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There are many Open Source Projects on the net. There are blogging platforms, CMS portals, image galleries, shopping carts, discussion forum scripts… you name it. For any project in any category, there is a free script that you can use.

However, it can be mind boggling to choose a script that suits your needs, especially if you are not familiar with any of them. In order to really test each script, you will have to spend a lot of hours installing and debugging them. And that’s a big disadvantage.

Luckily there is a site that allows you to test-ride most of the popular open source scripts. You can test the front and back end of any of the listed scripts.

For example, if you haven’t upgraded your blog to the latest version of WorPress 2.3.2, you can test it here.

I frequently use this site to compare different scripts and their functionalities. I also noticed that I send many of my customers to this website to test out particular script (especially the back-end part) before they chose it to use it for their projects. I thought you would find it useful.

Very powerful blogging platform MovableType is now free again, SixAppart the company that developed MovableType decided to make it open source. How would this affect WordPress’ position in the blogosphere? In the short run, WP doesn’t have to worry. But, in the long run… it’s probable that MovableType will catch up with WP, and maybe even take it over.

MT is a very robust and stable blogging platform. Some of the big corporations are using it, such as: AmericanExpress, Boeing, WashingtonPost, GM and list goes on.

Its advantage over WP is that, it allows you to manage (create) multiple blogs (from one place). For MT you just need to install it once, and the rest will be just clicking on the buttons. Need a new blog or number of blogs, just click “create blog” button, want to remove particular blog, click on “delete blog” button… and it will be gone, it’s that simple. So, if you have more than one blog, then you might want to check MT out.

Its disadvantage over WP is, it’s quite complex to install. If you are not IT savvy, its installation can give you a big headache. WP’s five minutes installation is really the simplest installation out there.

But, now that MT is open source, simplification of the script will take place, slowly but surely. But, as a blogger, MT’s going open source is only a good news for us. Because ultimately it’s the bloggers who will benefit from it, from the free, improved blogging platform. Competition will also keep WordPress going forward. (website: www.movabletype.org)

SimplePie is a code library, written in PHP, intended to make it easy for people to manage RSS and Atom feeds.

With SimplePie you can fetch any feeds and display them inside your website in any way you like. In order to work with SimplePie, you need to know at least some PHP programming. Here is a list of things you can do with SimplePie:

• Only display items from the last 24 hours
• Only display images from a feed
• Geting a thumbnail from a YouTube feed
• Displaying Google Calendar on your website
• Sort multiple feeds by time and date and many more…

Can you make money with it?

Sure, you can create a website that fetches RSS from many blogs and display them all in one website, with different categories and options (i.e your own Adobe XML aggregator). For example you could create the Ultimate Money Making Site which would display all the latest posts of “make money online” blogs. You could make money with AdSense ads and other ad networks, integrating them into the content of the website.

Warning: Please make sure you get the owners’ permission if you want to list their RSS in your website. I certainly do not want my posts to be displayed on other website without my permission.

simplepie.org

PHP/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful PHP tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data. Graphs that are similar to those of Google Analytics.

To create your own graphs with your own data, all you need to do is, download PHP/SWF Charts and place charts.swf, charts.php, and charts_library anywhere on your web server.

You need to describe your data in the table form in your php file. For example table like this:

should be described in your php file like this:

< ?php
include "charts.php";

//the chart's data
$chart [ 'chart_data' ] = array ( array ( "", "2001", "2002", "2003", "2004" ),
array ( "Region A", 5, 10, 30, 63 ),
array ( "Region B", 100, 20, 65, 55 ),
array ( "Region C", 56, 21, 5, 90 )
);

//send the new data to charts.swf
SendChartData ( $chart );

?>

which will create a graph like this:

You can also create other types of graphs, such as:

Line, Column, Stacked Column, Floating Column, 3D Column, Stacked 3D Column, Parallel 3D, Column, Pie, 3D Pie, Bar, Stacked Bar, Floating Bar, Area, Stacked Area, Candlestick, Scatter, and Polar. You can see samples for all of these at the PHP/SWF Charts Gallery page.

www.maani.us/charts/index.php

SixApart’s MovableType, blogging tool is free again. In the beginning it was free and it was one of the most popular and preferred blogging platforms. But in May 2004, SixApart commercialized it. One thing led to another, and MovableType was nowhere to be seen. It was getting less and less popular. On the other hand, now there were so many blogging tools. WordPress was one of them, lately it gained more popularity and became the preferred choice for bloggers.

I believe this move by SixApart, is done, in order to bring the glory that MovableType once had. I am not sure if it will bring its glory back, but one thing I am sure, all bloggers who are familiar with MovableType are happy now. Because MovableType has some advantages that other blogging tools do not. One such advantage is, you can create and manage multiple blogs within MovableType. So if you are running network of blogs, you might want to consider MovableType as your blogging platform.

I don’t think I will be shifting to MT in the near future, I am too much used to WP at the moment.

www.sixapart.com/movabletype/

This is a nice javascript that makes the date field (any date field) usable. All you need to do is to click inside the form field, and the calendar will pop-up for you to select the date. If you have any forms (e.g online booking, delivery service etc) be sure to use this kind of javascript.

It’s compatible with all major browsers:

• IE6, IE7
• Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0
• Safari

Download available at the site. calendar.swazz.org