You have probably heard about OpenCart and how it enables people to start e-commerce shopping websites with ease and effectively by providing an excellent interface on both end-user and administration sides. There are also many other open source (free) applications competing with it; including Magento, osCommerce, Presta Shop, Cubecart, ZenCart etc. but I think OpenCart is the best one. Here are the features which make OpenCart a winner amongst them.

• High flexibility: OpenCart is so well coded that it is very easy to customize according to your specific needs. This includes customizations on template system, languages, local settings and currencies.
• Much less bugs than other sh0pping cart solutions and working fast.
• Not complicated to administer the system. Meanwhile, other shopping cart solutions can easily confuse you even at the simplest things like product definitions.
• A wide range of payment and shipping options available for free in OpenCart system as modules.
• Active community with talented coders working on new developments

I am very excited to announce my blog readers about my latest book release from Packt publishing. I have especially authored a book on OpenCart. OpenCart Beginner’s Guide.

This topic was becoming more and more popular and there was a huge demand to learn how to achieve the most important e-commerce functions on OpenCart for beginners without losing their way.

The book will be very helpful for interested people. You can read the all features of the book and buy it on Packtpub or Amazon websites here.

A sample chapter on the features of OpenCart Payment Models.

You can download OpenCart for free on OpenCart.com

Another useful OpenCart review here.

I wonder how many bloggers, webmasters have ever heard about what an advertising server is and what it will benefit to optimize, manage ads to make the most money from blogs, websites. Actually, many bloggers are not aware that using an ad server, they can maximize the revenue on their blog networks, especially using the most popular and established ad server, OpenX.

Here is the brief functionality list taken from the OpenX book, I have authored to teach interested people about the usage of OpenX. Reading this, you will understand why you need to use an ad server and why OpenX is a perfect free, open source choice.

* Managing advertising campaigns and banners on multiple web sites from a centralized platform.
* Displaying ads according to their importance and alter the under-performing ads easily and swiftly with a few clicks on multiple websites.
* Filling all unsold ad space by remnant in-house ads and optimize them.
* Using GeoTargeting to show ads according to visitor geographical origin. It would help maximizing online ad revenue because of the high relevancy.
* Using channels to show relevant ads according to website page content
* Integrating Google Adsense, Chitika and many other ad network ads
* Using OpenX as an ad management platform for advertisers, publishers, and ad agencies on a single installation.
* Detailed statistics and reports on banners, advertisers, websites, website zones etc. This would help to change ineffective ads easily.

Additionally, OpenX is the choice of more than 150,000 publishers worldwide and reaches over 5 million clicks a day! They also operate a hosted ad server solution where the banners in your inventory can compete with the ads on their network through bidding on pricing.

By the release of latest OpenX version, it has become now even easier to serve different video ads, inline /overlay video ads etc.

The official OpenX website.

Suppose that you or your software development team has managed to create a wonderful product which is planned to run smoothly on several web and database servers. Actually, online web software alone doesn’t mean much if you don’t provide constant availability and scalability to its customers. Providing the best service is only possible with a high quality systems monitoring service. As a professional who has worked as DB Admin and .Net web applications developer for several years, there are certain quality criteria for this service. It should immediately warn me about the bottlenecks and system failures, even in the process level help finding it. I remember that a special process triggered by a credit card application used in a bank which I have developed reports before, was always taking the CPU sources near to %90, and we couldn’t long time identify it because the system tracking software was not powerful enough.

Hyperic looks like one of the most efficient open source server management and monitoring software in the market.

First of all, all their products are open source and provides everything you can imagine and being developed regularly. Open source also means that you don’t have to bind yourself to a giant company which will charge you money for every server to manage.

Second, professional Hyperic products are being used already by heavily visited application websites like hi5, Cnet, real.com.

Third point is that server monitoring product should be very easy to install, deploy and use. I don’t want to be a master Linux system admin to be able to use the product. Hyperic sofware interface is intuitive and easy to use.

Hyperic offers different scaled software for different needs on a great range of operating systems including AIX, HP, Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OSX, FreeBSD. Hyperic Open Source, Enterprise editions, Operations IQ, Amazon edition, Cloud monitoring are main product lines.

Imagine a media player, converter and editing software like a miracle solves all your problems with codecs and suits to even very specific needs. I will explain why I needed such an all-in-one software. If you are a very active archiver who downloads films, music and any other content like me, you maybe also faced the similar problems. I was using tons of small programs to merge, cut and convert the files because while some formats suit to one, the other didn’t. Some didn’t cut or merge correctly. For example, sound didn’t match the video. Some were so slow and even froze after a period. I can extend the list but I will do a favor and tell you about Blaze Media Pro. Powerhouse all-in-one fast converter, burner, audio and video editing software for all popular audio and video formats…and much more!

I will start with audio capabilities of Blaze Media Pro. Powerful easy audio editing and conversion of many types including mp3, wav, ogg, cd audio, midi, dvd audio, flac, compression of mp3 and wav files, mp3 encoding & decoding, cd ripping. For mp3 conversions, you can define any detail level about bitrates. It is possible to convert protected WMA, AAC, M4P files as well. Burning and ripping from cds are fully supported. CD to MP3 feature enables you to convert cd tracks to mp3 files very fast. Surely, you can choose bitrates, frequencies and channels data. Extracting audio from video files is a nice feature I use very frequently because like to listen concert videos directly as mp3 files. There is an interesting additional feature that you can add sound effects to audio files as well. Auto musicID recognition, audio tag editing makes the software as an excellent tool to build music libraries. Audio recorder feature can record from any source available on your system, such as line-in for cassette or LP recording with a visually detailed interface. There is a scheduler to start the recording whenever you want with a desired duration. Easy to use.

