Tag Archives: Ramblings

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cms for the masses

I love Drupal. What? You haven’t heard of Drupal? Well then, you just don’t know what you’re missing. Drupal is a robust, open source CMS application written in PHP and using MySQL. I’ve played around with Joomla, and it’s pretty cool. But when I had a big project for a real “content management system” I went with Drupal and never looked back.

The original goal of my original project was to come up with some way for multiple users to submit and publish content on a community website. I was in the position to upload and edit multiple PHP pages to make any updates or changes to the website. I figured there should be a better way. That’s where Drupal came in.

I set it up for my son’s school. It was very successful. I handled the administration and the care and feeding of the webserver, and a real marketing pro handled the content part of it. As of tonight we have over 200 registered users and a ton of anonymous users. I’m proud of it.

At work, we have a fine “oral tradition” that our newer employees, (myself included) are having a hard time getting our heads around. I installed Drupal as a way to address this. So far, so good. Many see the value of what I’m trying to do.

Now, add a dash of “social marketing” into the mix. I am a big fan of transparency. I want to lay my cards on the table and let you see what I’m working on, what my team is working on, and help you understand the challenges we face. It would be really great if I could get my team blogging on our departmental Drupal site. I’m not yet convinced they are comfortable with this. As I said in previous posts, opening up the Kimono a little bit can be a little uncomfortable.

What are your thoughts on getting your team to participate in this sort of communication? How would you sell your team on doing this? I realize that this might add some additional overhead to the workday, but I wonder what the ROI is on this sort of PR. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.  How can social martketing help an department within a company?

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lord of the dance

Surely you’ve heard of the Stone Roses.  They had that hit song in the 90’s, “Fool’s Gold.”  Yeah, it was a great song and was over 10 minutes.  Ian Brown was the singer you heard.  He’s great.  He’s been busy since the Stone Roses.  He’s got this song that I can’t get the lines out of my head…

Is it the questions or the answers that’ll lead you to the Lord of the dance?
I admire your style
Love your smile
Cross the street
Is it your destiny or circumstance that leads you to the Lord of the dance?

I’ve been thinking about who, or what is The Lord of the Dance.   And more importantly what is it that exactly leads me there.

Life is funny

Life is funny, because nothing can be as it appears and what happens tomorrow can be something you just don’t expect to happen.  I’ve had great pain in my life and sometime it would have been easy for me just to give up and take the easy way.  Other times, the situation was just something I had to deal with.  It wasn’t something that was going away or change quickly.  I had to learn to take it one day at a time.  You know, I’ve always heard people say that, but now I know what they meant and how to do it.  It saved my life.

But there have also been great and wonderful surprises.  I have meant so many wonderful, cool, interesting people on the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn and one Web2.0 services like Twitter.   I’ve mentioned before how I felt it was best to keep a low profile on the Internet and poo-poo’ed any idea of pulling back the Kimono, so to speak.  But I made the mental leap, and I am so thankful for my online network of friends. Many of these people I have met in person, but many I have not.  I am looking forward to making new friends and contacts and being open with all of them.

Questions and Answers

I used to play a lot of “What if…?” games with myself.  Like the Buddhist teachings, this only added to my misery.

The Four Noble Truths present a formulation of the Buddha´s understanding of the nature of dukkha, or “suffering“[13] , the fundamental cause of all suffering, the escape from suffering, and what effort a person can go to so that they themselves can “attain happiness.”[14]. Roughly put, and on a very basic level of understanding, they state that, firstly, life as we know it ultimately is or leads to “suffering” in one way or the other. That, secondly, the cause of this “suffering” is attachment to, or craving for worldly pleasures of all kinds and clinging to this very existence, our “self” and the things or people we – due to our delusions – deem the cause of our respective happiness or unhappiness. That, thirdly, the “suffering” ends when the craving ends, one is freed from all desires by eliminating the delusions, reaches “Enlightenment”; and that, fourthly, the way to reach that liberated state is by following the path the Buddha has laid out.

