Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

Through 3/31/2010, we are having a hosting sale.  Buy any Standard or Premium hosting plan, and get 10% off your order (including as many months as you buy initially). 

Just enter the coupon code Cheaphost when you place your order.

We are happy to announce that Cruiskeen Consulting LLC is now an Acquia Partner.  We will be partnering with Acquia both to promote Acquia's services, and to have the latest in Drupal training and information from Acquia.  We're looking forward to a fruitful partnership, and will be glad to discuss Acquia services with you, as well as our own.

We're now also supporting a one-click install of Wordpress for our hosting clients.  It's very simple, and lets you get a Wordpress installation up in minutes.  This is very much like our Drupal one-click install, and is also easily upgradeable (you'll get an email whenever a new Wordpress version is available) and you can then do a one-click upgrade.

We are strong supporters of Open Source software in general, and Drupal in particular. We build our web sites (including this one) in Drupal, and are a member of the Drupal Association.  Any purchases made from this page will also help to support the Drupal Association by paying the Drupal Association a 5% portion of your monthly hosting fee.

Our servers are set up to support Drupal.  We have a simple Drupal setup on our servers, which lets you install Drupal with a single click on the web.  This installer is kept up-to-date with new Drupal security releases, generally within a few days of a new release.  Our servers are tuned to support Drupal as well -

Drupal Hosting

Most of our hosting services are intended to support the Drupal content management system. We provide managed Drupal hosting where we supply  Drupal and a set of supported Drupal modules. This can include CiviCRM, and a number of other additional packages. Typically our Drupal managed hosting rates start at $65 per month.  We're not a generic hosting service, but have a strong background in UNIX/Linux system administration.   We can work with you on a specialized hosting environment for your needs, including VPS hosting and dedicated managed servers.

We're almost done moving to the new Eau Claire data center, and what a trip it's been. 

We moved our DNS servers yesterday (and I'm still looking for signs that I broke something subtle along the way) and almost all of the web sites are now moved.  We still have a few  email-only accounts to move over, and then we'll be ready to shut down the servers in Michigan, and re-install some of them in Eau Claire. 

A few months ago we launched a new web site for the American Composers Alliance in New York CIty.  ACA is a nonprofit that publishes scores for modern classical composers.

I'm happy to announce that we have just negotiated a space for a new data center in Wisconsin.  This will mean that we will be bringing all aspects of the business into Wisconsin, including our hosting and backup infrastructure. Our new Eau Claire, WI data center is very well connected to the Internet, and will provide us with high-speed low-latency connections.  The new data center has redundant power and is very physically secure.

I'm happy to say that Cruiskeen Consulting LLC's recent proposal to the Knight News Challenge has been requested to make a full proposal.  This means that it will move on to the 2nd round of the News Challenge judging. Our proposal is to create a system to build Gov.. 2.0 transparency web sites for townships in Wisconsin, and then to aggregate the news from them into a site that would provide categorized news feeds from them for use by reporters and other interested parties.

New security-related Drupal releases came out yesterday.  We've already upgraded all of the Drupal 6 web sites that are under maintenance contract to Drupal 6.15.  We will be doing the existing Drupal 5 web sites later today up to 5.21.  So far the upgrade has gone very smoothly, and also fixes a number of bugs in Drupal 6. 

As always, please contact us at the helpdesk email address if you have any issues with your sites.

The White House web site is now a Drupal web site.  The change of whitehouse.gov to Open Source is a welcome change, and may be the harbinger of more to come if this works out well.  The site is handsome and seems well-designed from a first glance.  The use of more Open Source software in government will be welcome, so let's hope this all pans out well.

I've been playing around with the Mozilla Labs project Weave.  Weave is great for people like me who work on multiple computers at different times,and on different platforms.  Now I can sync up my bookmarks, forms, passwords, etc.  between my browsers (well, Firefox anyway) oin all the machines, and do it transparently and securely. 

So far this has been working great.  In the past I used Foxmarks, which was nice, but not as powerful as Weave (didn't sync as many things) and was fairly obtrusive - it would occasionally hijack all the cpu cycles (particularly on my netbook) as it as syncing up.  Weave seems a lot less obtrusive, but takes a while to sync up.

I'm particularly intrigued by some of the single-sign-on features in Weave.  It can automatically log you in to web sites (only if they're https:  pages) and has a rudimentary implemention for OpenID, which I finally got to work after some playing around with the configuration (since i'm not using Mozilla's OpenID provider).  This still seems a little wonky, but it's potentially a great thing to be able to make logins to web sites (and I use a lot of different web sites) more transparent. 

Weave is still in beta, and may make your computer burn up in a big funeral pyre of disaster, but it has so far worked great for me.

New versions of Drupal 5 and 6 were released yesterday.  These primarily fix a number of security issues which were recently discovered, and also introduce a number of bug fixes, particularly on Drupal 6. 

We've just released the new web site for the American Composers Alliance, a publisher of classical music based in New York City. Their site makes heavy use of audio  and the Dash media player in Drupal. We're also working on a number of innovative search mechanisms to find compositions by the composers published by ACA.  Enjoy listening to some of the music that ACA publishes.

Cruiskeen Consulting LLC has changed the ICANN domain reseller that we are using.  We had previouslly been a reseller for GoDaddy/Wild West Domains, but for various reasons, including having a much better API for our systems, we have changed and are now reselling through Enom.  This change is fairly transparent for customers who have domains registered with us.  Some of you have transferred your domains to our new system, but if you have not, you'll see very little difference in your domain control panel, except that the old URL for Cruiskeen Consulting LLC now points to a ve