality a drag. Keep in mind, this was the first Magento site I’ve built, and there’s always a learning curve for every project.
My biggest complaint though is something that I have trouble even articulating. It’s a “vibe”, if you will. Having worked on the Drupal project for a number of years, I have seen first hand how an open source project can (and should) be run. The Magento team could learn a lot from looking at the development processes that projects like Drupal and WordPress employ. For example, with Magento extensions, in most cases, it seemed to not be possible to download actual source code, but rather, you had to enter a key and then Magento would download the package for you. In almost all cases, it feels like the actual source code is kept away from end users. Where is the place to file, and track bugs against various extensions? Where can I browse the source code online? How can I contribute bug fixes? To me, an open source project should be more then trial ware, with an option to upgrade to a premium edition. Open source software is largely about community development, and I don’t see an active developer community hacking away on Magento.
Other alternatives: (open source) Ubercart, Spree (Monthly fee) Shopify, FoxyCart
Bob Lefsetz on Music Careers
Bob Lefsetz is nothing if not controversial. But you just can’t argue with the man, can you? His words have the unmistakable ring of truth. For example, his latest post on careers for musicians is awesome in it’s bluntness and totality - a must read - and is Lefsetz at his best.
Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!
If bands were operating systems
After the recent news regarding Metallica’s prima dona behavior, where they’ve forced bloggers to remove (positive) reviews of their new album, I’ve drafted the following chart to help my fellow geeks understand the lay of the land.
Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)
Hypebot’s “Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0″
On Hypebot’s blog, there is an interesting post entitled “Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0″. Ethan Kaplan astutely observes that these are not so much ‘issues’, but rather a laundry list of virtually untapped possibilities.
Of particular interest to me is “issue number 11“, as is suggested in the comments section of the post: Patronage.
Music patronage is an idea that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for a number of years, and perhaps its time is coming. There’s certainly a few startups taking a crowdfunding or micro-financing approach to creating music: Sell A Band, Artist Share, and the slightly mysterious, stealth project from Throwing Muses singer, CASH Music, to name a few. An informative round up on these, and other similar services can be found in this great post by Peter Spellman.
As a tangent, I can’t help but contrast historical music patronage (wealthy lords and land owners in a Feudal society hiring court musicians), with modern day licensing deals (Britteny Spears singing for Pepsi). Many individuals have suggested an analogy between the Corporation and the Feudal Estate. Perhaps then, massive, contemporary music licensing deals are simply the inflated version of a very old practice.
SF Music Tech Summit wrap up
The latest SF Music Tech Summit was a total success. Great people, interesting panels, fantastic hallway conversation and free (as in beer) wine. What more could one want?
The panel I moderated was great fun, and we looked at all sorts of technical issues one faces when developing a “music2.0″ site. Tom Conrad had all kinds of great stories about scaling Pandora. Shaun Haber from Warner Bros. did an admirable job filling in for Ethan Kaplan , earning him the dubious nick name “Virtual Ethan”. In the audience, personal hero Derek Sivers told the story of his journey from php to rails, and back again. Paul Lamere took some notes as well, for those interested. All in all, very enjoyable time spent.
There were many great comments floating around throughout the day, but a one that stuck out in my mind was Michael Petricone stating that:
“IP is like chocolate cake. A little can be good, but too much… look out.”
I’ve also been thinking about Tim Westergren from Pandora who suggests that every four piece rock band should get a 5th member whose primary role is to act as blogger, videographer, and online marketing ace, working all the social media sites. Truly good advice, in my opinion.
Corey Denis had an interesting panel on the new music economy, in which part of the panel was devoted to coming up with a new wikipedia entry for the term “new music economy”. Nothing like some panel participation to get things going.
I also had a few good conversations about Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” fiasco with conference attendees, but the best description of the whole ugly mess is written by Mark Pilgram in a post entitled “the day the music died“. It’s a spectacular story of a truly epic fail. There’s many lessons in there - of what *not* to do.
Thanks Brian! Looking forward to next time.
SF Music Tech Summit tomorrow
Just a reminder to everyone in the bay area that the second SF Music Tech Summit, hosted by the talented Brian Zisk is taking place tomorrow, May 8th at the Kabuki Hotel.
I have the pleasure to moderate a “tech talk” panel at 1:00pm on building music related web apps with:
- Tom Conrad - Pandora
- Marc Urbaitel - In Ticketing
- Ethan Kaplan - Warner Bros.
- Jack Moffitt - Chesspark / Xiph
- Jeremy Riney - Playlist.com
Lessons learned from last SF Music Summit: Easy on the soju cocktails…
Should be a blast, and I hope to see you all there.
Music blogs made easy
I ran into this very cool post from Joe Lazarus, in which he describes the steps to link last.fm, Pipes, the Yahoo! Media Player and Tumblr together to make your own music site in 10 minutes.
