English 
Italiano 
It has long been known that visual informations may help in exposing and understanding concepts. They could clarify the wording besides, or even suggest unexpected interpretations, as remarked on instantshift and by David McCandless on TED.
The WordPress developer’s universe is continuosly expanding and the quality of the latest community releases, as the Bravenewcode vs. Jakob Nielsen case demonstrates, are capable of competing at the same level of professional products, which often cannot rely on the same ease of use.
The WP E-Commerce extension plugin disclosed infinite possibilities for turning a blog into a full featured online shopping site.
To improve User Experience, add new functions and simplify the checkout process, while solving some issues of the originary 3.8 version, I’ve made:
- a “Buy Now” button compatible with the PayPal Express payment method (not only Standard), checking whether user registration is required to proceed
- a new Paypal Express merchant gateway, capable of transmitting a detailed product list and automatically pre-filling some form fields
UPDATE: since version 3.8.3, the WPEC plugin implements a Paypal Express payment gateway updated to API version 71 and to many of the features introduced by me. However some further improvements are still possible, such as pre-filling forms in Paypal with data submitted to the site, or a detailed list of items in the payment receipts.
paypal-express.merchant.zip
Take a look to the additional patches and fixes that I made available to the WPEC community on the official support forums
It’s finally time for a roundup of the social networks that marked the evolution to Web 2.0 and radically shaped the Internet with new services and applications.
According to latest news, Twitter is reported to have overrun MySpace by gaining the 3rd position in the ranking of the most popular social network sites, leaded by Facebook and Windows Live in undisputed 2nd place.
This is not simply competition in a rapidly moving market, but the result of a more general trend in the transformation of the Internet.
The overcome of Web 2.0 has been the crucial point of a progressive expansion of the world wide web: as long as networks and bandwith kept growing, other services such as Usenet newsgroups and IRC chat (based on specific technologies and protocols) were cannibalized.
On the other hand, this undoubtedly encouraged a huge mass of new users to sign in: even the Facebook’s secret recipe relied after all on standardization, as this factor already constituted the formula for success of blogging.
The Facebook user model provides above all an online ID, in a common and almost fixed framework, at least visually, so tight to retain the range of individual variations within a strong reference to context.
