This week I'm peddling store fixtures and any merchandise I had left. It wasn't much, but it's still way too much to store at the house. Sorting into piles. Keep this. Throw this out. Sell this to some other music store. And the final scary category (quite large) - who can I find to take this away?

Anybody need bookshelves? A desk? A Crate half stack?

 

The random CD player has been dishing out some psychedalia this morning. Sergeant Pepper. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. An era gone by. Good backdrop for closing day.  

At issue is whether the U.S. Government has the right to examine electronic databases of public corporations. Specifically, all of Google's search records for a [classified] week. Oh, and a million more records for good measure. Unfortunately, the legal precedent for this action has already been well established. The government can, and ultimately it will.

Whether or not this decision is publically acceptable is another issue. It is not a legal issue. Whether or not this concerns you sort of depends on what kinds of things you usually search for online.  Are you the kind of person who looks up the prices of ipods and rock-n-roll memorabilia? Or the more inquisitive type - say for instance doing high-resolution flyovers of the Tajikistan border, and researching Islamic history? How about searching the web for collimators and gas centrifuge auctions?

There are folks like me who do all of the above... But to steal a quote [Scott McNealy] "You've already lost your privacy. Get over it".

The CMS quest, continued...

Since Drupal is out of the running for my preferred CMS environment, I've still been looking at all the others. I've installed and setup probably around fourty of these things so far. Nucleus and Blog:CMS are derived from one of the original LAMP  public domain scripts.  This collection of scripts is probably at the heart of a vast majority of the CMS software in existence and has been extended and hacked into entire families of content systems. Nucleus is one of the more primitive of the lot, and hence more configurable.  Blog:CMS  is more of a value-derived unit and adds enough  external modules to make it almost useful.  Both turn out to be a great framework for multi-blogging; however they're single category systems. Multiple category references requires a plugin. They work OK, but to get 'em right you've got to install and trust a whole lot of external modules.

So I went back to cmsmatrix.org and plugged in all the things I'm looking for. XMLRPC. Events. Multi-Blog. Community. Forums. Feeds. Built-in (not plugin) HTML editor. CSS based themes. A few other things. Got back about twenty hits. Out of a couple of hundred possibilities. Looked at every one. None that I have already evaluated were even on the list.

Commercial licenses are out. I still need to do some work on this software to get it to do what I ultimately want, so it needs a clean and extensible interface free of license restrictions. That knocked the field down to six.

Gak. Plugins. Look I want plugins, but I don't want to plugin the whole meat and potatoes of a working site. 

One was in German. Really nicely done, except that even though it's easy to translate the site into any language, the source code is in German. Sigh... Another one down.

That left two. Next one was in French. OK, then what's left? Tikiwiki. Now that's amusing. The perfect development environment for my needs turns out to be a wiki portal. But it makes sense. Wikis are documentation engines usually used by tech writers and librarians. People who write for a living - organized into communities. Creation, categorization, and referencing content are implicit.

Tiki also has the social aspects built in. Buddy lists and avatars. Built-in automatic defenses against spam invaders. Personalized themes and pages. About the only thing that I find it necessary to change right away is that it looks, uhm, like a wiki - no matter which of the supplied 30-40 CSS skins you put on it. An over-abundance of teeny font sizes and dotted lines. In its favor the code itself is readable and not abstracted to obscurity, and the style sheets are clean CSS, not "php over CSS".

Contrast that with the other systems, which are written by and for software geeks. Either to make money, or as collections of freelance module developers trying to add on enough features to make the thing work. They're programming communities, producing algorithms and metaphors and features. Wikis are writing communities, producing documentation.  Which do you think makes the better document managing system? Duh!

I'm now looking at next weekend as the last day for the business. The 21st to be exact. That will give me a little over a week after that to empty out the store fixtures and clean it all up.

Might work out about right. I find it amazing that people are still buying stuff. There's not much left to buy. But they're getting desperate. They feel that they have to buy something. OK. How about a broken guitar strap? One dollar. Need a flute case? They don't have a flute. But they buy the case anyway because it's cheap.

