Image released under the Creative Commons by superflexnet on Flickr.

Pixie was always going to be an open source project. Free to own, free to modify. When I first started putting the project together (around five years ago now) I had already committed to the idea. The Internet relies on free and open source software and Pixie had to be part of that. I believed in it, and for the most part I still do.

Without a doubt the project has been a success; on a personal level and for getting toggle off the ground. Pixie was the launch platform for our first year in business, it has been deployed by us on many websites and continues to work flawlessly. On top of that Pixie has been downloaded well over 25,000 times, translated into 18 languages and awarded second place in the Packt open source CMS awards (2009). Pixie has raised our profile and stood its ground against larger projects with more funding, more support and bigger communities.

Its not all good news though and after a few months of reflection at the start of the year we decided it was time to consider stopping the project. My passion for developing the software started to fade towards the end of last year which coincided with a very difficult time for us. Our finances, jobs and business were on a knife edge.

So at the start of April we listed Pixie for sale and so far we have been unsuccessful in finding a buyer. Pixie has not sold because it does not generate (easily measurable) revenue and potential buyers are faced with the challenge of monetising a project that requires time, development and support for the community. These are the same reasons it’s difficult for a young business like ours to invest time on it and when you look at the numbers it makes for a very interesting story:

Help & Support

There are 2824 messages in the forum – if we assume half of those are answers and half are questions that works out to be 1.9 questions per day for the lifespan of the project. Each reply has to be carefully considered and that adds up to a great deal of time. This does not include the personal emails that arrive in my inbox too. The real challenge is that for the project to grow it needs to be supported and realistically that support (at least at the start) needs to be free. This particular problem is one we hope to address with our latest labs project.

Code contributions

The number of downloads is fast approaching 30,000 – out of those people there are only three that I would class as core contributors. That is 0.01% of people giving back to the project and that is not good enough. There are lots of possibilities for why this is: perhaps I could have given the community better tools? maybe lots of people felt it was good enough already? I can only speculate as to why this might have happened but I wish the number was higher.

Financial contributions

In two years we have had three donations to the project (totalling £70). This leads me to the conclusion that people do not appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to run and develop such a project. We need to learn to value the things we do not pay for and/or lower our expectations. We have had some fairly insulting emails for taking our time when replying to support questions or because Pixie did not work as expected. Thankfully that has been a minority of people.

Advertising & Referrals

To try and generate a small and steady income we looked at both advertising and partnerships. None have worked out very well. Our first attempt was to use Google Adsense across the site. After a few months our balance had made it to $30 and when we hit that milestone Google shut our account. The money was gone and there is no appeal procedure to get it back. To this date I am unsure what happened. So we replaced those advert units with ones powered by buysellads.com. To date these adverts have generated us $20 and we are unable to claim this money as it does not hit a threshold amount. That money might never make it to our account.

We also formed a hosting partnership with a company called Arvixe. They pay $70 for each hosting referral we send to them and it started out well. Within a few weeks we had five registrations but we had to wait three months before being paid. As time went on those initial payments disappeared – apparently they cancelled their accounts before we could be paid the referral. Nearly 12 months on and we have only ever had $140 from Arvixe. Referrals no longer show up despite people in the forums claiming they clicked through from the Pixie site.

Last week I removed all advertising from the Pixie site. It is a real shame when open source projects have to turn to advertising to support themselves. I recently switched my laptop to Ubuntu and have been searching around for open source software. Take a look at gimpshop.com – the site is littered with adverts and you can tell by the language and layout that the developer is struggling. As a result the last release was released a very long time ago. I find it strange that we are happy to spend thousands of pounds on Adobe Creative Suite yet so reluctant to drop the developer of an alternative some beer money.

Content creators across the web face this same problem every single day and thankfully a new service has appeared that tries to address the issue. It’s called Flattr and I recommend grabbing an account. We have already created a Flattr button for Pixie (to test the service) and at the end of the month we will be getting a small income from it, likely to be fractions of Euro. But its a great start and beats having tacky adverts littered across the site. You can even Flattr this post… after all, it took weeks to write (I started writing back in March!).