You should download the Blaze Media Pro trial version and experience editor, music CD burner, ripper and player capabilites of music software definitely.

Now, let’s continue with the video capabilities which I use more. Full MPEG encoding & decoding with support for conversions amongst AVI, MPG, WMV, MOV and more. Batch convertion option is a nice feature by the way if you are managing a large video library. Video DVD&Cd burning is supported. I have also noticed a useful option for webmasters as well. Possible to convert video files to Flash SWF or FLV files. Video making from images, sounds; video joining, effects adding, video capture, extracting video frames to images, audio additions, deletions are supported. Maybe, I should emphasize that this software is also a video media management tool where you can have the control of every single frame with any operations adding, cutting, moving, resize, rotate, mirror etc.

DVD ripping is quite popular for the latest years, and Blaze Media Pro gives full support for it. DVD to many formats. You can also create ISO files from CD/DVD layout.

Overall, if you are looking for a high quality complete package about media files management, go for it. I recommend trying the software by free download. $50 is a very affordable price for the huge features support.

Visit http://www.blazemp.com for more information.

This is an exciting-to-play kaleidoscope animation construction game. Every single image you put on the area of this flash screen rotated and duplicated across regions to create beautiful moving effects reminding us cornflake shapes. Try it. Easy and fun software.

A reliable, accurate and fast real time GPS tracking system is a must for service and trucking companies, sales forces and delivery companies, because the quality of the program which they use directly affects their profits and efficiency.

GPS Insight vehicle tracking system is a hardware and web software-based vehicle tracking product which is the technical leader in the GPS tracking field, provides many vital features for success in these highly competitive field.

The program has the ability to track the exact locations of thousands of vehicles in a very detailed map with 2 minutes updates using satellites and AT&T/T-Mobile.

The main advantage of the system is its powerful reporting tools. You can calculate fuel consumption and the most efficient destination routes to optimize your savings and idle times of vehicles to protect yourself against extra labor payments when drivers are not really working and even speed of vehicles for safety and many more. Here is a list of 16 reports.

Also, one important feature worth telling is a Google Earth Support. You can enhance your reports with 3-D mapping.

Another benefit is ability to keep track of 90 days of activity history, so it is possible to do strategic decisions on the long term by usage of the data analysis.

Would you buy a critical product without seeing its detailed demos? I wouldn’t. The GPS Insight website has a nice set of demos and tutorials which tell you what you are really buying and why this is absolutely necessary clearly.

GPS Insight provides a 30 day money back guarantee, and offers free trials for qualified companies. They do not bind you with long contracts, either. Their tracking devices take only minutes to install, and ship the same day your order is received. You will be tracking your fleet in days, not weeks or months.

One of the things I like most is their detailed and comprehensive GPS Insight support wiki for customers and Blog for GPS vehicle tracking. I see that they keep their customers up-to-date with their service updates and incoming developments.

For example;

We have recently begun to work with the ADOT (Arizona Department of Transportation), and were asked to incorporate mile marker data into GPS Insight for them. Of course they have this information somewhere, but in the time that it will take to get the raw data and process it into GPS Insight, we could simply create these mile markers ‘manually’ and I thought this exercise is worth documenting on the blog.

As a conclusion, It will cost you $1.50-2 per day per vehicle is nothing compared to what you will gain through the benefits you receive.

Do you have many important things to tell what you are passionate about?
Then, you should start your own Wiki page and begin knowledge sharing and collaboration with other people from all over the world.
It is not hard at all and much fun.

WetPaint is a very easy to use Wiki website and program which is mainly suitable for beginners to novice people. If you don’t have much time to dive into details of other more technical Wiki tools like Wikipedia, WetPaint is just for you. You can finish your Wiki in minutes by using a very good WYSIWYG editor. Adding widgets like Youtube videos, RSS, polls, chat or any other one is also possible in a few steps.

Wetpaint is totally free and you can use a sub domain name host at Wetpaint or you can use your own domain name. Your wiki will be public in default, but you can change it to private or by invation only.

Key features:

• Very easy to use with visual editor
• You can add RSS feeds into your pages
• Comments & Discussions on the pages
• Easy to attach files like photos, videos etc.
• Search Engine Friendly Pages
• Clear & Easy Navigation
• Many Attractive Custom Templates
• Excellent Widgets Support
• Community features
• Site Statistics

Because I have passion for smart toys, I have started a Wiki at WetPaint. It didn’t take much time for me to open iqtoys.wetpaint.com in very easy 3 steps. Actually less than 10 minutes. It is just a page now, but very easy to add new pages. Wetpaint has the best interface that I have used in Net lately, from the easy registration steps to building pages.

Another great feature about WetPaint is that you can open any number of Wiki sites under one username and easily edit them. You can track your pages for changes
and make custom to-do lists.

Don’t forget to visit users guide to get more information on Wiki world.

WetPaint made a huge success and it is one of the best sites of Web2.0 world. There are thousands of Wiki pages where you can also join to contribute. You can search
by keywords or browse the categories.

Join WetPaint to test the system yourself. Think about your passions and knowledge. Technology, Health, Hobbies, Jobs, Music, Games etc. Choose one. Then fire! Once you begin building your first Wiki here, I am sure you that will become addicted to WetPaint.