Internet Business Applications

JP asked us to include two examples of Application Programming Interfaces in our Websites.

API #1 - PayPal Button

I included a PayPal button on The MBA Podcast website. To do that I had to go to my PayPal account and get the HTML code for Donations. When a user clicks on the button they go to the payment form and just decide how much they want to donate. As of today, I got donations from as low as $1 to a max of $20:

API #2 - Feed Content

On my personal blog, I included the HTML code given by FeedBurner for my podcast. So any time I upload a new episode, it will automatically display on my blog:

This assignment was all about showing an XML file in a nice user friendly way. I basically followed the instructions on the w3schools website.

The Real Simple Sindication (RSS) file for my MBA Podcast is actually an XML file. Here are the first lines of the file:

Then for each audio item, here is what is included:

So I had to create a stylesheet podcaststyle.xsl to tell the web browser how I want the content to display. Here is my style sheet:

So there were some new lines of code that I had to add / change in my files. First, in my Podcast.xml file I had to insert a line pointing to the XSLT style sheet file:

?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="podcaststyle.xsl"?

Then I had to edit the podcaststyle.xsl to indicate how I want the data to be displayed. For example, the following lines:

xsl:for-each select="rss/channel/item"

xsl:value-of select="title"

xsl:value-of select="description"

xsl:value-of select="pubDate" 

are telling the browser that for each item inside my XML feed, I want to display the Title, Description and Publish Date.

Here is the final result:

With the first donations that I got for my podcast, I decided to buy some domain names:

The first one I took was www.mbapodcast.net for only $4.95 in a promotion by NetFirms. Unfortunately, the domain name mbapodcast.com is already taken... I did write to the guy who owns the domain but he asked me $1,000 for it!!!

So I decided to apply my money better and bought 2 more domain names for $20:

www.usfmbapodcast.com & www.thembapodcast.com.

The good thing is that I'm doing pretty well in Google. For example, if you search for "mba podcast", here is the result:

Number 3 in almost 2 million hits? Not bad for something created less than 1 month ago, right?

I think it's worthwhile to listen to what the VC who backed PayPal had to say about SaaS & Open Source when he was asked about the main areas for future growth:

SaaS.mp3

You can listen to the whole interview with William here.

I know that the most important thing of a Podcast is the Audio file itself. But I also think it is a good option to have a website where listeners can refer to if they need to find out more about one specific speaker.

One of the things that I really like is to go and check which countries are visiting my website. Here is a current list:

To track my visitors, I am using a free hit counter called GOSTATS.

This assignment was all about comparing two similar Software as a Service (SaaS) products. Since I always buy my books for school either at Amazon or Ebay, I decided to compare both.

The Use Cases is a method where you try to write the requirements for the perfect solution:

This is my conclusion of plus and minus of both alternatives:

In terms of conclusions, even though none of the above solutions are perfect, my choice would go to Amazon. The main reasons are:

• I am still able to sell my International Editions
• I know how much I am going to get for the sale.
• And very important, I don’t pay any insertion fees!!!

JP asked us to look for an OpenSource solution that we might be interested on. Of course, my goal is to create a Podcast so I searched for a solution at www.sourceforge.net. I was surprised to find out that there is actually a Plug-In for WordPress targeted at Podcasters. The name? PODPRESS (PODcast + wordPRESS: very original, right?). So I just downloaded it and activated it.

Here is the site where you can get PodPress (for free, of course!):

http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/#download

Here is the link for instructions on how to install PodPress:

http://podcasterswiki.com/index.php?title=PodPress_Documentation

And finally, the usual PrintScreen:

There is no reason to post the instructions for installing WordPress since this page has very good step by step installation guidelines:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Detailed_Instructions

As always, here is a PrintScreen of WordPress running on my Virtual Machine:

I started working a bit on the content for my website: PODCASTS! My first ever podcast was with JP, of course. We had a great talk about Technology in general with a particular focus on Open Source software and how an MBA can take advantage of the free software and tools available on the Internet.

You can listen to it here:

 http://usfmbapodcast.com/2006/10/06/1-jp-allen-professor-university-of-san-francisco/

Here are the messages that I got when I tried to use one PC in Malloy Hall's computer lab:

Is USF using piracy copies of Windows XP?