What next?

Collectively we need to get better at collaborating on open source projects. We all have a part to play and we must learn to appreciate the hard work that goes into the projects we take for granted every single day.

Despite what it may read like we remain confident in open source. Open platforms will eventually win (see Google vs Apple) and the future we all want relies on this being the case. We have plans for some smaller projects that we are going to open source in future… actually most of our labs projects will either be open source or support open source projects.

With regards to Pixie I feel we have taken the project as far as we can. We are now trying to decide what the next steps should be. The great thing about open source is that a project can live on regardless of what happens. If you have any ideas we would love to hear them.

Simplicity

2009 was an extremely turbulent time for us. We moved offices twice, and then back to where we started. We took on freelancers and paid work experience students. We talked about expansion, discussed diversifying, discussed focusing on one business area, launched our shop, a new website and the laundry service. All of these were experiments to establish a route forwards. A route that would hopefully afford us some financial security and allow us to continue doing the work we love. It is safe to say we moved away from simplicity in a the hope it would take us somewhere new. It didn’t – but at the same time some of these experiments were essential. We now know what we want, what works (the shop has been a huge success) and what doesn’t (huge overheads and staff). They are important lessons to learn.

Design

2009 was a good year for design. The shop allowed us to experiment with design a great deal. We produce our own packaging and labels as well as getting to make the actual products. We also experimented with print making, book binding and illustration for various projects throughout the year. We would like to do more handmade work – I think our own site illustrations prove that it can be very effective both online and off.

Open Source

Our Open Source efforts continued with Pixie and as a result we were rewarded with a runner up prize for “the most promising Open Source CMS“. That is a massive achievement and puts our little CMS along side some of the greats (WordPress, Drupal etc). Things were not all rosy for Pixie though. In July we received a legal threat from Tech4Learning with regards to a Pixie trademark in the USA. The letter was a “cease and desist” so we decided to ignore it. Our reasons for this are simple; If Tech4Learning would have approached us with a civilised inquiry then a discussion could have taken place about the Pixie name. Instead they took the route of a scared business. One that is afraid of competition. If anyone from Tech4Learning is reading this – we would still be open to a discussion about it.

This year we need to look at ways to monetise our Open Source work – while we love to help, it has proved to be extremely taxing on our time. A decision needs to be made about the future of the Pixie project and we a currently experimenting with ideas. We will keep you posted.

2010

So here we stand at the dawn of 2010 (the year of the flying car! – ha) and its time to make new plans. We want to talk a leaf out of Carl’s (Fellow Creative) book and tip our hat towards transparency and honesty for the coming years. Being open about ideas, plans and money is a good thing. If you know where we stand you can decide if you want to stand with us (or otherwise).

Right now we are in a period of flux as we make changes to the business – both in terms of company structure and how we work. You will notice that Mike is no longer with us as he moves on to start a new business. But no fear, we are not going anywhere, we just want to make sure that whatever we decide to do in 2010 is the right choice for us and our clients. We are in the process of working out our plans and will post back the outcome. Decisions, decisions…

I like to think that the web is an extremely creative place and that the reason for this is the lack of restriction. We are free to say, share and create whatever takes our fancy. This leads to great ideas being shared across the planet in almost real time. Ideas that are life changing. Ideas that are fascinating. Ideas that are controversial. Ideas that are worth spreading.

Image released under the Creative Commons license by eflon on Flickr.

The Digital Economy Bill is a complex beast. It is long. It is boring. And the people responsible for drafting it like it that way. Within its many pages are clauses that will have detrimental effect to the Internet as we know it. The big show stopper is this:

Section 17: Power to amend copyright provisions.

