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Code sharing, Consultants, Non Programmer, Re: Go to checkout onlyif login is successful
****** message to minivend-users from Birgitt Funk <birgitt@minivend.com> ******
Greg Evans wrote:
>
> ****** message to minivend-users from Greg Evans <raisplin@rcn.com> ******
>
> on 3/2/99 12:56 AM, Thompson-Jordan was rumored to have said...
>
> >****** message to minivend-users from "Thompson-Jordan"
> ><Thompson-Jordan@mindspring.com> ******
> >
> >Hmmmmm......
> >
> >Though I empathize with some of your frustration with Minivend, your
> >choice to act like those whose behaviour you don't like strikes me as
> >..... well .....
>
> I would like to say that while minivend appears to be a great product
> epecially at the price it is offered for <g> and I intend to continue
> developing my site with it, just the install process is _extremely_
> frustrating, at least for a minivend newbie. I believe it took me about
> 3 days to get it installed _after_ I subscribed to the list, and before
> that, I had tried to install it at least 10 times. Unfortunately the
> docs are not as good as what minivend itself seems to be. What threw me
> off the most was the seemingly redundant questions during the install
> process and the fact that the installer does not (at least for me) set up
> the directory and file permissions correctly on install, which makes the
> setup only that much more frustrating.
>
> Looking at the frames pages for minivend frames/left.html for example I
> see:
>
> <TR><TD VALIGN=top [var TABLEFG] ALIGN=right width=100%><A
> HREF="[area scan
> di=category
> df=yes
> dl=Renaissance]"><FONT SIZE=1 FACE=ARIAL,HELVETICA
> style="text-decoration:none"><B>Acupuncture </FONT></A><BR></TD></TR>
>
> now I know how to change these to achieve a desired effect of my own
> personal categories, but looking at the documentation on 'One-Click
> Searches' I see some explanations of what things are as follows:
>
> di mv_dict_limit
> df mv_dict_fold
> dl mv_dict_look
>
> ok, so (not so obviously)
>
> mv_dict_limit appears to tell minivend what field in the db to search, at
> least that is how I am reading it
>
> mv_dict_fold I have no clue what this is for
>
> and mv_dict_look appears to tell minivend what string of text to look
> for within the db field that was chosen
>
> Now after searching the docs I find
>
> mv_dict_limit Automatically set the limiting string (mv_dict_end) to be
> one character greater than the mv_look variable at the character position
> specified....
>
> This means absolutely nothing to a non-programmer
but may be a lot to a programmer... 8-)
>
> mv_dict_fold seems to do the exact same thing as mv_dict_case, except the
> mv_dict_fold is ignored unless mv_dict_look is defined..it says it is the
> reverse sense from mv_dict_case, theyappear to do exactly the same thing
> to me, except one requires an extra variable
>
> mv_dict_look: The string at which to begin matching in a dictionary based
> search
>
> seems to me this could have been metter written as somethign more like
>
> mv_dict_look: what you are looking for
> usage: mv_dict_look=String_you_want_to_find
> or dl=String_you_want_to_find
>
> I am only making that example from what I can gather from the docs, can
> someone either tell me if that would be interpereted correctly, or if I
> am mistaken
You are not mistaken. Behind those things are hidden some jewels of MiniVend
and they are not delivered to you without shipping cost, on a silver platter
and spoon fed.
I think to pick them up, Mike Heins likes you to do your own share of digging
into its meaning. (I apologize, if I assume something wrongly here, it's my
own thinking and none of it deducted from any personal conversation with Mike
Heins). I am sure one can find out how they work exactly by looking at the
source code, though or by intensively trying them out. If you find out
how they work, you will be more than thankful that "those jewels" can
be found on "public ground". The digging is up to you. Or you hire some
one who gets his hands dirty.
If you wonder, why I don't give more exact explanations about how they work,
it is mainly, because I paid for those to see them in action (they work
beautifully BTW), because I haven't quite understood how they really
work myself, when I last tried to understand them (1996/1997), and I don't
like to talk nonsense here, explaining something which is not 100
percent clear to me either.
But MiniVend got me pretty hooked, to dig into why and how they work. And
THAT is the only thing, which is dangerous about MiniVend. It is a
challenge to use minivend as a non programmer and to take the challenge
can be dangerous as one can not evaluate exactly what one is getting into.
>
> >And, comparing this list to those for VMS, Unix, Linux, Roxen, etc. Well,
> >I took a survey of Minivend users and got about 50-60 responses.
>
> > One of which was mine :)
>
Same here.
> >Of those,
> >about half had ever finished a Minvend site. You can extrapolate total
> >users yourself. I think that VMS, Unix, Linux, Roxen have a little
> >larger user base.
That would be an interesting thing to clear up. The minivend.com home site
mentions that minivend catalogs have been installed in the thousands. One
thing which doesn't fit to this statement is the fact that on the
"sites" page of minivend.com you will find less than fifty sites listed.
I don't think Mike Heins would prevent in any way companies from showing
off their sites in this list. But it is not done.
I just wonder if one can deduct the number of successfully developed
catalogs from the number of times MiniVend has been downloaded either from
the minivend.com server or from CPAN.
As mentioned before, not only consultant's knowledge how to use MiniVend as
means of a bread-winning occupation is closely held, businesses seem to do
the same thing.
What motivates the businesses to do so, I can't quite grasp.
