Outfit Mode has a really nice use of music on their site, playing Wonderwoman by Leaf - currently number ten in the Dutch Top 40. It’s a really nice design, which the song sort of compliments.

I think most web developers / designers have worked with at least one eCommerce platform. Up to now, the choice has been fairly good and many, many stores run on Zen Cart or osCommerce. The thing is, a lot seem to look the same, and the majority of individual stores don’t always seem to be treated with the love and care of some others on entry level paid platforms.

Personally, I really like the open source platforms because it brings new and interesting products online and allows owners of small High Street stores to join the online retailers. It works best when the products are unique mind; there must be 100’s of electronics stores online.

I’ve just been reading through the website for Magento - a new open source eCommerce platform. A few things stick out at first glance. The main developers actually develop very good eCommerce sites at the moment, and they talk about online stores not being a cookie-cutter experience.

As for the administration area, the screenshots and features look excellent. I can’t wait to download Beta 1 and start developing an example website with it.

Twitter is a free social networking service which works with small messages. You might use it as a very brief blog, or to develop a webapp with considering the cool tie-in with SMS messages.

Getting a message out is pretty easy - you can do it from GTalk or Jabber, log into twitter.com, or the really cool one - send a SMS message to the Twitter number. So many providers give an allocation of free text messages (an Orange pay as you go SIM pack on my desk has 300 free texts a month) that you can update several times a day and not pay for it.

Curiosity got the best of me, so I signed up, made a test update and then placed some code in the sidebar here. I took the JavaScript badge offered on the site and crowbarred it into the existing XHTML code for the sidebar, and updates are shown under the flickr thumbnails on the right.

I’m really excited by this - and it’s got me thinking about all the possibilities. You can subscribe and follow me on Twitter itself, via RSS and if I make an update you get an SMS message. And if that wasn’t enough, you can make yourself appear popular by following an often updated Sky News and getting a lot of text messages.

You can follow me on Twitter, read this excellent introduction, find out if (and why) you should care, or consider the alternatives like Jaiku which looks very cool too.

Update 15:33 - I’ve been thinking about different ways to use Twitter to send SMS notifications on all sorts of sites. Users obviously have to be signed up to Twitter and following you, but these look pretty interesting. WordPress plugin to send a status update when you create or edit a post - Twitter Updater. If you’re using another blog, or maybe want to send any RSS feed (like Podcasts, press releases, updates to an event, etc) you can do so with twitterfeed.

I’ve been thinking about blogging platforms a lot lately. There’s many posts around at the moment about choosing the right one, but not all get into much depth.

There’s a good roundup on Mashable of the features between the two most popular self-hosted CMS’s. Movable Type 4 was released this week and everything I’ve seen so far looks great. Having setup this blog with WordPress though, I can’t recommend it enough.

Mashable: MovableType 4 vs. Wordpress 2.2

In preparation for launching WebKanix I wanted to arrange some more reliable hosting. I’ve been reading about MediaTemple for a while and last week listened to the call/podcast over at TechCrunch. If there’s anything I’ve really grown to value from a hosting company it’s good support. The reputation (mt) have for support is excellent, and with folk like Jeffrey Zeldman using (mt) it became a no-brainer. I updated the nameservers on webkanix.com last night and so far so good.

The GridService (gs) seemed like the right one to go for now. Signing up is very easy and an email arrived instantly to explain that my order was pending. I waited a day before calling to enquire and the CSA sent through everything I needed within minutes. The difference implied with the name is that unlike shared hosting where a “bad neighbour” can have an effect on the speed of your website, the website is spread across hundreds of servers in tandem. This hopefully means you won’t go down under the Digg effect and that there’s no single point of failure.

In short, there’s 100GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth, on which you can host 100 sites. I’m thinking about launching a small web application in Ruby and am looking forward to testing it on (mt). Usage is measured in Grid Performance Units (GPU). The way this is displayed is very good, with a graph and large simple numbers explaining the usage. You also get a table of the top scripts and files. In this billing cycle I’ve used none, but I really don’t expect to exceed the allotted 1,000.

Once logging in first impressions are that it’s a little disorienting. Everything is there, but it’s organised very differently to anything like cPanel.

The panel itself looks amazing and it’s great to see an overview of domains and support requests with common tasks on the right hand side. Everything is well designed like this and it’s a pleasant departure from WHM when managing multiple domains. Adding a domain is easy, but managing domains requires a slightly different mindset if you’ve been a long time user of cPanel or Plesk.

Adding an email address is accessed via ‘Manage this Server’, and chosing the domain for the email address is done by using ‘all domains on this site’ or selecting just the domain you wish to use. Managing databases is fairly easy, but there is a single username and password for all of them, and you must specify the server shown in your welcome email rather than ‘localhost’. Once you get used to a different way of managing domains and their services (such as adding a subdomain as a new domain with its own services) it really is easy.

I’ve been impressed with the service so far. Everything has been quick to load and I’ve not seen any downtime. The only frustrating point has been with MX records on my main domain. In the past I’ve been able to setup email accounts on a server, then change the nameservers to point to the new server. Hopefully this gives as few problems with lost emails as possible. Apparantly it doesn’t work like that on (mt) and I can’t enable email until the MX records point to the grid.

Update 17/08/07: I checked this morning and still hadn’t had a response to my support ticket. I tried enabling mail again and it worked, although I’m now just using IMAP and not forwarding to GMail.

Update 19/08/07: MediaTemple did reply to my ticket, but only to say the problem appeared to be fixed and that I should contact them if there’s any further problems. It took 19 hours to have a reply, but I’m happy the issue is fixed and I haven’t encountered this problem when adding other domains since.

When I was thinking of setting up a podcast (more on that soon) I stumbled across Boagworld - a podcast by Paul Boag, a web designer and usability/accessibility specialist.

I’ve seen many, many blog posts by Paul over the last year and really like the style in which web design is discussed. There’s no preaching at the reader and the content is both good for people coming into web design and those who have been at it for a while.

I heard Paul’s most recent podcast over the weekend and then went back and listened to the first two going round Asda. I can’t recommend them enough for everyone involved in developing and managing websites - it’s not overly technical, it flows extremely well, the length is just right and the audio quality is great.

You don’t need to go back and listen from episode one - but the show notes are good, so if something interests you it really is worth downloading.

I see a lot of blogs and sites with RSS feeds now, which is great. Many are starting to use the common feed icon instead of their own, or combinations of XML, ATOM, RSS, Feed and so on.

You may notice on some blogs that in Firefox a little RSS icon appears in the address bar, and the RSS icon in Internet Explorer 7 will light up on certain pages. This is done by placing a line of code in the <head> of your layout.

<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“RSS 2.0″ href=“http://james.webkanix.com/feed/” />

That’s it. Replace the values with your own and check it out. Visitors won’t have to check footers, side navigation and content for the feed - it’s right there for the taking.