The Secretary of State may by order amend Part 1 or this Part for the purpose of preventing or reducing the infringement of copyright by means of the internet, if it appears to the Secretary of State appropriate to do so having regard to technological developments that have occurred or are likely to occur…

I am no lawyer or politician, but here is my translation: If passed, the Digital Economy Bill will allow the Secretary of State to change copyright law at any time without requiring consent from other members of parliament. These changes can be made under the guise of “reducing copyright infringement on the internet”. That is a big deal.

The Digital Economy Bill is shaped by industry insiders (record companies, copyright bodies) and has been drafted without public opinion. It exists to protect the interests of business and not people. Imagine for one second that laws were created in the same way Wikipedia articles are written. Everyone with Internet access (and everyone should have internet access) could shape the bill and provide feedback. That is a powerful idea and would be an example of true democracy. The Digital Economy Bill is step in the wrong direction. We should be embracing new technology as a way of driving change. Instead we have big industries refusing to to create new business models and putting pressure on the Government as a result. Under this bill these businesses will pressure the Government into shaping copyright law in a way that only benefits them. Ouch.

If toggle chose not support a new super duper web standard, we would probably go out of business. People would say “you should have changed”, “its competition” and “that’s business”. They are right. Based on that same logic the record companies should either change or go out of business. Either way I think the artists (the ones who actually understand creativity) would be better off.

Now is your chance to say and do something about it, we don’t have long:

• Step 1: Read Fellow Creative’s post on the issue. You’ll find an example letter in the comments.
• Step 2: Email your local MP.
• Step 3: Call your local MP.
• Step 4: Attend a Pirate Party UK meetup.
• Step 5: Watch this Ted talk on creativity & copyright.
• Step 6: Add the Twibbon to your Twitter profile – you can use the widget to the right.
• Step 7: Pass/remix/share/talk this message to others.

On the eve of the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, we also have other important issues to address. These two issues are not completely unrelated. We need a platform like the internet to share ideas on tackling climate change. We need to address climate change so the Internet still exists. December 2010 is our chance to make some noise. Lets not miss it.

This is a massive achievement for such a small CMS and I would like to thank everyone who took the time to vote for us. We came joint second with Pligg, while Impress CMS took the top spot. From Packt Publishing:

We are pleased to announce that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.

ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.

Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.

Here’s the distribution of the prize fund for this category:

• ImpressCMS: $2,000
• Pixie: $1,000
• Pligg: $1,000

Thanks again!

Once again we need your help. Voting has started and we are up against some great competition, the final five are:

• ImpressCMS
• Manhali
• Pixie
• Pligg
• Redaxscript

Public votes will be combined with ratings from a panel of Judges with winners announced on November 9. Packt is also giving away an 8GB iPod Touch to three lucky winners chosen randomly from the voting stage. Vote for Pixie »

The ubiquitous iPod has pushed iTunes into the hands of millions, after all if you want to sync media with the iPod or iPhone you don’t have a great deal of choice. My main gripe with iTunes is the fact it tries to control everything. By default it will duplicate every music file you own and attempt to sort them in a way it feels appropriate. Being a designer the neatness of my files matters to me. A lot.

It’s not just that though, iTunes wants to rip my CDs as M4A files – not ideal when all my other tracks are in MP3. I like MP3 files as they play on anything. I feel like every time I use iTunes I have to play with the settings to get it to behave how I expect it to. Finally, what’s with all those arrows and trays that try to sell me tracks I already own?

To be honest I miss Winamp. Back when I was a PC, Winamp was my player of choice. It let me manage my files and watched my perfectly sorted music folders for when I changed or added music. It played every file I threw at it and collapsed into a tiny little music bar that stayed out the way. The skins and the plugins rocked too.