I hope I didn’t loose you with that quote.  My point is that instead of sitting around and lamenting why things are they way they are, I could be doing something for myself.  My “enlightenment” happens to be when I play with technology and when I can do something for someone else, be it my work, a friend, a relative, a family member, or a stranger (don’t get me wrong, I got prejudices around strangers, too).  With my new found respect for taking things “one day at a time” if I can do just something every day to better myself or learn something I’ve always wanted to learn, I am making progress.

Destiny or Circumstance

Remember that climber that got trapped and had to hack off his arm to survive? That was a remarkable story.  You can read it, but I heard that guy interviewed.  He didn’t give up, give the terrible circumstances he was in, he made his own destiny; he didn’t give up.  He kept a level head, thought things through, and made some tough choices.  During this time, Outside magazine published an article on people who were “lucky.”  More or less, it said people tend to make their own luck and was back with some studies.  For example, they put a $5 bill on the ground and people just walked by it, no one saw it.  Then, a guy who said he was lucky, walked by and saw the money on the ground.  They suggested that “lucky” people are actually paying more attention to their surroundings than those who were “unlucky,” whether they realize it or not.  I’d like to think that’s how I am, or that’s how I’d like to be.

So, who is the Lord of the Dance?

I think we are our own, “Lord of the Dance.” That is to say, there is a little Lord of the Dance inside of us.  Certainly, there are things we do, choices we make who help define who we are and where we are going.  And sometimes is it really hard… super hard to see the end of the tunnel or to have faith that there is an end to the tunnel, but there is.   And while I still don’t know if it’s the questions and answers or destiny or circumstance that will get me there, (honestly I think it’s both), I’ll know the real Lord of the Dance better;

I am my own Lord of the Dance.

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olympics

I really intended to post my review about my new TomTom tonight, but I’ve been overwhelmed by the olympic’s opening ceremony.  I’ll have to do it another night.

I really enjoyed reading all the Tweets tonight about the open ceremony.  Everyone is so impressed and it was cool reading them in real time, (more or less).  We’re lucky to be watching it in HD and on a 47″ tv.  I am however frustrated by the amount of commercials.  I did see, that someone already posted a torrent of the entire ceremony in HD.  I might need to grab that.

I like how they are calling the U.S. basketball team, “The Redeam Team.”  Chumps.  I read that in Europe, basketball has become huge.  Instead of European basketball players being focused on hot-dogging and endorsements, they are focues on the fundementals, technique, and skill.  We’ll see who wins.  I’m no expert, but I predict the U.S. will get spanked by the Europeans in basketball.

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i feel like a new man

Wow, it’s been a crazy couple of months.  I’ve been settling into my job, (which I am so happy at), I’ve been wrapping up some projects, and I’ve been finishing up with some clients AND trying to develope some new business leads.

My job is going great.  One of the things we were really lacking, (my department) was a robust ticketing system.   Someone suggested RT::Request Tracker.  I had never heard of it before, and I am very impressed.  The best thing, I believe, is that every browser works with it, and works well.  It’s all Perl based so one can grock it fairly quickly.  But it’s also very powerful and configureable. It was a bitch to install it since it required so many Perl modules, but I stuck with it and got it going.

I might have mentioned before that I am a big fan of Drupal.  We set up a departmental portal recently using Drupal.  I like it.  I used Drupal for our son’s school and was very impressed with it:

One of the things I would like to try to promote is the social networking tools like Drupal or Twitter at work.  I would like to have a departmental blog.  I feel it is very important to communicate the work we are doing, (which is nothing short of excellent).  I’m not sure how my reports will feel about it.  We’ll just have to see.  If you got some ideas or thoughts around bring social networking into the office, please let me know.

On the productivity side of things, I’ve been loving Remember the Milk.  They just release a Firefox add-on that integrates with Gmail.  It’s pretty slick and I use it quite a bit.  I see they also released some clients, but I haven’t had a chance to monkey around with them, yet.

I also spent some time tending to my long neglected WordPress installation.  I need to read documentation more closely.  I got my tags issues all straightened out and things are humming along nicely.

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biking to work

Okay, I couldn’t really come up with a fancy or catchy title for this post. But this is great.  It’s actually a dream come true.  It turns out it is really easy for me to bike into my office.  This is an added bonus and I’m so happy about this.

