2011 is turning out to be a pretty busy year and I’ve got some updates to mention in just about every area of my life.
It all starts from the same point: we’re having a second little girl later this year. She’s due in mid-August.
I naively thought that two babies wouldn’t be much more work than one. I’m already wrong.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get a better handle on our business over at OSTraining.com. Since the launch early last years, things have been growing faster than my ability to analyze and understand it.
It’s been a pretty sobering experience so far and I ended up experiencing some pretty eye-opening problems with all the tools out there?
First, I realised once and for all that the major payment gateways are really living in the 1990s when it comes to their websites. We use PayPal and Authorize.net for payments and “wow!”, they do not make it easy to do any analysis. GaragePay helped us to get the data into a usable format from PayPal (thanks to Kyle from PixelPraise for that suggestion) but I’ve not found a good tool yet for Authorize.
Continue reading “Any good CRMs or ERPs for Online Businesses?”
I’ve been on record here saying that Open Source project should focus on learning from one another rather than competing.
So it’s been interesting to see the Drupal community talking about commercial modules this week. It’s very similar to the discussion that took place in the Joomla community during 2007 and 2008. Back then I wrote a post detailing the experience of some friends and colleagues called “Hitting the Open Source Wall“.
Earlier this week an eerily similar post started the conversation in Drupal: Is it Evil to Ask For Payment?. You can follow some of the debate by following the #drupalappstore hashtag on Twitter.
Continue reading “The Open Source Wall Revisited: Drupal and Commercial Modules”
“Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
Yo Mos, what’s gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We (are) Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?”
Continue reading “New Years Resolution Challenge (with thanks to Mos Def)”
This post has been a long time coming … like almost everything on my blog these days 🙂
It’s a rant of sorts and a little over the top, but it sums up what I’ve been thinking for a while.
During 2010, I’ve listened to presentations and read blogs and tweets where people have been talking about other Open Source projects as their rivals. The attitude manifests itself with comments like this:
This has been going on in all directions: between Drupal and Joomla, WordPress and Drupal and also Joomla and WordPress.
I think this attitude is misguided and here’s why:
Continue reading “10 Reasons Other Open Source Projects Are Not Your Enemy”
It’s been far too long since I blogged.
I’ve got a few good excuses such as a baby, a business, a book, the OSM board and almost weekly trips around the U.S. However, I’ve also got a few good topics stored up, so expect more posts in the coming weeks.
First up, some thoughts on Molajo which is the shaping up to be the first widely-marketed Joomla distribution. Joomla’s had few distros before such as Non-Profit Soapbox and the pre-packaged installs put out by template clubs and extensions like Virtuemart. However, those were never really presented as distributions and that’s what the Molajo folk are aiming for. They’re expressly aiming to replicate Drupal’s success with distros. I’ve spend about 50% of my time this year in the Drupal world, so I’ve a few thoughts on their pros and cons:
This might be the most expensive blog post I’ve ever written, but here goes …
This week I was talking to a developer who sells open source products and their attitude was that they fight even single customer refund request..
I was pretty shocked – we always, always give refunds. Over at Open Source Training you can get a full refund at any point during your membership – any point, even 5 months and 30 days into a 6 month membership.
I told the developer that we’d write up a list of our reasons to see if he was convinced:
A few weeks back I made a deliberately provocative post entitled “Even WordPress Usability Sucks” and ended with the suggestion that Joomla form a Usability team. It looks like one is starting to roll.
Congrats to Kyle from Joomlapraise, Chris from JoomlaJunkie and the others in the Joomla UX group on people.joomla.org for getting this started. Here’s how you can help:
1) Join the people.joomla.org group and get involved.
2) Reply to Kyle’s post today with an initial set of areas to work on.
3) Check out Marco Barbosa’s Minima template. He’s been working in this area for several months now and trying to imagine what the Joomla 1.7 admin area might look like. You can test his prototype at: http://marcobarbosa.com/minima/administrator/ Login with demo / demo. Leave feedback here.
Wonderfully smart readers … I need to pick your brains.
We’ve been using Pingdom for years to track our sites. I love it. When sites go down it sends out an automatic email, SMS and even a message via an iPhone app.
When our servers go down, we know.
However, that’s not the same thing as saying when our sites go down, we know.
This weekend a site was hit by a session error and that bought the site down. All a visitor could see was a MySQL error and the message “please repair the database”. Because the server was still responding, Pingdom thought the site was up and so didn’t tell us about the problem.
Any ideas on how we can get around this? How can we get notified even when our server is active but our site is throwing out errors?
We’ve been to over 50 cities in North America from Anchorage in Alaska to Miami in Florida.
There aren’t many places left on the list of place we’d like to teach. There’s Hawaii of course (we very nearly had a client invite us there) and Puerto Rico too.
However, there is one gaping hole in our U.S. coverage … Boston.
No longer. Next week we’ll be in downtown Boston teaching Joomla and Drupal for 2 days each.
What’s even better is that I’ll be teaching with the wonderful Jen Kramer. If you don’t know who Jen is you will shortly. She’s a mainstay of the Joomla world:
Jen is a senior faculty member at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, teaching courses and workshops in web site design and management, including Joomla. She has also previously taught at Champlain College, the Community College of Vermont, and the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Jen is a Lynda.com author for the titles “Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates”, “Joomla! Advanced CSS” and more. Her first book, “Joomla! Start to Finish” was published by Wrox Press/Wiley in January 2010.
Continue reading “We’re Bringing Joomla and Drupal to Boston”
One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed.
I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve’s readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.
Out of all the blog posts I’ve read this year, one has stuck in my mind more than any other: Why [the] open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems. He takes on Drupal and KickApps for their lack of usability and then moves on to WordPress.
He’s right. Even WordPress usability sucks. It’s generally regarded as the best of the Open Source projects in terms of usability, but even it sucks.