But today I want to talk about Songbird, a player that’s been around for some time but recently caught my attention again. Songbird describes itself as “The Open Music Player” and looks like this:

The unique feature of Songbird is that it’s built around Mozilla technology, essentially it’s Firefox customised for music. That means lots of plugins and themes, but most importantly it can be used as a browser too. One of my favourite music sites is Grooveshark. Grooveshark allows you to play virtually any track instantly, for free via your browser. But what about Spotify? (I hear you cry). Well Spotify is OK, but I don’t like audio adverts and I don’t like having yet another piece of software to listen to music. Spotify is also partly owned by the companies that got it wrong the first time round.

With Songbird I can manage all my local MP3 files and enjoy all those tracks I find online too. I have also installed some great plugins that allow you to manage the songs on your iPod, broadcast messages to Twitter and display lyrics for the current song. The one plugin that would make this setup even better would be integration with Amazon’s MP3 store. As a substitute it does integrate with the 7digital Music Store, however I have yet to try it. I would be interested to hear any feedback on the service.

With Sondbird, Grooveshark and the Amazon MP3 store I feel like the issues facing the music industry have become a problem of the past. Rock on.

If you have found Pixie a useful tool we would really appreciate a vote:

Your votes (for this first stage) must be made by 10th September 2009. Simply click the banner above and fill out the form at the bottom of the site. Thanks :)

With the launch of the toggle design laundry™ service a few months ago we have found we are now generating more reoccuring invoices than ever before. The dates and amounts of these invoices vary from client to client and on top of that we have quite a few hosting invoices to get out each month too. Our plan was to find an Open Source invoicing application that would generate recurring invoices, let us know if any are overdue and allow us to use our own invoice numbers (were picky about these things). It also made sense for this application to be online so we could access it from anywhere and give a login to our accountant if they needed it.

Siwapp

In terms of design this is the most promising of the three systems we tested. The layout is clear and the feature set is spot on for what we needed (although custom invoice numbers were not quite right). One thing that we really liked about it was the running total on the dashboard (seen above). The huge let down at this stage is the installation procedure. The application requires the Symfony framework to run and as a result needs plenty of command line attention and the correct web hosting environment to get it running. Siwapp shows real potential and is worth keeping an eye on.

Simple Invoices

The latest 2009 builds of Simple Invoices feel much better designed that the previous versions but unfortunately the application is still in beta. As a result it feels incomplete and the generated invoices look unprofessional. As a design agency we have always take great care over the presentation of our invoices and it was one of the main reasons we decided not to use Simple Invoices. Once again though it shows the potential to become an excellent tool.

phpBMS

phpBMS is a full featured business management tool featuring calenders, to-do lists, detailed user permissions, sales, products and invoicing. The interface is a little clunky but it feels together and stable. If you are just starting out your business then you may want to consider giving phpBMS a try – for us though all the extra features were overkill.

The winner is?

Having tried out a handful of options we decided to go with a product called The Invoice Machine. In this instance the Open Source options were not polished enough – we felt we needed a product we could trust and rely upon. So far The Invoice Machine has been excellent and the API means we can tie it into other systems if required. It also offers a full data export if we decide to go Open Source in the future.

Due to our office move and new site launch we didn’t get around to making any Open Source recommendations last month. To make up for it we will squeeze in two this month.

So far our recommendations have been desktop focused and primarily for the Mac (we are all Mac users at toggle). The Open Source movement extends way beyond desktop software and the Open Source business model is being adopted in some very unexpected places. Open Source cola, Open Source hardware and more recently an Open Source car.

A shift is occurring in the way we use technology and store our data, the shift is driven by the web and is moving the software we use online. The huge advantage to this is that our data follows us to any device we happen to be using. With this in mind we felt it was time to start looking at some of the best Open Source web applications.

OpenGoo

The sales pitch:

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organisation to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents.

In short, OpenGoo is a strong alternative to Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office on the desktop. What really impresses us with OpenGoo is the amount of features available in the application. OpenGoo allows you to manage:

• Text documents
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

From the looks of it they have more features on the way too. The application is the long lost cousin of ActiveCollab (a now commercial project) that we used to make use of in the early days of toggle. Essentially it is a mashup of many different Open Source projects rolled into one neat package.

