When you go to a really cool website and want to contact the person or company who runs it, what is your most preferred method? Email, instant message, social media (Twitter, Facebook), or via the contact form? Either one is good, but for most people contact form would probably the most convenient one.

Few web developers hesitate to include one because they think it will take too much time or effort to make it work, specially if they do not have any server-side programming basics. That is no longer the case, these tools will help you build nice contact form for any project quickly:

Contactable

Contactable is a jQuery plugin designed to make contact/feedback forms simpler and more accessible. This plugin will enable you to create a contact form on any page of a site with minimal effort. I also made a small modification of this great plugin to appear on the right side of the page instead the left, you can check it here.

Wufoo

Wufoo is one of the easiest form builder around. It helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code. Its free account is more than enough to create basic online forms, but you can easily upgrade to premium plans to fit your needs.

pForm

Similar with Wufoo, pForm comes with an online form builder with simple interface that will help you build forms of any kind. Integration with your existing web page might be a bit more complicated than Wufoo, but still more simple than building a custom form yourself.

MachForm

MachForm is developed by the same company as pForm. It is the server installable version. You have more options like: receive submission and save to database, send entries to email, send autoresponder email, validate inputs, and lot more.

Interspire Shopping Cart (ISC) is one of the best self-hosted e-commerce system in the market. It has most of the features that you will ever need. Another big plus with ISC is it is still actively developed. Interspire regularly releases minor updates every few months to fix some bugs and a major one in 6-12 months.

One inconvenient thing that might prevent you to do an update immediately is it cannot auto-update (WordPress style), so you need to manually reupload the necessary files. Official documentation from Interspire to upgrade your ISC installation can be found here.

Following the instructions there is the safest method for sure. But if you do not have the super fast connection via FTP to your server, overwriting the files one by one might take at least a few hours. So I tried to find with a faster way with the help of SSH. Let’s start.

Preparation

Make sure you have done the followings:

1. Backup your store’s database and files.
2. Read the changelog.txt file from the latest update to know which template files that need to be updated.
3. If you changed or customized the system files, you might want to reprogrammed some of the files first.

Step 1: Rename your current ISC folder

By default, the store folder is named ‘shoppingcart’. You can rename it to ‘shoppingcart-old’. If it is on your root folder, you can create a new folder and move everything there.

Step 2: Upload and unzip the update file

You can use FTP to do this. Then using SSH, unzip the file:

unzip Interspire_Shopping_Cart_(Edition)-5.x.x.zip

The folder can be renamed after unzipped.

Step 3: Copy product images folder

This folder contains all the product images that you have uploaded, so it is very important to keep it intact. First you need to rename the ‘product_images’ folder from the new system folder. Then go to your old store folder and copy the ‘product_images’ folder:

cp -r product_images ../shoppingcart/

Step 4: Copy the template folder (if you use custom theme)

Go to ‘templates’ subfolder, find your custom template name:

cp -r CustomThemeFolder ../../shoppingcart/templates/

Step 5: Finalize the upgrade

From here, ISC upgrade script will take care of the rest. Just open your ISC admin URL, then it will do the database upgrade and all necessary steps.

Done.

Either you work in creative or multimedia industry, you probably want to showcase your work online. If not, then I suggest you to. You usually get discouraged when you need to set up the website for it, you would feel that you need to spend a lot of money to have someone to build or design it for you. That is if you are not familiar with web development.

Luckily many free or premium applications are now available for you to choose to quickly create your online portfolio and resume, with easy-to-use interface to manage and regularly update them. Here is a shortlist of ones that I found to be really nice and are packed with features that you will mostly need:

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is one of the most popular online portfolio services with many features. You can create a free account for up to 5 projects with 35 images. Whoo! pro plan is available for $12/month, where you get 50 projects with up to 500 hi-res images and 10 high quality videos.

Coroflot

Coroflot is focused for creative industry with a very active job board. Based on their About page, it is hosting portfolios of over 150,000 creative professionals and students.

Raveal

Raveal is another one that you can consider. It is oriented on the social media and search engines parts to make your names easily heard by the rest of the world. Its Free plan gives 100MB of storage, while the Professional plan provides 1GB storage with some additional features.

Need more functions or different look? Then installing WordPress with a theme optimized for portfolio might be the best and easiest solution. I will save that for different post.