> Makes sense to me then that if a application (in this case) has a small
> user base the users would _want_ to help each other out as much as
> possible. For instance, I am using FileMakerPro to maintain the database
> that is being created for my site and since I don't have a clue how to do
> what I want to do with minivend, I jumped online and found a Filemaker
> person that created some calculations in FileMaker that will, by the time
> the database is done save me prolly 50-60 hours of work. The price for
> the 6 hours he spent writing the complex calculations? $0 (Hurray
> for me)
> >On top of that, my impression is that many Minivenders are
> >consultants or hosting companies who use Minvend to add value to
> > their services, hence their knowledge is their value.
> Well, I won't voice my opinion on consultants (nor will I prolly get much
> help after this post),
Come on ....
> but as for the hosting companies, if I thought that I might need to use a
> hosting company because the software was too difficult or because the
> lack of support for it by the users of it (especially free software),
So then, who are the users ?
It sounds as if you are an enduser, by this I mean a business owner (other
than ISP, website development, web hosting or programmer/consultant business)
who wants to build the catalog for his own company.
Or, are you someone who has established a "one-man consulting company" who
gets paid to set up a MiniVend catalog for some small business owners,
selling whatever from beer, chocolate, CDs, books, theatre tickets to
dreams ?
There is a big difference in what kind of user you are, IMHO.
If you are a user of the first kind, real end-user, I can understand
that you try looking for a "no cost" and "free" software package and do
the whole work by yourself. Well, then you realize that it is pretty tough
to deal with it by means of reading the docs and the list and you get
frustrated. And you ask yourself, if it wouldn't have been easier to get
something "out of the box". Well, there is nothing much out of the box yet,
which is affordable and can deliver the flexibility and performance
MiniVend can, I think.
On the other hand then, can you expect that anyone who has more a clue of
what to do with the MV package, should not get paid when he helps you out?
If you have gone through a series of "consultants", who didn't deliver the
services you expected to get, certainly, I would also rather buy a commercial
packet, which supposedly is "easier to use". (So far, they are mostly not,
you still need a "consultant" and end up spending much more money).
If you are the other type of user, the newly established "one-man"
consultancy company, who has his first paying customer, for whom you are
setting up and building a catalog, why would you then believe that people
on the list here, who are mostly that kind of users, will give away so
many good hints ? You are competing with them on the market. And I assume,
as a most of you are dedicated to free market enterprises, you will come
up to think of it as a fair deal.
Coming to conclusion, whatever kind of user you are, there are strong
motivations and reasons "not to help too much", which are quite
reasonable and worthwhile.
> I would go BUY a commercial package before I ever hired a consultant or
> used a hosting company, remember this is all my opinion, and not a
> personal attack on anyone...
>
> >There is a hokey thing called the Golden Rule and I think it is at the
> >heart of the Free in Free Software.
>
>
Grrr, I don't play hockey, what's that rule ?
> I don't think so, NetBSD mac68k by no means has a large userbase IMO,
> however of the 350 or so people that are on the mailing list for it, I
> have never failed to get an adequate response or step by step
> instructions on how to do something that I have needed to know how to do,
> as an example on one of my old macintosh LCII's running NetBSD, the
> ethernet card just would not work, one of the people on the list took the
> time to work on writing custom drivers for my particular card
> (unsuccessfully, but that's not the point), we corresponded via email
> (cc'ed to the list) for quite sometime, and eventually after repeated
> failures, he had me call the card manufacturer, since I wasn't sure what
> information I was looking for, I gave him the phone number and he called,
> and then went back to work, for 1 person's needs, all this on top of his
> regular full-time job, and he was pumping test drivers out to me
> sometimes as often as once per hour, now that is what I call support.
I am not familiar with exactly what kind of free software you are dealing
with in the above mentioned example, but I think the main difference
between a package like MiniVend and let's say any major free software like
Linux, Apache, Perl etc, lies in its usage and its size.
Linux, Perl and Apache saved the www to be owned by "some one company" and
handed it over "to the people" for use "by the people" independent of where
you come from and how much money you have. Because of that, you find a strong
support for keeping it "open" (to make it the better and safer product) and
"no cost" (to be owned and used by the have-nots) and with a generous
mailing list, newsgroup support system.
The same is true for any type of free software which is needed to support
various types of hardware and perl modules which are designed to make many
tasks of sys admin safer and easier or to make it easier usable in the
desktop environment. (KDE/GNOME)
MiniVend could be seen as a free package to save the community of small ISPs
from being taken out of business by "some one larger companies" for e-commerce
services to end-users. And this user base is increasing tremendously.
If it is too complicated to use for those ISPs, it may be, because everything
is in development, Linux, Perl, Apache, almost anything which MiniVend uses to
make it a complete package, plus the MiniVend package itsself including its
docs, all of it is still in development.
It can't be the work of Mike Heins alone to save the package for this purpose.
He offered already a lot.
MiniVend could also be seen as a no-cost "raw package", which needs further
development into an "inexpensive" commercial product to use for business
owners and small companies for their e-commerce needs. Those users are
also out there in big numbers.
That might not be what the small ISPs would like to see, because if
their potential customers can handle their e-commerce needs by
themselves, they loose their customer base.
So, is this a case of a dog biting into his own tail ?
>
> Now, in closing I will say that the responses I have gotten from this
> list and the people on it who have mailed me directly have been excellent
> and I would like to see it remain that way. At the same time I think
> that the docs need to be in as close to 'layman's terms' as possible, and
> I would love to see code examples posted to the list as well.
Wouldn't we all ? 8-)
Anyway, I like MiniVend and if it's just for getting a kick to find
out how it works, so be it. (Just think of it, a person like me would be
able one day to show Mike Heins a new trick with his program ? 8-))
Cheers,
Birgitt Funk
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