Where we live, we live very near the Silver Comet Trail.  In fact, from my garage to the local access point to the trail is 2.5 miles.  Now, the Silver Comet Trail is cool in its own right, but what’s really cool is that the city of Smyrna, GA has build the “Cumberland Connector.”  Sadly, or suprisingly, there is hardly any info available online about the Cumberland Connector and where it goes.

So, door to door from home to office is going to be just around 10 +/- miles.  That’s totally doable.  So far, I’ve been parking at a grocery store / shopping center which makes my commute about 6.5 miles and I have the option of finishing my morning ride on part of a trail that goes into the Chattahoochie National Forest.  It’s really great.

I have a good friend who has a bike shop right near the trail head of the Silver Comet Trail.

I bought a new set of cycling bibs, (which I highly recommend) and a new bike computer.  So right now, my ride is around 6 miles (as I said) and it takes about 30 minutes to ride in.  And I typically burn 480 – 640 calories, (remember, I’m a big fan of hear rate moniters, HRM’s).

As I mentioned, it’s been hard to find any good resources online, but I did find a nice PDF that explains the new and proposed trails in the area.  I’ll include it here in case it helps you.

trails-in-cobb-cumberland-galleria-area-2007

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life is good

It still hasn’t really sunk in yet.  I am still in a state of disbelief.  Oh sure, maybe it’s because it is something new or maybe the romance hasn”t worn off yet… whatever it is, I am happy.

I got a new job.

I started last week and it’s been a great experience so far.  The environment it very pleasant, the culture fits me fine, and the people I work with are really great.

While my new role doesn’t have anything to do with social marketing, there is a lot of networking that goes on.  I’m not saying there are back room deals afoot, more so it is good to have friends and allies in high places.

Other good things are that I now am rocking a new MBP.  I got Parallels, and I am installing CentOS (this minute) under Parallels to try to run some proof of concept type of things.  I am glad I kept my skills sharp and learned many new things while I was between jobs.

As I said, life is good… and this post is lame.  I hadn’t posted much in a little while.  I was trying to keep it quiet about my new job.  I really didn’t have a good reason, but I wanted to make sure it was real before making it public.  I know that may sound weird.

Other than that, tonight I am fighting a cold so I am going to bed early.  Thank you to all of you that helped and supported me while I was between jobs.  And thank you to those who put in a good word for me.

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where’s waldo? now you can know!

I’ve been playing with new social networking site, Brightkite.  At first, I wasn’t sure how much I would use it, but now I find it as addicting as Twitter.  It’s really neat.

One of the more interesting things that I heard years ago was that applications would be “location aware” of where you were.  The context of these applications were more centered around phones and IM clients.   Brightkite takes it beyond this level, and I find it pretty enlightening.    Sure, if you use Pidgin or other IM clients, you can have different “resources” identified as “Home” or “Work.”  Brightkite allows you to update wherever you are either by the web or by SMS.   If you can send emails from your phone, you can email pictures of whatever is interesting at the location you “checked in” at.

Today I “checked in” at my barber and I got a message from a friend that said, “Hey, you’re in my ‘hood!”  How cool.  Think about this in larger terms if more people were on board with this.  I could “check in” and if my online or social friends are nearby, they can announce it, and who knows?  Maybe we can meet for coffee.

Imagine how this service could help Realtors or other professionals that travel around a limited area.    Imagine how cool this would be if people could have GPS units that could somehow update locations?   Imagine if you could update via Bluetooth?

This is a different kind of service and it might take some getting used to.   But I like it and I’ll use it.  If you are on Brightkite, please feel free to make me a friend and if you are Twitter, feel free to follow me; if you aren’t a ‘bot or something, chances are I’ll follow you back.

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more than six degrees

I was trying to find new folks to follow on Twitter and Facebook tonight.  I have an RSS feed for tweets for people in my zipcode, but it is often hard to know people based on username verses their real or known names.

Our subdivision has a web-based forum and tonight I posted a question asking how many of the residents were on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.  I’ll be curious to see the response… if any.

I’m sometimes surprised of the “online persona” I’ve gotten to know verses the real person.  Since we have kids and our neighborhood has a community park, we meet a lot of other parents.  I am really curious how much of an online presence other people have, and who do they think is important or who do they follow.  It’s an interesting experiment in social networking.

