I've been spending some time trying to choose a domain name for a new web service.  Turns out this is a lot easier said than done.  James Simonoff has written a comprehensive article "How to buy domain names like a pro" with a lot of great information and resources.  Here are some tips I've picked up along the way. 

Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine launched over the weekend.  Rather than attempting to be another Google like search engine trying to help us find information on the web, Wolfram|Alpha tries to answer our questions with precision.   Want to know "how many physicians are in the united states?"  730,801 (2000 estimate).  Cool!

For the past couple of months I've been using the "real time" search engine OneRiot.  Real time search sounds cool, but what the heck is it? And more importantly, what can I get from OneRiot that I can't already get from Google? 

So what exactly is PCI compliance and why should you care?

In a nutshell, if you accept payment with credit cards or transmit or store any cardholder data, then the PCI requirements apply to you.  PCI requirements apply to ANY credit card transaction - online, telephone, or in person.  So who doesn't take credit cards for payment?  PCI Compliance applies to just about everyone doing business today.  While PCI compliance is not a federal law today, Fritz Young of CISSP says "there are state laws that are already in effect (and some that may go into effect) to force components of the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) into law".

Using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal for your web site is a good idea.  A primary function of any CMS is the separation of content and presentation (look & feel) from each other and from the underlying CMS application. To get the most benefit from your CMS it's important to understand that the CMS has constraints and standards that that allow it for function properly.  Following is a list of things to keep in mind when using a CMS.  My list is far from authoritative, so please make suggestions and comments.

In April 2008 John was interviewed by Amy S. Choi from BusinessWeek for an article titled Entrepreneurs Fight a Recession.  For the article BusinessWeek interviewed small business owners in Bisbee, AZ, Hanover, NH, Burlingame, CA, and Austin, TX to find out how we were preparing for the down turn in the economy.  A followup article will appear in the April 10 issue of  BusinessWeek.  So what's happened to 53 Technology since April 2008? 

Chances you are already using social media as part of your marketing strategy or you wish you were.  There's no shortage of social media platforms to choose from ... Twitter is hot today.  FaceBook is the rage with the "masters" (over 35) crowd.  Then there's MySpace, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, etc, etc ... Hard to keep track of them all.  So where do you start? 

Recently I've been experimenting with a variety of semantic web tools and web widgets lookig for easy ways to add semantic web capabilities to existing web sites.   Here's a quick and easy way to add Snap Shots link previews to your Joomla! blog.  Mouse over any link in this post to see what Snap Shots does.  This takes about 10 minutes.

Why use PHP from the command line?  I'm much more facile with PHP than Perl or Awk, so using PHP to tie together several tasks needed to update about 50 sites on one of our servers was very appealing.  Here's a simple CLI PHP example that prints any arguments added to the command line.

Recently I needed to create an RSS feed for a site without a local RSS service.  The site uses Joomla! 1.0.x, which doesn't have built in RSS support and available RSS components for Joomla! 1.0.x are buggy and open security holes in your site.   Then along came Dapper (www.dapper.com ) .  Dapper is a web based mashup tool that makes it to do all sorts of neat things with content.  I needed to create an RSS feed, here's how it's done: