Views of a Modern World

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Software bounty — $50 WordPress event plugin with ics file

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I recently tried out several event plugins for ASDworld to capture some roving office hour events I am holding. The plugin I chose, Event Calendar, was the best of the lot that I tried (I know, I should do a comparative review!). I like the way that I get a crisp per-event post that can hold most of the useful information for each event.

However, I need to get those events back into my Outlook calendar so I can keep track of them and not double-book myself. I described the workaround for that problem in my Anagram post. What I realized in the course of turning to Anagram was that this problem could be easily prevented. If the event plugin also creates an ics file with a download link, not only could I add the events myself, but people looking to attend those events would probably benefit even more from the feature, allowing for greater attendance. That’s a win-win for bloggers and readers.

As with the last WP plugin software bounty:

There are a number of ways that you might address this problem, so there will be no constraints; this means, however, that judging a winner will be more subjective. I will judge finalists and ask a programmer/designer from the Triiibes WP users group to select a winner.

This plugin is a work-for-hire but we’ll agree to a suitable CC license so you have an opportunity to redistribute and even sell.

Software bounty — $100 WordPress self-link plugin

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Reading a recent comment on the WordPress users’ group on Triiibes, I realized that a new user was having a problem that actually does affect me as well. The user complained that he couldn’t figure out how to post a link to a previous post.

Of course, the response is you type the anchor text, switch to a different window/tab, copy the url to clipboard, switch back to post page, click the link icon, paste URL, and hit insert. Bingo! Easy as pie, once you know what it is and that it’s no different from any other link.

But that’s not the heart of the question; it’s that when blogging gurus talk about adding value to your posts by making reasonable intra-blog interlinks, WordPress effectively treats all my existing posts as external.

This bounty, then, is for a small plugin, compatible with WP 2.8+, that would implement some mechanism to make linking to internal posts on the same blog much easier.

There are a number of ways that you might address this problem, so there will be no constraints; this means, however, that judging a winner will be more subjective. I will judge finalists and ask a programmer/designer from the aforementioned triiibes group to select a winner.

This is also a work-for-hire but we’ll agree to a suitable CC license so you have an opportunity to redistribute and even sell.

(Incidentally, the reasons that I want all these bounties to be works for hire are that (a) I’m paying for your work, even if it’s not a full contract rate, and (b) this way, I can be sure to control the rights and allow for greater distribution. Giving a prize and then letting someone keep the results proprietary seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve provided the ideas, so if that’s what you want to do as a programmer, just build it, give appropriate credit, and don’t submit it for an award.)

Software bounty – $100 for comment-spam blacklist tool

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Over on Triiibes, there is a group for wordpress users; the population seems to trend pretty heavily to blogging types, so it’s pretty lively and there’s lots of direct experience with issues.

Someone recently asked about dealing with comment spam in a way that goes beyond the super-awesome akismet plugin for WordPress, which has been 100% effective (no Type I  or Type II errors, at all, across any of my blogs) at identifying comment spam. That’s performance.

In any event, I remembered I’d read an article that talked about modifying .htaccess to block specific IPs.

Jay Tillery, a designer and WP guru, reminded me that WP 2.7 has a nice big field for entering IP addresses to be blocked. It’s on the Settings:Discussion page in your admin screens.

But, unless you’re working your blog all day (in which case you should probably be writing rather than configuring), who wants to cut-and-paste IP addresses from Akismet? I know that I don’t; it’s just an extra step.

So, here’s the latest software bounty project:

Wanted: a WP plugin, compliant with at least WP 2.7, that adds per-item checkboxes in the akismet comment spam review page and, upon the action in the page, such as deleting spam or a separate “blacklist” button, adds the IP addresses to the comment blacklist field in the Settings:Discussion options page.

Feature: allows for a global “blacklist all” option for individual IPs.Reference: When using the Akismet plugin, the IP address for a spam comment is available and even a sortable field.

Reward: $100 for first working version. Submissions to rick@thoughtstorm.com. I will test the plugin myself and then have a colleague confirm the solution is acceptable. All submissions will be recognized here.

Also, the best version of the plugin (which may not be the first) will be sponsored by us to develop and market a “pro” version of the plugin that includes advanced features such as integration with other external blacklists/whitelists, blacklist sharing features, configurable IP block address blacklist rules, or others.

Software Bounty – product classifier tool

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We had a previous investment in an online consumer products retailer. One issue that we were facing in rebuilding (unfortunately) the site’s backend from the bottom-up was re-branding the product line into several market segments that we were going to market through distinct URLs, designs, and strategies. My goal was to do all of that using a single back-end database (since products would fall into more than one segment) and ecommerce platform (since everything would be ordered, stored, and shipped from the same location). We never quite got to the point of finding the right solution; perhaps foolishly, I expected that this was not the first incarnation of the problem and that some boxed solution had all these capabilities.

Under the circumstances, the bounty is $50 for a pointer to a quality program that accomplishes these tasks and a TBD bounty if the response is an offer to build/license the package.

Part I of the project, which  I won’t really define in detail, is a combination web front-end and back-end [ERP/ecommerce] software package that meets the general description above. We would like the system to be easily extensible to running additional unrelated sites (i.e., we really want a platform rather than just an application. My current guess on how this might work is that it will be a mySQL-compatible database “layer” that will update with the ERP/ecommerce layers every 10 or 15 minutes, and all the website generation will come out of the database layer.

Part II of the project is a tool that makes it easier to classify a variety of products according to various categories relevant to the database.

The interaction results in classification and organization of products in the inventory. The products need to be classified under different dimensions with option of additional filters/labels/tags. To do this, the system needs to allow a customer sales representative (CSR) to set the classification for the products, preferably in a visual, checkbox/radio button format, enabling matching of descriptions to photo images of the product. After a product is classified the page can display the next product to be classified. The system will also allow the CSR to reclassify the product at any time.

To ease the process, it would be helpful to have an option to classify two products simultaneously. The selection of the two products presented for the choice should be random, with some modest preference for those not yet classified. When there are multiple classifications/selections/choices to be made, the alternatives should all be presented on the same page with the same photos.

Finally, we would like to consider evaluating different/alternate photos for each product to get an opinion of preference. This is similar to an internal version of the A/B test protocol (which, needless to say, should be part of the underlying ecommerce system).

Questions and answers from previous discussions:

Will the classification be hierarchical and if hierarchical to how many levels? — the primary classification is one of forced choice between two products, choosing which is more appropriate for some classification, such as which of these two products is more appropriate for a man or woman. The other classification tasks are really more like editing product details, and so they don’t really have the forced choice component.

Do the CSRs need any login page? — the login page should be part of the pre-existing security for the database, so this is not part of this specific project. Also, we would like to eventually make this classifying/rating task available to customers, tracked, analyzed, and presented separately.

Do you also need to know who did the classification for a product? — No, this is not important for the CSRs. If we undertake the customer implementation, we would probably consider tracking raters and responses to improve recommendations and market research.

Link: Here is a page from Amazon that describes similar functions, the “Customers Compare” feature:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=cm_a2a_dp_vot_whats_this/103-1548962-5547031?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200141170