I’ve decided to drop out of facebook and LinkedIn. It seems they are just for other people to use tofind opportunities, trading off the fact that they know me. Enough of that!  I don’t need to dedicate more time and effort towards making Facebook or LinkedIn or everyone else happy and successful. I’ve got my hands full as it is!

We’ve been using Drupal for a number of projects. It’s got a steep learning curve, but I like it as a PHP platform. We are now evaluating Magento as a shopping cart solution, and suffering from the huge differences in basic PHP infrastructure. My boss is wicked smart and he thinks Magento will be hot a few years from now.

One of the big issues with Drupal was that it wasn’t search engine friendly, and we did a ton of work on that. I just started looking at Magento, and this article on Magento SEO suggests we have some work to do with Magento as well.

I’d love to see us move to a unified platform that was great for PHP development, and good enough for search engines. We could make some killer user interfaces if we didn’t have to worry about implementation and maintenance issues (Drupal) or search friendliness (SEO). Google seems to be getting very smart these days. Maybe pretty soon it will be smart enough so we don’t need any extra SEO consultants. Ha!

I’m working on a development project for a relative of a good friend.  It’s really low budget, because he has a lot of family obligations is not in a position to invest in anything right now with this economy,  but I am happy to help him get something started. It’s an online wine store intended to be a “wine convenience store”. It’s like 7-11 in that it’s drive-by, open all the time, and has a simple collection spanning the spectrum of cheap rose through unoffensive table wines, with  one or two “top shelf” wines in the $40 range. The whole idea is one-stop, limited number to pick from, and something to please everyone “common” enough to shop at a 7-11 for wine.

This is a small project with very limited budget.. we’re talking a few hundred bucks to get everything going (and I mean everything!).  I’m thinking Magento shopping cart for easy of implementation and because traffic won’t be huge (so a slow Magento won’t be a problem).  I have been reading up on Magento SEO and my dev cart is working great.

I’ll probably also be given the job of building a blog about the store, so I can skin WordPress to match the Magento store. I’m looking forward to it, even if it’s not a very profitable job given the budget. It’ll be my first wine site.

Update: We have a domain now, WineEleven.com!