Milestone achieved finally...

After some heavy coding finally put together a Seagull based Feeder module`s first milestone (will publish it soon somewhere), it is working on RSS atm, but soon it will evolve to other feeds as well. It has autoUpdate where updateable feeds are ordered by bayesian rating, with limits etc. It maps discovered Items to a generic Content class, so it will be a great content provider. I am really excited about it, and cant wait to see it in production which is yet to come. Next steps include caching, and a bit refactoring, as the project evolves. It should be a news aggregator service, with some fresh ideas, but basics should be done first :)

Zend Neon Impressions

Hopefully found my next php IDE. I have just installed Zend Studio For Eclipse. So here are the first impressions. I wanted to move over to Eclipse for a while now, but got used to ZDE which is decent IDE, but its HTML/CSS support is bellow poor. First impressions are great, easy install, a little headache (more about reasons, and thanks for help), but finally I can debug my Seagull installs from IDE directly (a bit slowly though). Now I have to get used to new keyboard shortcuts but nevermind (I delete all the time instead of duplicate, what is rather annoying :). Eclipse has rather large coding language base, and well supported plugins and together with Zend Eclipse is a great thing to have.

SugarCRM with Seagull, Chapter 3 (final)

The thing finally works & is simply great. It took a little time but it is really good tradeoff because you gain all of SugarCRM functionality and development of such would take way more time.
Experience with provided API is that it is really easy to communicate with. A little bit frustrating was the fail to use PEAR`s SOAP_Client, but nusoap does the job just fine (if anybody have done it with mentioned package, please place a comment with a guide for providing complex datatypes).

So to summarize: Christians - Lions 1:0 :)

Technocrati submission

Have submitted this blog to Technocrati, will see if it drives attention, I am interested in feedback

Adwords experiment

I have started an interesting experiment with AdWords service of Google. I have chosen a high quality software product. Selected the right keywords, made geotargeting & started advertising. Have made a campaign with 2 adgroups (one for broader keywords, another for the best matching keywords). These groups compete against each other. Its really interesting that broad keywords, with terrible CTR`s & with tons of impressions are performing better. The CPC is better, so the price of clicks is for astonishing 30%. lower. The purchase-quality of clicking users could be worse of course, but will continue the experiment & report the results.

SugarCRM with Seagull, Chapter 2

Made local installation of SugarCRM, went almost smoothly (got some minor unimportant errors). Tried to connect to its API with PEAR`s SOAP_Client. The test call was made correctly but when I passed it multidimensional arrays as parameter (for login call) something odd happens. It always returns error. Tried with nusoap, everything went almost smoothly (the problem with it is using same name for a class as PHP 5`s SOAP extension, solution is disable extension or make renames in nusoap classes, I made the second option, as I dont know whether I will use PHP`s SOAP in future). Now I am able to communicate with SugarCRM, working on classes that will talk with it atm, more will come.

SugarCRM with Seagull, Chapter 1

Started today an interesting project, namely integration of SugarCRM (customer relationship management) solution with seagull. Plan to do it trough provided soap API interface, looking forward to challenges, which will surely come. Plan to make it as part of export module (maybe later a separate one), as I need only one way (SGL->Sugar) communication. If anybody has idea/proposal don`t hesitate, now is the time :)