Looks like the open source content management system, Mambo, has had a split among its developers, resulting in a fork of the code. Here is a nice summary from Enter Content Here: Mambo, Joomla
This kind of split is one of the risks of open source projects. I think it can also be a healthy, long-term, survival mechanism as well although it certainly adds some chaos in the short run.
The Opera web browser is now available for free without embedded advertising. From the site:
Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal.
Hey, how about that. An actually competitive browser market has returned with more than 2 free options. Welcome back to the mid-to-late-90s!
Associations often make their online dues payment processes hard to navigate for their members. Given that dues still form a significant chunk of any association’s revenue, it’s shocking how hard some of them make it for their members to give them money. These five tips focus on how to make your online dues payment system ridiculously easy in order to gather as much dues online as possible.
The point of all these tips is to make it as easy as possible for your members to do the one action your renewal notice should spur: paying dues.
Here is a nifty web app: tRuTag
I’ve created tRuTag with Ruby because I wanted to explore tagging. What it does is create an html page of your tags on various sites and then allows you to explore them on other sites.
I use it as my homepage and have just implemented some of it’s functionlity on my Ruby on Rails site. Below is a sample page. Please view the readme or download tRuTag and enjoy!
It requires Ruby on Rails to run. I’ll probably try to get this set up on my laptop this weekend.
(Via O’Reilly Radar.)
One of my more geekly habits is to track up and coming technologies for the web. Ruby on Rails is a relatively new development framework that focuses on allowing rapid prototyping of database-driven web applications. Here is a nice post on how RoR can scale up under heavy load.
Bonus link: a 15 minute video on how to create a weblog system in RoR in considerably less than 15 minutes. Assuming you know RoR inside and out, of course.
Synergy is an open source tool that allows you to use one monitor and keyboard for multiple computers. You switch between the computers by simply moving your mouse off the side of you current screen. It even works across several operating systems, so you can quickly switch from your Linux desktop to a Windows box for example. Wow!
With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor.”
Ben asks for more tech content (while comparing me to Darth Vader) and I deliver! 🙂
I made a few changes to the technology and hosting for my site as I re-did the design and content for my consulting biz. Here is an overview of the changes.
Content Management
I am using the latest version of WordPress to power the entire site. Not only can it blog, it can also host static content pages starting with the 1.5 version. I used the static front page plugin to have static introductory text as the home page. I also made a page template that included much of the markup from the main index template in order to move the blog to a /weblog/ subdirectory.
I was a bit torn about moving the blog off the home page but I ultimately decided that it was best to make a clean introduction on the home page for new visitors and regulars could go to the new blog page. This turned out to be a bit tricky to get to work. Drop me a line if you want my code, happy to share it.
Finally, sticking with WP had the added bonus of keeping all my existing RSS feeds in place without a lot of tweaking.
Design
The design for the site is a modified version of the Kubrick template that D. Keith Robinson just slammed today as way too common. I’m crushed but I don’t think I’ll redesign just yet. 🙂 I think it is a very flexible template that can be pretty extensively modified if you want.
The logo was designed by my wife Jennifer. Being married to a graphic designer has its perks.
Hosting
The site is now hosted with Text Drive, a new hosting company that caters to cutting edge open source technology. In fact, when you sign up for an account a significant part of the proceeds go to the open source project of your choice. I dedicated mine to WordPress. As they are a start-up, there are pros and cons. On the pro side they are incredibly responsive and very willing to change and experiment. The con that comes with that is a bit more downtime than usual as they shake out their systems.
So, nothing too extraordinary, except that I was able to rapidly build a new site using open source technology and even an open source design template. If you have comments on the design, content or anything else, please post them to this entry. I’d love to hear the feedback.
Looks like Microsoft is getting around to formally addressing blogging with server-side tools.
How to manage member access to member-only areas of an association’s web site is a common question posted to the ASAE Technology listserv. Since I’ve answered it a few times I thought I would go ahead and post my stock reply here to save some typing in the future. 🙂
Many associations, when they first create a member-only area of their web site, have used a member’s ID number and last name to control access. However, that same information is usually listed on mailing labels and membership cards. This method is very easy to set up, administer and communicate to members. However, having that info on mailing labels is definitely a security risk. The size of the risk really depends upon what they can do with the account once they login. If it’s just to view content (usually the case for early efforts), the risk is relatively low. If it can include e-commerce transactions or editing the members’ data in your association management system (what most associations want to add or expand upon now), then the risk is pretty high. Either way, I think it is smart to move to something more secure.
When I came to ASHA in 2000 we were using the same account number/last name scheme for access and that info was and is on every mailing label and membership card. We then implemented a username/password system that allowed the user to create their own login name and password. Over time, we found many members had problems remembering the login name they had created for themselves. A few years later we migrated to using their e-mail address as their login name which has dramatically reduced support calls for lost user names (many of our members call us instead of using the account help tools on the site). Based on our own experience, I would recommend going with e-mail as the login name. That seems to be the emerging standard around the web for many major sites out there (Amazon being the most notable).
Some gotchas to look out for when using e-mail as the username:
Finally, you will need to associate the login with their account number in some way. You might ask for their member ID number at the time they register or associate the login with their account later through some other process. I strongly suggest automating the process as much as possible while still preventing the same ID number from being associated with more than one login.
Hopefully the above info will help you get a jump start on the design (or redesign) of your web site login system.
C. David Gammel, CAE 