Mostly, it’s because I’ve run out of things to say. On one hand, the technology issues I cover are well covered elsewhere. There are some amazingly good blogs out there focused on the use of Drupal and other open source tools. You don’t need to hear from me about the newest web tools – you have ReadWriteWeb and Mashable for that, among others.

On strictly NPTech topics, I can only say “nonprofits should use open source software for better sustainability,” “there’s more to talk about than social media,” and “all nonprofit software should have open APIs,” and “technology won’t save the world,”  and “the nptech world should develop open standards,” and “nonprofits should collaboratively develop software,” so many times. I know that this isn’t falling totally on deaf ears, but some days it does feel that way. And I’m kinda tired and bored of sounding like a broken record, so I will stop rotating now. And besides, the landscape has changed somewhat – in some ways better, in some ways worse.

I’ll still be building websites (and their successors) for the foreseeable future with Drupal, and perhaps with whichever cool, new open source development framework comes next after Drupal becomes irrelevant (it will, eventually). And I’ll be Google+ing (rather than Tweeting, which is mostly for my writing, or Facebooking, which is friends/family) interesting Tech and NPTech topics as they come along and are discussed. And when Google+ stops being relevant, I’ll find the next thing that comes along to share links and ideas and discuss. But for now, and until I change my mind (I like to keep my options open), this blog will be inactive.

Was this blog a success? I don’t know how to answer. Perhaps you can tell me in comments. For a good while, I had a lot of fun doing it. I hope I was at least a little helpful. Those are enough for me.

For the curious (well, OK, it was mostly me who was curious):

There are 409 posts and 922 comments. Since since September 2007 when I started to use analytics, there have been 151,000 ish unique page views, and 106,000ish unique visitors.  The most popular pages are (these are fascinating!):

1. The home page
2. LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org
3. CRM and CMS Integration: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge and NetCommunity
4.  WordPress vs. Drupal… Fight!
5. What is Cloud Computing?

Of course, they suck for completely different reasons, which is part of the frustration. And each have places where they shine. Why can’t there be a nice combination of all three? That would be perfect.

Why Mac OS X sucks:

• Apple is becoming a controlling, closed system, and with the advent of the Apple App store, developers have to go through an approval process to get their apps on the store, there are specific things you can’t include in an app in the store, and there will come a time when most people get their software through the store, so there will be less and less incentive to maintain non-app store versions of software apps
• These days, you can find most kinds of software for the Mac, but there still is a relative paucity of apps in comparison to Windows.

Why Windows sucks:

• Viruses, Trojans and Worms, Oh My!
• Although I have only seen the Blue Screen of Death once in my year of Windows 7 use, there are still inexplicable slow-downs, crashes, and weird problems. And it takes FOREVER to boot, even with Soluto.
• Internet Explorer

Why Linux (in my case Ubuntu) sucks:

• I have to go through arcane (and luckily for me, fairly painless) procedures to get simple things to work (like plugging a headset with a mic into my jack!)
• Hardware manufacturers ignore Linux for the most part
• Most software developers don’t make Linux versions

The only good news I can see is that the operating system is getting less and less relevant. And, on balance, for me, Linux is winning. Now that dropbox and scrivener work on Linux, and I’m moving from Quicken to some online cloudish thing (suggestions?), I can pretty much leave Windows behind. (Oh, there is still Netflix. Sigh.)

Software:

• WordPress – you already know it and love it. I use it for this blog, only. I used to have two blogs on WP – this blog and my personal blog, but I moved my personal (and author blog) to Drupal, to integrate it with other stuff I had online.
• Drupal – I use Drupal for my personal blog and also other purposes, like the website for my intentional community. My main personal site will be migrated to Drupal 7 soonish. My main sci-fi author site is already on Drupal.
• Dokuwiki – my woefully neglected and out of date technology wiki is on Dokuwiki. Dokuwiki is a very cool tool. It’s a wiki, but everything is stored in files instead of a database. It makes it quicker, and also much more easily migratable. The annoying part is that it is one more wiki markup to learn (I wish SOMEONE would finally agree to make a wiki markup standard!!)
• In the relatively rare case where I need to use HTML/CSS for web pages (there are a few legacy sites I maintain for friends) I use Bluefish (on Ubuntu.)