I've really started getting disgusted at all this. If these folks had all been here a month ago I wouldn't be closing this business down. But they're mindless robots, driven by cheap stuff. They aren't customers. Right now I'm beating Internet prices. I'm beating everybody's prices. Hence I've got a full house of mindless shopping automatons buying junk for pennies on the dollar. If I was still trying to make a buck, the store wouldn't have a soul in it.

I've had several real honest to goodness loyal customers stop by in the last couple of weeks as well. Chat about the old days and I try and let them know the closest places to buy the things that they'll be needing. Some of them I'm really going to miss.

My quest for the perfect development CMS continues. Drupal seemed like a good choice before, but it has issues. It's fairly easy to create a full-featured multi-user website, but the background application is fairly unstable, and the security sub-system is ridiculously complex. Complexity in a security module, bad.

So I lined up a few more to try. E107, which has almost the right features. Not quite. Geeklog turned out to be a nice option. Security is its strong point. However not so easily extensible, and it still doesn't have everything I'm looking for. I tried about ten other CMS packages that aren't memorable at all. Then I tried out the king of the hill. Typo3. It's extremely well done. The code is impeccably clean. Written for professional content developers. Consequently, it's very difficult to use.

Maybe I'll haveta' write my own...

So I open the city's weekly newspaper this morning, and there I am playing guitar on the front page. Wow. Big news I guess that the old music store on Castro Street is closing. The reporter repeated everything I said in confidence. Never trust a darn reporter. But still, it was a nice piece and gave a historical perspective.

If you want to know why the store is closing, you can pretty much find out why by reading these archives.  

The selection is getting real thin now. Don't think I have any more book 1 of anything (always the first to go). Lots of Volume 2's and 3's.  Vast expanse of display case is empty now. Those have to go as well. Only a couple more weeks to go.

Yvent.org is the domain for my new venture. I don't yet have a website set up, but I'll pull in one of my CMS packages in the next few days.


Yvent.org is dedicated to extending RSS and ATOM to support event information, such as calendar events. This has to be done, and nobody is doing it. Those that are doing it are doing it wrong. So it looks like I've gotta' be the one to evangelize doing it right... Sigh...

The best way to describe this work is be defining what it is not. It is not mod_event, which was an initial foray into providing event info over RSS1.0. That was done in RDF, and not complete enough to be useful.

It also is not hCalendar micro-formats. Imagine parsing HTML embedded in XML. Really. Yukko.

It also is not iCal. Microsoft invented iCal and it isn't XML and it's not suitable for the modern age.

It also is not 'iCal in RDF'. Somebody actually wrote a spec for this.

What it is - is event information in everyday information feeds, made easy enough that any kid can implement it. This is what led to the success of RSS  in the first place.

I'll be writing an RFC. But so as not to step on any toes, I think it should have it's own space. Maybe I'll just refer to it as  ERSS. That's enough for now. I'll write more as this starts to materialize.

...a thousand words

Suppose I should close out the year with a report on the state of the music store. The decision to close turns out to be the best thing I've ever done - to boost sales. Go figure.

In a little over a week, I've turned in record sales highs most every day. I've got two! acoustic guitars left. One is left handed. The rest are gone. A few electrics left. Zero band instruments. OK, one tenor sax. The shop is looking bare. I thought I had about four or five months of inventory and would be stuck with tons of stuff at the end. Instead I might run out of stuff to sell before January is out. Folks are grabbing up stuff that has been sitting here for years. No questions asked. The yellow clarinet. The bugle. The timbales. The orange Gretsch. All the inventory that I was starting to think of as store fixtures than sale items. Stuff I've marked down to nosebleed prices so many times that they look like price tag pin-cushions.

Wish I could've had sales like this when I was making a few cents profit. With all the money I've wasted on advertising, it's also curious that people are mobbing the store from almost the entire south bay. Lined up outside the door. Nobody has heard of the place, nobody has seen my advertisements, but they have all found out in less than a week that a music store is closing down.

I've learned more about retail in the last week than I did in the last four years when I was actually practicing it.