If you follow the clear and straight forward instructions in his example, what you end up with is an automated way to post mp3s to your music blog, based on what you’re playing on your local computer. With the inclusion of the Yahoo Media player on the page, it’s easy to listen to the whole lot through a browser. Pretty neat, for 10 minutes of work!
It’s genius is how it turns the (mostly) passive activity of listening to music into a content creating endeavor (albeit, an automated endeavor). The newest version of the Yahoo player even has a ‘buy’ button, that lets you link in your own Amazon affiliate code. On the Yahoo! Media Player wiki, Lucas Gonze points out:
What’s interesting about this button is that it automates a crucial but neglected part of the ecosystem for net media. Monetization shouldn’t be a manual operation. Music bloggers, for example, usually have a little blurb in their sidebar encouraging visitors to buy recordings associated with the songs they post. They do this out of a kind of musical environmentalism concerned with ensuring a flow of recordings to discover, keep, love, and post. However, it’s a lot of labor for a blogger to set up a purchase link for every track. An upsell link needs to be part of their infrastructure along with comments, RSS, and other basics. With this feature we’re making purchase flows a standard part of the tools for web media.
So every time someone buys a track after listening to it on my Tumblr blog, I get something like a nice shiny nickle. In theory, this means one could get paid to listen to music - truly my dream job. All I need is more traffic, and better taste in music ;)
Thanks Joe!
Check out the end result (still in desperate need of some themeing)
http://music.mixedcontent.com/
Introducing: SXSW Gig Guide
With around 1600 bands playing at SXSW, planning your time is critical. With the inevitable slipping of gig schedules, knowing who else is playing at a given venue is really important, and so I threw together this tool to help myself plan my evenings entertainment. You might also find it helpful:
I screen scraped the SXSW site, plotted the venue data on a map and then scrapped artist MP3s from the SXSW site, and hooked those into the new Yahoo Media Player. The end result is you can click on a venue marker, and then listen to the bands that are playing there that evening.
It was also interesting in how long each part of this app took to build:
- Using Ruby and the totally awesome hpricot HTML parser to write the screen scraper to grab HTML from sxsw.com and convert data to JSON - 20 minutes
- Writing the JS to show the JSON data on the map - 1 hour
- Fussing with CSS and HTML layout (which is still broken!) - 3+ hours!
Moral of the story - Either learn more CSS, or surround myself with talented developers and designers so I don’t have to. I’m inclined to do the later…
Next up is to incorporate this data into Rilli so it’s possible to build your own calendar and see where your friends are going.
Thanks to Jeremy Keith for inspiration, and Mike Purvis for some Map code.
UPDATE: Now working in IE7. Thanks to Lucas for the bug report.
UPDATE 2: A few folks have asked for the data I’ve scraped from the SXSW site. The (huge) JSON file can be found here. Go nuts…
A chat with Spotify, and how the URL is the next MP3
At this weeks San Fran Music and Technology conference, Rob Lord made a great point when he said “I can’t believe the MP3 is the new MP3“. It is kind of surprising that the latest format to be getting all the buzz is simply a MP3 devoid of DRM. I mean, isn’t it time to move on already? This morning, I had a chance to sit down with the fine folks from Spotify, and if they have their way, the URL may be the next MP3.
URL’s are a really powerful concept, and I’m going to make the bold claim that if something is not addressable with a URL, it might as well not exist. To this end, Spotify have rolled out a cool feature where one can now link to a specific point in time in a song. This link for example, points to Jimi Hendrix’s solo in Little Wing (but you have to have the Spotify beta client installed for it to work). I believe that it’s currently only possible to point to a particular starting time in a track, but once you are also able to specify a duration for the url, this will be golden. Some work could go in to making the URL’s look nicer to humans, but the hard part is certainly done. When Thomas Edison released the first phonograph player in 1877, he proclaimed that it possessed the ability to annihilate the significance of time and space. Now 125 years later, it’s the URL’s turn…
I also heard about how Spotify is in the process of building a brand new metadata store. They have licensed information from familiar places like Gracenote, AMG and MusicBrainz as well as added in some of their own data including song recommendations and indexing of song lyrics. Apparently, they even have detailed metadata about the individual musicians performing on a given track, so one could find all the songs where Eric Clapton plays guitar, but does not sing, for example. If this isn’t cool enough, the even bigger deal is that they’re releasing it through an open API. For free…
Now imagine combing all this music RDF data with other distributed data stores. One could write a SPARQL query that looks up artists who have released albums before 1970, that then references Upcoming.org (or another new event site) to see which of those artists are now on tour. Or… as a musician, I could write a query to check a list of my musician friends, marked up in FOAF on my blog, and alert me if any of my friends have a new album.
Keep in mind that this is all supposed to be paid for by advertising, so keep clicking on those ads everyone, because I want at this API…
Thanks again to Daniel and Niklas from Spotify for the morning chat!