What I like most about WordPress is that I don’t really have to do any work to use it, or tweak it. I love how easy it is to use.

I love Drupal for its flexibility – and for my personal stuff, it’s really great to be able to mix and match stuff (like I actually have two different blogs on that site, but it’s really only one blog… Drupal is ace at that sort of thing.) I keep debating about whether or not to migrate this blog to Drupal. Stay tuned.

Hosting:

All of my personal stuff is on Dreamhost. I say this with some hesitation. I have hosted with Dreamhost since 2007. They are worker-owned, pretty green, and their newsletters are quite humorous. They give free accounts to nonprofits. Their service has improved over the years, but they ultimately aren’t all that reliable. They have downtimes (a really bad one recently,) Drupal often barfs on Dreamhost during admin tasks, and you can’t run Rails apps reliably at all. I’m going to spend the spring and summer migrating all of my domains (there are plenty!) to a VPS on Linode (this will be my chance to play with IPv6, too. I already use Linode as a development server.)

My other core tool is a console window. In Linux, I use the generic version. For Windows, I use SecureCRT, which is well worth the $ since putty is not up to the task (I know, it’s open source, which is great. But it just doesn’t cut it if you need to use it pretty much all day every day with multiple servers.) My text editor of choice is Emacs. Yes. Emacs.

For Windows, I love Notepad++, a sweet open source text editor.

I like Eclipse as an IDE, its awesome. I think it’s better than the proprietary Komodo, but that’s just me, I’m sure people beg to differ.

Other core tools are git for version control and github for code sharing. I haven’t found a GUI git client I like, so I just use the command line. IRC and Pastebin rock my world for getting help in troubleshooting problems, and IRC is great just for chilling with other developers.

(If you want to look at my Social Source Commons toolbox, it’s here. It’s not so up to date, and it’s a list more of tools I have used, and some I still use.)

The center of my workflow, like for most consultants, is email. I’ve used a variety of email clients of one sort or another over time, and I have recently just decided to ditch them, and use gmail exclusively. I have definitely noticed that I’ve been migrating a lot of functionality of things that I do to web-based apps of one type or another, and this is one example of that. I use Canned Responses to provide HTML signatures when needed, and also forward all of my mail to gmail, then send out mail as other identities. (I’ve learned how to circumvent that annoying thing of “Sent on behalf of” in gmail – use the SMTP of the email alias you’re using.)

What’s also very close to the center is my project management tool, Redmine. (I’m actually now using a very recent fork of Redmine, called Chiliproject.)  I’ve waxed on about this tool ever since I’ve found it, and I would love to challenge a loyal Basecamp user to a point-by-point comparison of the two tools. I think it knocks Basecamp right out of the water. It’s core is a very powerful and flexible ticket tracker, but it includes all of the important project management features you want and need, milestones, time tracking, wikis, file repository, even discussion boards, and it connects with version control repositories. It works for multiple projects. And, it’s open source, and isn’t even that hard to get set up and running.

Another important tool, which I use in my personal life as well as consulting life, is Evernote. Evernote rocks my world. The web interface is great, as is the desktop application (which I use cross-platform – the Windows version works great with WINE). I also access Evernote on my Android phone. It’s a great tool. I use it for to do lists, stuff like blogging calendars, and also the Chrome Evernote extension allows for clipping of whole web pages, which I love (there is a Firefox extension as well.)

A tool I’ve recently come to adore is Passpack. It is an awesome web-based password management tool for teams. I love the collaboration features. For sharing files, as well as providing solid file backup, I use Dropbox (it even works on Linux!)

And, like all consultants, workflow involves documents and spreadsheets, and for that I mostly use LibreOffice, although sometimes using Google Docs makes sense for collaboration. I use Google Reader for RSS feeds, and TweetDeck, or, more recently, HootSuite for Twitter (I really like the tabbed interface of HootSuite. It makes looking at the variety of lists I have a lot easier.)

