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Web/Tech

Tools I use: Personal Web Presence

by Pearlbear on May 6, 2011

I’ve had a web presence of some sort since way back when most personal URLs looked something like: http://somecollege.edu/~username. In 2002 or so, I ditched HTML for a series of CMS systems for my personal stuff. I started out using the CMS I wrote in Perl, called XINA. (Those were the days.)  Anyway, that was then, and this is now. Here’s what I use.

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  • Dokuwiki – my woefully neglected and out of date technology wiki is on Dokuwiki.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.)

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My Browser Stats

by Pearlbear on March 6, 2011

I was looking at my Google Analytics report for this blog, and came across an interesting thing. The browser share of those visiting my site, and the North America browser share from Statcounter.

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?

 

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly RFPs

by Pearlbear on March 3, 2011

In my time working on web development for nonprofit organizations, I’ve seen more RFPs than I can even begin to count. I’ve even written a few. And, especially since I’ve primarily been someone in the role of having to respond to an RFP, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting RFPs that I feel don’t serve either the organization, or the developers well. Here is, in my estimation, the good, bad, and ugly in the realm of RFPs.

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!!

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Last 10 delicious.com links

by Pearlbear on June 21, 2010

Again, a little peak at what I’ve been up to, reading, and thinking about. You can also see what I’ve been reading by looking at my shared items on my google profile.

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The wonders of libcloud

by Pearlbear on July 30, 2009

Here at OpenIssue, we think a lot about the web. I mean, a LOT. And we’ve been thinking a lot about web hosting, and the varied flavors it comes in. We’re working to figure out what makes sense for us to use and implement, and what makes sense for us to recommend to our clients. A while ago, we decided, like many folks, virtual private servers were going to be the preferred hosting set up. Not that it’s right for all organizations – but for many who invest significant dollars into implementation of a website or CiviCRM, the advantages of a VPS will likely outweigh the higher monthly cost.

We started using Slicehost, which was incredibly easy to set up and use, and was acquired by Rackspace, which is considered the premium dedicated server hosting company. I then soon discovered a service called Cloudkick, which allowed us to monitor all of our slices and our clients slices in one dashboard. That was very cool.

It turns out that in the process of creating Cloudkick, the folks there came up with libcloud – a library that service providers could use to give developers access to the services needed by the servers – list, restart, create, destroy, etc. There are now a number of cloud hosting service providers, such as Rackspace cloud servers (used to be Mosso), Slicehost, and Amazon, that are beginning to support libcloud. Libcloud has become it’s own open source project, and is under active development.

Hopefully, this will provide a plethora of options for folks in terms of being able to monitor and manage the varied cloud servers they’ve got going. It certainly has already made our lives a lot easier.

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Links

by Pearlbear on June 2, 2009

As you can tell, I haven’t had much time to blog lately. Here are some great links I’ve come across that I thought were worth sharing:

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New kid on the block: BlackbaudNow

by Pearlbear on April 2, 2009

Blackbaud announced, just in time for AFP, their new product, called BlackbaudNow, in partnership with PayPal. It is a curious service. It is an extremely low-end, low-cost online website/online donation package from a vendor that spends most of its time on the very high-end of the scale.

It is simple. An organization can sign up for a free account, get a 5 page website, including a donation page, about page, etc. Editing a page is basically point and click – it highlights the part of the page you can edit it, and you edit it with a WYSIWYG editor. It’s decently AJAXy, but no, it’s not shiny – at least not my definition of shiny. You have a small number of templates to choose from (which, frankly, aren’t so great looking – I think they dedicated more graphic design time to their branding and pages than they did to the templates.) It’s free, although Blackbaud takes a percentage off the top. People can donate to your organization via Paypal only, and you can track donations in their very simple interface. You can export your donation history into a CSV file, and you can make your reports into PDFs. There are no APIs.

This was developed by the team that Blackbaud acquired when they acquired eTapestry. And, it’s designed to make migration to eTapestry easy – therein, I suspect, is the key. I’m betting this is a loss-leader – a product designed to get people in the door, and when they are chomping at the bit for more (which they will be in about 2 days after they set up their site,) there is a more costly (and profitable) product waiting right around the bend for them.

Small nonprofits – especially those with few or no staff, are always in a particularly challenging place when it comes to finding the best solution for a web presence and online donations. But I don’t think that a tool like this is going to serve very many nonprofits for very long, given its limitations. Of course, people like me, who make our living building websites, and helping facilitate the web presences of organizations, look askance at tools like this, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I have to admit that this seems to me a bit too much like a gateway drug – get them hooked on free, then move them slowly but surely to much more expensive systems. And in the end, won’t a modest investment  (say, $2K or so) on the part of an organization in getting a better web presence going to serve them better in the long run? Heck, I think a WordPress.com site attached to a Network for Good donation page will serve them better. At least they’ll have a lot more well-designed templates to choose from, and a real CMS engine.