We don’t make use of OpenGoo at toggle (yet) – we would need to have mobile access before jumping on board. OpenGoo could also be improved with cleaner interface, especially if our clients are going to be collaborating on documents with us. Playing with the demo we were really impressed and we will certainly be keeping a close eye on the projects future developments.

What makes it great?

If you have ever played with other media center offerings (Front Row, MS Media Center) you were probably let down. Out of the box, certain files wont play and to access web content (iPlayer, Flickr, YouTube) you have to exit the media center application and head for your browser. Boxee pulls it together by not only supporting every file I have thrown at it but by connecting to many web services as well. From one interface I can grab files over the local network, pull in tonnes of web content, download from BitTorrent and even check the weather. The Boxee interface is surprisingly clean and easy to use and the app is also kind enough to fetch film and tv show information from sites like the IMDB. Adding to the excellent experience is a remote control application for iPhone and the recently released Boxee app store which allows you to add extra functionality and content sources.

Boxee is available for Mac, Linux and Windows and requires a Boxee account to download. With your Boxee account you can share your content recommendations with friends on Boxee and other social networks. There is also talk of seeing Boxee ship on standalone hardware (think Apple TV) in future.

For the less technically minded it can be a challenge to get Pixie installed and setup so we thought it might be useful to offer a fully hosted environment which allows new comers to get setup quickly and easily. The package will include hosting, email, a domain name and support. We have not worked out the numbers in terms of cost, bandwidth or storage space as we wanted to gauge your interest first. If it is not too much trouble pop your thoughts into the questionnaire (we will post up the results to the Pixie blog soon).

Fill in the Pixie questionnaire »

On those rare occasion that we do need to make a disk (normally for backups or freebies) the tool of choice has been Toast (at least for the last few years). Toast is a great application but the version we have is three versions out of date and the cost of grabbing new copy cannot really be justified (it is a recession after all!). It was time to go find open source alternative.

Burn

Burn is a beautifully simple application (OSX 10.4+). The interface is uncluttered and making a disc is extremely straight forward. It supports all of the features you would expect: data discs, video discs, audio discs and also copying. We downloaded a copy of Burn a few months ago and they have already released an update… not only is it free and open source, it is also under active development. We cannot find a bad thing to say about this application and suggest you download a copy right now.

Simply Burns

Burn is not the only open source CD writing application we found for Mac, we also found Simply Burns. Unfortunately it does not have all the features of Burn and we had a hard time getting over the clunky interface too. It is worth a mention though as it does show some promise and it is always good to have options.

What is your favourite disc writing application?

Last year we posted up some of our favourite Mac applications, and in that list was Parallels Desktop; a visualisation software that allows you to run Windows as an application on your Mac. Visualisation is an important part of our web development process as we check all of the websites we create on a range of browsers and operating systems. With software like Parallels we can run Linux, Windows and Mac OSX together without the need to constantly reboot or own a bunch of different computers with varying software configurations. Shortly after we had purchased two licenses for Parallels, the software was upgraded to version 4 and over the last 6 months our version has become increasingly unstable. It was time to look for an alternative.

Enter VirtualBox, developed by Sun Microsystems and distributed under the GNU GPL. VirtualBox may not be tricked out with all the eye candy of Parallels but it is extremely stable, fast and in my opinion much easier to use. You will need to make sure you have installed guest additions from the menu within VirtualBox to get the most out of the software. Guest additions makes integration between the two operating systems much more seamless, features included mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest OS window).

From the main VirtualBox window you can easily control the amount of system resource available to each guest operating system, organise snapshots (e.g. revert to a point where Linux still worked before Scott broke it) and install new operating systems. I have both Ubuntu and Windows XP installed so far. VirtualBox even handled running a few games too (for testing purposes of course!).

Overall we are really impressed with the VirtualBox and suggest you give it a try. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.