Anyname Domain Services

Happy New Year… a bit late I know, but I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the site content overhaul. New sections have been added, content refreshed & updated, and the backend system updated to the new Wordpress 2.7 release.

So what does the year ahead bring? I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions – they’re much too easy to break, fickle and just end up with a guilt complex that lingers. Instead I have a start-of-year review both for my personal and professional goals culminating in a big to-do list.

I’m in the process of revisiting the professional & project side to decide what’s hot, what’s not, what stays & what goes, what are the priorities and what will be new on the list. So here’s the current list… which will change!

Wordpress
2009 will be Wordpress year. When re-developing this site I had to make a number of choices. The most important ones being whether to use a CMS or bespoke development, and then which CMS to use, and finally which theme. I picked Wordpress because of its stature, constant development, extensibility, and dedication to open-source. The latest release has not disappointed, and my only major quibble – the admin panel, has been updated to an excellent & smooth UI. Wordpress is now fully CMS-ready. There are a couple of major conversion projects in the pipeline of older CMS’s to Wordpress 2.7. These will involve database conversion scripts which may be released. Many of my parked sites will also receive the ‘Wordpress treatment’ and will be migrated to content-rich mini-sites, info-sites, affiliate stores and niche-content sites.
There are also a few wordpress plugins in the pipeline. I’ll discuss these in later posts.

Affilistore Enhanced
Last year saw the release of AffiliStore Enhanced 2.5 – a beefed up version of the standalone AffiliStore product. You may notice the ASE link in the top menu. This redirect will be replaced by a dedicated ASE page and associated demo. ASE will still be supported and downloadable from Affiliate-Stores.
The latest 2.5 release has now been forked and I’m working on the 2.6 release. Version 3.0 will be the last released version of this sometime this year following 2.6 which will be more of a modified 2.5. I’ll be moving on then to other projects but will continue to support v3. I am also available to design & develop bespoke modifications & themes, as some of you have enquired about. I’m currently road-mapping the development and will post on this when ready.

Qinetix
Building a brand is one of the biggest challenges – both online & offline. Both are littered with the remnants of start-ups and establishes businesses which have not succeeded or kept up with the times – even Woolies have gone the way of the mammoth.
Qinetix is my attempt to get into the online e-commerce market. This has been several years in the ‘thinking’ if not ‘planning’ and stems from my years developing & supporting accounting platforms, and in utilising and watching the development of e-commerce and online ecommerce systems.
As a PHP developer I have seem this – in parallel with MySQL – develop into enterprise ready solutions. There is a need now for online platforms to utilise the functionality of php5/6 & MySQL 5.1+ to power the next generation of Web Applications & e-commerce solutions.
QinetiX I hope will be a part of this in 2009/2010.