Gabriel Harper's Blog

This huge list of 76 script directories took several hours to compile, but it’s a goldmine for anyone selling online software. This is one mega list of script directories that let you submit your PHP scripts, turnkey scripts, and other website scripts. Most are free, some are paid or offer paid options. Some of these script sites get tons of traffic. Getting your products listed on the right script directories pays off.

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I use a lot of different software in my job, but there are five software tools in particular that I can do nearly all of my Web development with. The best part is they are allcompletely free applications. You can download and install everything you need to be up and coding in under 30 minutes.

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TinyMCE is a free WYSIWYG editor with two visual components – themes and skins. TinyMCE themes are very complex to customize but you can make your own TinyMCE theme. If you just want to customize the look & feel a little bit, you’re better off creating a TinyMCE skin.

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I’ll admit this is one project I wasn’t even aware of. The Wordpress blog just mentioned the sister project BuddyPress, which takes the WP architecture to a new level with a complete social networking platform.

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There are thousands of free scripts to speed up development. Established PHP frameworks and JavaScript libraries abound. It’s expensive to reinvent the wheel, and pointless besides. But when is it legal to use free code in your commercial apps, and how will it affect your project?

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What is XMLHttpRequest? The XMLHttpRequest object enables client-server requests in JavaScript. If you’re writing Ajax enabled scripts, fetching remote data in a Firefox extension, or pulling data from another URL in any JavaScript app then XMLHttpRequest is needed.

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This is a completely portable PHP script that fetches similar threads from a vBulletin forum. It does not require global.php or any other vBulletin scripts to run. The script uses full score matching, and supports search engine friendly URLs made by vBSEO and other custom formats.

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This is a simple way to add social Web icons to vBulletin posts that link to a member’s social networking profiles like Digg, Facebook, etc. You can easily add custom user profile fields from vBulletin Admin CP that let users add their profile URLs in their User CP. For your convenience I also zipped up 19 social Web icons that you can download for your vBulletin forum.

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Here are the steps I took to create a new theme for TinyMCE 3.x. It isn’t very hard to do, but the documentation is extremely out of date. You can tweak these all you want, but if you want to make a custom TinyMCE theme there isn’t much available.

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Here’s a huge list of free forums to sell your Website scripts. Make sure you register and read the rules of each forum. Perfect for selling your custom PHP apps and turnkey scripts to other Webmasters. It is very up to date since I recently compiled and edited the entire list.

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A practical guide written in a technical style, Edward Hasted’s Software That Sells is more about software and less about selling. The book presents a clear overview of running a software company with some useful tips and strategies, but when it comes to marketing tactics it falls short.

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OpenOffice.org is an awesome alternative to Microsoft Office, and it’s completely free. OpenOffice.org matches Microsoft Office on almost every feature that a typical user needs. Unfortunately, it’s still destined for failure. There’s too much “open source” in OpenOffice.org – people don’t want a geek tool, they want a friendly tool. OO is not polished for the typical end-user, and at this rate is destined to always be the underdog.

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Data modeling is the practice of representing data structures and their relationships through conceptual modeling. The benefits of implementing this process during the design phase of your database project include improved data integrity, a more efficient development cycle, a clearer vision of the entities that are being represented in your database, and a powerful visual aid for collaboration and database design.

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