Why do Apple laptop upgrades cost 200% more than Dell’s?

Erm… economies of scale might have something to do with it, perhaps?

CNet only manages to touch on that in their conclusion…

So why so pricey, Apple? Less buying power? Greed? Good business sense?

…whereas it perhaps should’ve been the focus.

A quick googleage would’ve uncovered that in the 3rd quarter of 2007, Apple sold 1.1 million Mac units in the US. Dell sold 5 million PC units in that period. I’m going on the assumption the difference is similar on the worldwide scale, but perhaps it’s not. Dell’s worldwide figures might be much larger in comparison.

In any case, if I’m buying 1 million items from you, it seems likely I’m going to get a much larger discount than someone who’s only purchasing around a fifth of that amount. Which might account for at least a percentage of the difference. It might not as well, but surely the possibility invites more than 3 words in a conclusion…?

I’ve decided to release 1.1.0 of YAK for Wordpress as an “experimental” version. It hasn’t been fully tested yet, but enough people are hanging out for some of the features that I hope a few early adopters might kindly help out with the process.

1.1.0-exp includes features from the not (publically) released 1.0.4:

1. Add new non-unique order id
2. Move javascript on cart off page and into separate script. split javascript into generic and admin specific files — to stop problems with (missing) jquery on the wp pages.
3. Add warning message for people with session.auto_start turned on.
4. Integrate YAK back into the WordPress menu structure. The top-level menu was a nice idea, but it’s inconsistent with all other plugins (plus isn’t recommended, according to the WP devs). You can now get to YAK’s options through Settings->Yak, and to Orders/Products/Sales Reports from the Manage menu.
5. Fix PHP4 problem with the view products screen

Along with a few additional features:

1. Add https support
2. Add first cut of Google Checkout integration.
3. Tidy up setting payment types (drop downs now rather than input boxes). Add setting of a credit card landing page.
4. Add support for tags with square brackets [ ]. The html-comment version of tags will be removed in an upcoming release

Google support is minimal so far. It’s one-way integration at the moment (allowing customers to submit an order through Google Checkout) — with no automated return path for handling purchase. That will come with a later release.

These updates hopefully make configuration a lot more user-friendly — particularly the changes to the Payment Types. Note that if you decide to upgrade, please make sure you backup your installation, and you double-check all your configuration options after upgrading.

YAK version 1.1.0-experimental can be downloaded from the WordPress Extend site.

I’m now charging for support of YAK for WordPress. Basically for anything that can’t be handled via a few messages on the General Discussion page or on the Bugs page.

The main reason for this change is that I can’t justify (particularly to the family) the amount of time I spend both on development and bug fixing, AND on the volume of support requests I get (at times).

See the new Support page for more information.

It appears the only one who’s lost contact with reality is the NZ finance minister…

On one hand:

In particular, households are being squeezed by higher fuel prices since the budget, he said. Gasoline prices have surged 14 percent the past three months

and then on the other:

…workers needed to be aware of the outlook for the economy when they made wage claims… …Wage expectations in the public sector haven’t caught up with the changing economic environment. Some have lost a bit of contact with reality.

The word that jumps to mind starts with T and ends with WIT.

A recent file rearrangement on my server resulted in all the links for “Snake Wrangling for Kids” breaking.

The problem is fixed now, and the zip files should be accessible again.

As a matter of interest, just searched on Google for “wordpress shopping cart” to see how far down the list YAK turned up. Surprisingly, it’s on the first page. Well, the bottom of the first page, but it is the first page.

Cool geek-out moment!

YAK 1.0.3d has been released (the WordPress plugin page hasn’t updated yet, but the files are currently available from Sourceforge).

Please backup your existing installation before upgrading. Deactivate, remove the current yak-for-wordpress directory, then copy the new version into the plugins dir and re-activate. You’ll need to double-check the configuration settings, because many input boxes have changed to drop-down selects (for category and page selection for example… see below). This upgrade will also require you to go through your products and set the price in the “YAK Product Details” tab (see point 5 in the changes below) — the custom fields are no longer required.