I’ll follow up with notes from my ‘hood forum post.

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it’s overwhelming sometimes

I like to check out new things on the Internet especially some of the new services out there, like SocialThing and Ping.fm. I’m on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blah blah blah…

But, sometimes it’s hard to keep all of them up to date, or updated or even to just check in. I have a Pownce account, but only visit when I get a notice sometime has happened, (like a new friend or file). I have a SocialThing account, but I think I’ve only been there once or twice. What else?

With all of these services, I feel like the spinning plate guy, trying to keep up with all of them. Sure, it’s getting better as more ideas become reality. Services like Ping.fm let you update Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, etc all at once.

But then you have to decide if you are going to use IM to update your status or post message, or use a desktop client or the web UI or your cell phone…

I don’t want to be the plate spinner, I want to be like Cardini. If you have not seen the video of Cardini, you’ve missed out. He was so masterful, he took slight of hand to a new level.

Don’t get me wrong, I love these sorts of things. I am enjoying Remember The Milk and Grandcentral. I’ve been using the heck out of my Pbwiki account, and LinkedIn has helped me make new contacts, but the daily routine of checking in everywhere gets old, and some of the newer services don’t seem to have much value for me at this point, so I’m likely not to visit them as much as the others.

So yeah, I want to be like Cardini of the Interwebs. I want to have such mastery of these applications, it looks beyond natural.

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see me for who I am; how can I help?

I had a hard time coming up with a title for this post. I wanted to have something clever but not sound cliché, so I decided to start writing can see it something came up.

It’s always funny where inspiration comes from. It can hit you when you least expect it. It can be that little glow of an ember that could ignite into something wonderful, but only if you give it those first few flames of air. I’ve posted in the past about some really great TV shows on the BBC. I don’t watch BBC America often but every once in a while I’ll find something that I get a kick out of. I’m sure you’ve also heard how the BBC comes up with a great show and here in the U.S. they’ll try to copy it and just don’t do it right. There are plenty of examples; Who’s Line is it Anyways?, Coupling, Weakest Link, Who Wants to be Millionaire, The Office, and I am sure there are others.

We just started watching “Last Restaurant Standing.” We had three episodes on Tivo from last season. It’s really an interesting show. Surely you are aware of “Top Chef.” Top Chef on its own accord is pretty cool, but “Last Restaurant Standing” is sort of like ‘multi-dimensional chess” in comparison. The premise is that one of England’s most predominate chef and restaurateur, Raymond Blanc, is looking to partner with a couple to open a restaurant. Nine couples are given a restaurant to run, (none of them have any experience running a restaurant), and are given direction from the chef. The winner of the weekly change is given immunity and the rest of the couples face some sort of elimination challenge. The winning couple is split up and offers help to the remaining competing teams.

The last two episodes were around identifying and strengthing the restaurants’ brand.  Last week, each couple was given simple directions to “develop a brand” and then set up.  It was interesting to see how each couple went about what they each thought what was “their” brand and how to establish it.  Most of them floundered, most of them had a really hard time with this excersice.  And with this, I found myself relating.

The next episode they were given more clarification on what or how to identify their brand;

What excites you? What is your passion? What do you believe in?  That is your brand, and that is what you must do.  You must make other people, your customers understand and identify with your brand!

I’ve heard it before, this is nothing new.  But the difference here was seeing the people in the hot seat and how they reacted to this.  It was like they were too close to it to realize it.  Each contestant had that moment where they said, “Oh! I get it!”

It was at this time, I had a realization.  No, I didn’t realize what my brand was.  I think I have a good handle on that, (don’t get me wrong, it did take some time to get there).  What I realized was that manybe I wasn’t doing enough to promote what my brand was.   Some of the contestants had really clever and innovative ideas on how to promote their brands.  I would have not thought of them, but what I did find myself having, and this was like getting hit with a ton of bricks, was the permission to try really different things.  I’m talking about stepping out of my comfort zone.

One thing is clear, is that you have to have a personal brand. I saw something on a new blog I started reading, Wirelessjobs.com.  It referred to the 95% rule.  Whenever you are at a networking event, see and hear what 95% of the people are doing.    Then, do the opposite.  If you are in the 5% minority, you are sure to get noticed.