April 2010

Quoting IT: Organizational Change and IT

"The fact is, however, that major IT projects are inevitably going to be about business change, and the two have to go hand in hand. As it continues its steady evolution, IT becomes less and less about individual products, languages or whatever, and more about getting things to work together."

-Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics, Organisational Change and IT: More than a bar-room conversation?, The Register, April 28, 2010

Blogging Live: Tim O'Reilly at DrupalCon 2010

Tim O'Reilly is the Tuesday keynote speaker at DrupalCon 2010. His talk was on open source in the cloud era. I had some WiFi issues that slowed my typing down so I've embedded the his slide presentation at the end of this post.

2:30 PM: What is wrong with government? "We need to do more than shake the vending machine." O'Reilly is giving examples of people doing things themselves. Do it yourself on a civic scale...the heart of Gov 2.0. Drupal is an example of do it yourself spirit. O'Reilly's putting Drupal back into the speech on how people come together to build something better.

Blogging Live: Buytaert on The State of Drupal in 2010

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead, will give his bi-annual State of Drupal talk in the beginning of DrupalCon SF, where he’ll discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss Drupal 7, usability, the Drupal.org redesign, and other developments to Drupal.

CMS Report is here live at Drupal Con and we'll be blogging about the presentation as we hear it.

Edited: Video from the keynote speech has also been embedded at the end of this post. This video can also be found at archive.org.

This road leads to DrupalCon

I spent Sunday flying to San Francisco for this year's DrupalCon. Attending this Drupal conference is a first for me. For the past few years. I've wanted to attend the conference but either personal or professional distractions came up that prevented me from attending the conference. This year is my year for DrupalCon and I'm anxious to get to know the Drupal community better than I have in the past.

Tikiwiki Announces Tiki 5.0 Beta

The Beta release of the latest generation of Tiki CMS/Groupware is now available. This 5.0 Beta includes many new features and functionality, including:

  • New themes (skins)
  • Many fixes and updates
  • Beta release of Tiki workspaces
  • Beta release of shopping cart and payments

Tiki Community members are encouraged to download and explore this new release. You can obtain the Beta (as well as all other Tiki releases) from http://tiki.org/download. For information on this and future Tiki plans, see http://dev.tiki.org/roadmap.

About Tiki

Saying goodbye to "Like that Idea"

Five years ago, my wife and I had a dream. Together, we wanted to start a blog called "Like that Idea" and so we registered the domain LikethatIdea.com. The idea for the WordPress blog was to have a site where we could identify and review neat ideas which we thought others would like to read about. The ideas came in the form of products, books, movies, services, and interesting article that we read ourselves. In the end though, we ran out of ideas to write about and the site never really took off.

By the time many of you read this post, Like that Idea will be never more. I'm currently working on wiping the site off the server. It's time to say goodbye to one of the few joint Internet projects that my wife and I worked on together. Instead, we'll use the time to work on our own personal projects as well as working jointly on the biggest project of our lifetime, our family.

Below the fold is a post I couldn't help but transfer from LikethatIdea.com over to this site. Thinking back at this moment in time still puts a smile on my face.

Seeking a cure for information overload

This week I have been thinking a lot about how poorly we manage data and information. The quality of the data and the lack of needed data has historically been an issue at work. We have focused a lot of our time on data mining but never really recognized that one day there would be too much data and information for our staff to sift through. Recently, our managers proposed two new data sources for the operational staff to review and I decided that it was time to hit the panic button that we're currently giving out more information to our workers than they can handle.

When a business presents too much information to their staff it is a lot like catching deer in your headlights. If the deer is too overwhelmed to run and you don't steer the car out of the way then no good can come to both car and deer. This is where I think we are at work and we're needing to slow things down a bit to give both driver and deer time to think about their next move. For the moment at least, I'm personally at a lost on how best to solve our issues with information overload.

WordPress.tv: SEO Analysis Video

I usually stay clear of search engine optimization (SEO) discussions, but I think this video is worth your time. In the video, Corey Eulas teaches SEO tips, tricks, and best practices found to increase traffic from search engines. This talk includes examples with a look “under the hood” of a few actual sites owned by members of the audience. You will "discover how to enhance user experience and usability while making your site more search engine friendly".

New Version: MODx Evolution 1.0.3

This past week, the MODx Team released an update of their MODx Evolution CMS, version 1.0.3. This update is a security, bugfix and enhancement release.

The MODx Team considers Evolution 1.0.3 a mandatory update for all MODx Evolution users as it closes some potential vectors that could lead to security compromises with prior MODx releases.

MODx Evolution 1.0.3 also offers more than 45 bugfixes including fixes for IE8 compatibility and the Manager Datepicker and more than 20 enhancements or improvements including adding Templates and TVs capability for custom installer builds, a better organized context menu, core add-on and language updates—all to make the MODx experience better for developers and users.