This release includes the following bug fixes:

1. Problem with table creation.
2. Country options not saving properly.
3. Fix an odd problem with globals.
4. The return URL appears to be broken with PayPal IPN. PDT works fine, but IPN seems to wind up back at the home page of the blog. Added a fix to cleanup the order from the shopping cart when this happens.

And the following changes:

1. Frank Malina’s new look-and-feel.
2. French translation (provided by Charles Dixon-Spain).
3. Change money format and currency format to be simpler drop down boxes.
4. Change the download url from the settings screen so it is now an override (i.e. optional).
5. Add new data input on the post/page edit screen for yak price and title (replacing the old method of using custom fields).
6. Remove the “Auto Set Price” option (doesn’t make a huge amount of sense now).
7. Fix the Auto Set Quantity so it works with selected categories.
8. Tidy up the stylesheet.
9. Add a hidden link to the checkout and to the buy button form — vain hope that this might drive more search engine traffic to the YAK plugin page — if you don’t want the link included, it can be switched off on the Basic settings page.
10. Change the product category (settings page) from an input box to a dropdown.
11. Change the redirect on buy (setting page) from an input box to a dropdown.
12. Change the return and cancel urls on the PayPal settings page to a dropdown so you can select a page rather than having to type a url.

The latest YAK release is slightly delayed because I’ve, thus far, been completely unable to test PayPal integration.

First problem: The return URL doesn’t appear to work (cancel return URL works fine). PayPal keeps sending me back to the index page of my test site.

Second problem: When trying to save the Website Payment Preferences (in PayPal Profile) I get a “Page Not Found” error. So there’s no way to change between IPN and PDT. This has been broken now for at least 5 days.

If anyone is using YAK and PayPal and is willing (and able) to test both IPN and PDT integration, please let me know. Worst case scenario, I’ll release this version as unstable, and wait for PayPal to fix their problems…

UPDATE: Problem solved. PayPal have updated their site, but this has somehow corrupted old test accounts. Deleting the old account and creating a new one fixes the problem.

Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a WordPress Community group on LinkedIn.

Or, possibly, there are dozens. There’s no way to tell since LinkedIn’s Group directory isn’t open and also isn’t searchable. Unless you’re lucky enough to find the relevant group on someone’s profile, you’re stuck with creating your own.

So that’s what I’ve done. If anyone is interested in joining, the invitation link is in the groups section of my profile.

And let’s hope LinkedIn develops a really good ratification process for merging millions of one-member groups…

It’s been over 2 years since I released YAK for WordPress (6th of March, 2006 according to Sourceforge), and the forthcoming release finally starts to tidy up a few loose ends. It was always a bit hacky — from a user interface perspective, that is — and 1.0.3 sorts out a few of the most obvious problems (this is not to say it’ll be perfect, of course).

YAK has always represented a reasonably significant investment in time. I don’t put a huge amount of effort into development now that it’s hit the 1.0 release, but popularity brings an inevitable increase in the number of calls for support.
Family commitments mean that I have less time available — or at the very least, it’s harder to justify spending the time. The obvious answer, suggested by a couple of people, is to commercialise (at least in part) the plugin.

There are plenty of open source projects which have at least a small commercial component. And plenty more which are mainly commercial, but release unsupported open source versions. An example of the former are projects which have paid-for documentation. An example of the latter would be something like JBoss or MySQL, which release community and enterprise versions of their apps — the enterprise version, rather obviously, providing commercial support.

So this brings me to a question: where to, with a semi-commercial version of YAK?

There are a few options on the table:

1. Reduce the detail of the online documentation and release a paid-for installation manual.
2. Release a supported, commercial version of the plugin with the latest features, and the open source version (with those features) would follow a few months later (only the commercial version would be supported).
3. Per-request charge for support, perhaps based upon the time taken.

What do you think? Any better ideas?