One year without MS Office (offtopic)

It has been about a year since I used MS Office applications on my laptop. No, I didn't set on a year-long office-deprived journey on purpose. I just did not have a use for it! Although I still have MS Office installed on my laptop, because there was no way to get a decent laptop from Dell without one, I have never opened Outlook, Word or Excel. All my spreadsheets are done online on Google Documents, all my email is in online mail services such as GMail hosted and Zimbra, and for documents I use OpenOffice. I am happy to say, I do not miss waiting nervously for several minutes while Outlook is launching (that's on 2 Ghz/2Gb Core Duo machine)! I do not miss Excel's lousy window management, and most of all I do not miss having to carry around a jumpdrive with all the documents that I need to access from different machines and fearing that I will loose it! I do not miss spending a day on reinstalling, reactivating MS Office and resetting all the preferences every time I reinstall the OS or get a new machine! Goodbye bulky software, hello SAaS (Software As a Service)!

Should I be writing to the blog to up the traffic?

Well, I haven't had time to look at Google analytics for my online store since May. It's a shame, but yes, for the last 4 months I did not track the performance of the website. So, I decided to catch up with the analytics and examined at the graphs. To my surprise, I noticed that in the last month I had more traffic spikes then before. So, I started looking for the events that may have caused the spikes and they correlated 100% with posting to this blog and submiting the posts to digg. Duh! I guess, I have just discovered one of the basic axioms of webmarketing that all professional web marketers know by heart. But hey, I am just a software engineer with a hobby of creating online businesses! Digg it up readers!

Other online CG stores are quick to follow Exchange3D.com

It has only been days after I added YouTube previews to exchange3d.com and 3DExport.com has added this feature too, although AFAIK, mine looks better ;)

Selling animated 3D models online

Way too often I have customers ask me whether a model is animated or is suitable for animation, whether certain parts of a model are rigged, etc. In some cases, this is not a straightforward question to answer. Now that we have video previews, it is easier for a customer to determine whether a model is good for animation and what parts of it are movable. Another great 3D artist shows his 3D models in a YouTube video. Now, as you look at this 3D model of a Transformer robot-car (Lamborghini Gallardo to be exact) there is no doubts that it is rigged for animation, and you can see that everything moves in this 3D transformer.

Switching from DOJO to YUI

Thanks so much to Yahoo! for publishing their YUI library. I have been using Dojo in order to add some AJAX to Exchange3D.com website. Dojo generally worked, but boy, it is heavy and buggy! The best thing about dojo was that it could create dojo objects from existing HTML markup, which allows me to make search engine friendly pages and use AJAX at the same time. But now that YUI is available, I am switching everything to YUI. It is much faster, and much lighter, although it does not have as many features as Dojo.

Youtube video ad for Exchange3D.com

Check this out, one of our artists made a YouTube ad for his new model with reference to our online store where you can buy 3D models.
Click to Watch

Another happy customer

Isn't it a wonderful for a small business owner to start the day with receiving an email like this:

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thnx for your wonderful support!!!
we are not used to that!

thnx we will be back.

greetings from marc and ralph
of the netherlands
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made my day so far :)