Honestly, I’m underwhelmed by this service, and, in addition, I have a bone to pick with Blackbaud. The online help for BlackbaudNow is powered by the open source software MediaWiki. It is well hidden, but a somewhat savvy MediaWiki user will notice the telltale signs (the URLs are one giveaway.) Of course, proprietary software makers use open source software all the time, that’s not the problem. The problem I have is that they hid it. Why hide the fact that they are using an open source tool to build their online documentation? Not even a small mention on the About page. Did they do any modification to the code to make it work like they wanted to? Did they contribute anything back to the MediaWiki community? At the very least, they could have given credit where credit is due.

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We want video!

by Pearlbear on December 5, 2008

YouTube is everywhere – you see videos as a common part of websites, and almost everyone has an internet connection with high enough bandwidth to play video. This means that a lot of nonprofits are interested in having video on their sites.

So what does it take, and what considerations should you think about as you embark on adding video to your site?

First, it is almost always a mistake to upload a video to your website without thinking about the ramifications, both in terms of bandwidth, as well as performance. If you have a standard hosting account, or even a VPS (Virtual Private Server) do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to make sure you won’t end up with sticker shock at the end of the month.

Video is very bandwidth intensive. It is not at all difficult to overshoot your bandwidth limitations on your hosting account with one short video on your home page. A client of mine put a short video on their home page after election day, and we had to take it down a week later, or else they would have started to have to pay for extra bandwidth. Take your average traffic for the page you’ll add the video on, and multiply by the size of the video. For instance, if you have a 3MB video, and you get 1,000 visits per day on that page, that’s potentially using 3,000 MB (3 GB) of bandwidth (of course, most people won’t play through the entire video, etc. but that’s the place to start.) And 3 GB of bandwidth for a month will exceed the bandwidth limits of many virtual hosting plans. In terms of performance, lots of people streaming a video from your website can bring a webserver to its knees. If that video is more popular than you expected, you may end up paying for it, both literally and figuratively.

What about putting it somewhere else? YouTube is the easy answer. Google pays the hosting costs, you get easily embeddable video that can be viral, and you can drive traffic from YouTube to your site. But what if it’s not a public video (perhaps you want to provide video for your members only, for instance) or you want to stream live, or use a different format than flash? There are a number of services you can pay for. StreamGuys and Limelight Networks are two examples of companies that can provide that sort of service for you.

Putting video on your website takes both strategic thinking (why are we doing this? What are the goals?) as well as tactical, technical thinking (what’s the best way to get this video to the eyeballs that we want to see it?)

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Drupal and Postgresql

by Pearlbear on November 22, 2008

A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at groups.drupal.org, thinking I’d pick up some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with “Drupal for Good” and “Drupalchix”) was the PostgreSQL group.

Yesterday, in my RSS feed, this post showed up. It was the suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support from the Drupal core.

I was always aware that Drupal supported PostgreSQL, and I didn’t really have any plans to use it. And there are varied opinions as to it’s usefulness (which I beg to differ on.) But as a long time lover of PostgreSQL, I couldn’t let this drop. And, I’d been looking for a good solid project to get me going in Drupal, so it looks like I found it. So I’ve adopted it.

But, it turns out that with Drupal 7 (the development branch) it’s virtually impossible to install Drupal, and even though I did wrangle an install (all of the right tables seem to show up in the database), it doesn’t actually work, and I can’t yet figure out why. I don’t yet really grok the structure of Drupal, so it feels like sorting through spagetti right now.

There are several core modules with PostgreSQL problems in Drupal 6, so I might actually go back and work on those first, before I can think about tackling what’s wrong with install.php and PostgreSQL.

Drupal Themeing, and other projects

by Pearlbear on November 13, 2008

I’m learning Drupal bit by bit – one of the first tasks was to learn how to make a new theme. It’s one of those things which is actually fairly straightforward-seeming … until you hit a snag. And then it’s opaque.

One thing I learned is that it is incredibly sensitive to typos. One space accidentally inserted between the “<?” and the “php” led to a completely blank page. Ah well. I’m certainly learning what mistakes can lead to what kinds of issues, which is good. Eventually that becomes second nature.

But, in any event, by the end of an hour or so of hacking, I’d turned a template that I found online at Open Web Design into a Drupal template. I felt accomplished! I’m going to do a few more, and see how sophisticated with it I can get.

One thing I ran into (and haven’t been able to solve yet) is that it’s not easy to have navigation that requires more than just the standard <ul><li> tags. Adding <span> tags, for instance (which makes possible some more interesting looking navigation buttons) seems, at least at first, far from trivial.

I’m making a list of little(ish) projects that I want to do – sort of like problems I think I want to know how to solve.

  • Drupal and google docs single sign on. There is already a SSO Module for Drupal 5.x, and someone submitted a patch for it, but it’s still up for review. I’d also have to cough up $50/year to get a google account that has the SSO API, but it might be worth it.
  • Drupal sidebar connecting with the NPR API – perhaps to provide a targeted news stream?
  • Doing a google map mashup of data in Drupal
  • Working with getting flickr photostreams to show in Drupal

I’m still looking for a good project to try out in Cake. Unfortunately, the module Drake, which is meant to be a bridge allowing you to run Cake applications within Drupal, seems moribund. There is only a development snapshot for the 5.x branch, and no one seems to be picking it up for 6.x. Sigh. There is, for sure, another whole blog entry about Drupal modules.

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