Now, I already know my audience is different, but that seems, well remarkably different. In the last month, 3,743 visits came from Google, and 43 came from Bing.

And I thought “aha! So I haven’t been paying attention to Bing in my SEO efforts – that must be the problem!” So I did some benchmarking. No, that wasn’t the problem. In fact, in general for the set of phrases I used for benchmarking, Bing more often had me higher up in the results than Google!

Things that make you go hmmmmm….

Here are my stats:

Here are the stats from Statcounter:

It’s a bit hard to see, but my stats have IE as third, where as the Statcounter stats have IE as out front, by a fair bit. Also, my stats have Chrome in 2nd place, and they have Chrome in 3rd, even with Safari, and a fair bit below Firefox.

This falls into the category of “things that make you go hmmmmm…”  Although in some ways, it makes sense, given that my audience is much more tech-savvy than the audiences of most websites.

(For instance, my personal site, that gets much less traffic, and is likely a less techy crowd, has stats much more similar to Statcounter than this blog.)

So, anyway, way to go readers, making Firefox first! And for those 37 of you who visited this year using IE6, shame on you. Be nice to web developers and ditch IE 6, please?

I’ll start with the bad. A mistake I see very often in RFPs is an imbalance in what is articulated in the RFP, and the kind of work that is required to pull off what’s needed. Let me give an example: An RFP for a new website has 2 pages describing in detail needs provided by any modern CMS (web based WYSIWYG editing, drop down menus, new pages easily added, contact forms, etc.) and then a phrase dropped in like “integration with our CRM,” or “event management system,” without any detail as to what these things really mean (like, what is the CRM and what kind of integration is needed, etc.) This invites a world of hurt, as you can imagine. Kind of like the sound made when the Man from Mars starts eating guitars in the Blondie song.

Then there is the ugly. The mistake that organizations most often make is that they have a five- or six-figure imagination, and a four-figure budget.

So what’s the good? What makes a good RFP?

• Do your homework: know what kinds of software options available to build the kind of system you want, and know what their capabilities are, and how much it generally costs to implement those basic capabilities. Learn about how hard customization of those platforms are (some are much easier than others.)
• Understand that integration of most any two different systems is going to be four times as hard as you think, cost at least three times as much, and will do 1/2 of what you expect or want.
• Hire a strategic consultant who really understands technology and the technological details of what you are looking for to help you figure out whether or not you can afford what you really want, and how best to articulate those needs in an RFP. Even an hour or two of their time will save you money and headaches. Someone who is a developer or who has been one in the past is a good bet.
• Read this slide deck by Gunner of Aspiration!!

I’ll write a series of posts, and cover the following topics:

• Desktop software (OS, Office Suites, browsers, utility software, and other good stuff.)
• Comparisons of open source vs. proprietary development environments (i.e. PHP vs. .NET and that sort of thing.)
• CMS
• Non-profit CRM (including “SaaS” in the proprietary camp)
• CRM/ERP more generally
• Document Management
• Other web applications
• Open Source Communities, and how they have changed (and not)

I don’t know what order I’ll write about these things – I guess just as the mood strikes me.

Sometimes, change happens when we’re not looking for it, or we don’t really want it. Sometimes changes that we don’t want lead us to places that make more sense for us. This is one of those times.

I’ve been struggling with health issues (life-altering, but not life-threatening, thankfully) for almost 6 months. They have led me to make a significant change in my work life. I have decided to step out of co-running OpenIssue, a business that I helped start more than 2 years ago, so that I can work part-time, to get (and stay) healthy.

OpenIssue will continue with its strong team focused entirely on CRM and data (using Salesforce, Convio Common Ground, etc.). I’ll still be working with OpenIssue on odds and ends moving forward.

I’ll be looking for small projects, or being a piece of larger projects. Please feel free to drop me a line, and please read my page about what I’m looking for.