Bryan Ruby

Yesterday, Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that Acquia has released the next generation of Mollom, the Mollom Content Moderation Platform. The new Mollom platform is being billed by Acquia as the "first cloud content moderation platform built for the enterprise". Mollom is capable of reducing the time that’s required to moderate large volumes of user-generated content. Personally having used Mollom to assist me in moderating user content for small to medium sites, I would think the need for something like Mollom is even greater for enterprises with an even larger web presence.

DotNetNuke (DNN) has announced a social software solution aimed at optimizing customer engagement and loyalty through online communities. DNN Social gives businesses the ability to easily create and manage communities on their existing websites, giving end-users a one-stop destination for consuming content, exchanging ideas and interacting with other community members.

Sitting on my desktop the past few weeks has been an eBook from the Aluent Group, Drupal and Joomla!: A Comparison of Project Processes and Costs. I probably would have not read this eBook if it wasn't for an acquaintance of mine, Justin Kerr, letting me know that he was a co-author of the book. I'm lucky to have read the book because I think Justin Kerr as well as co-authors Robert Nowak and Jet Pixel have hit a home run in their review and comparison of Drupal and Joomla.

If you have ever hosted your website on a server or virtual private server then chances are pretty high you once did or currently are using cPanel. cPanel is a graphical web-based control panel that helps site owners and administrators to quickly and easily manage their website and hosting account. It's an awesome tool that interfaces with your server to help you perform once difficult tasks such as creating databases, manage website files, as well as setting up email accounts. Unfortunately, hackers broke into a proxy server used by cPanel, Inc's technical support department and now there are concerns that a trojan may have spread onto your server.

While Twitter remain my social network of choice, I've struggled over the years with Facebook. For me personally, there is something about Facebook that has rubbed me the wrong way. Facebook's user interface has always felt "cluttered" to me and the addition of "social advertisement" this past year hasn't helped win me over either. More importantly, the seemingly never ending changes to both Facebook's privacy policy and privacy tools has left me very uncomfortable. These days, I'm only on Facebook because my closest friends are on Facebook. In short, with Facebook I feel like I'm a hostage as it may be the only way I keep close ties with friends unwilling to try Twitter or Google+.

"Disk encryption, which encrypts every bit of data on a hard drive, is a good additional level of defense. However, unless biometric or smart-card authentication is used on the device, it is simply one more password for a hacker or thief to crack."

 - Greg Crowe, "After theft, NASA orders laptops encrypted, but is that enough?", GCN.com, November 16, 2012

Thanks to Blend Interactive's Corey Vilhauer, I was reminded via an email blast that this is the last day to register for the Now What? Conference at the "early bird" price. This one-day conference is designed to help anyone who works with a website post-launch answer the question, “How do we keep our website useful and relevant?” The conference was created to help bring together web and marketing professionals from across the region to hear from some of today’s leaders in web project management, web governance, and content strategy while talking shop with colleagues and speakers.

Recently, the fine folks at CMS-Connected gave me the opportunity to become a periodic guest for the CMS in the Spotlight segment of their show. CMS-Connected is an hour-long monthly news webcast that focuses on the content management industry. For the January show we had Joomla! in the spotlight, but once we went live I soon found myself challenged to adequately cover the CMS given short period of time and format.

Update: A recording of January's show can now be found on the CMS-Connected site. Also, a continued video discussion on Joomla! can be found here at CMS Report.

Brett Profitt recently posted on the Elgg Blog that Elgg 1.8.12 has been released. Elgg is an open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments. Elgg can be found in a number of settings from campus wide social network to internal collaborative platform for small and large organizations alike.

Elgg 1.8.12 has been released with numerous bugfixes and improvements. Enhancements in this release of Elgg include: