Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

I get asked occasionally, so here's the drill -- why should you host with us, or have us design your web site?

I've done a quick development job for Bobfest Northfest. This is sort of a dry run for a 2011 event, Fighting Bob Fest North.  Fighting Bob Fest is a progressive festival that happens every year in Baraboo, Wisconsin, commemorating Fighting Bob LaFollette. 

It's been one of those love-hate weeks.  I got a Droid Incredible telephone.  I love it.  It's busy doing all sorts of wonderful things for me, including monitoring my servers and waking me up in the middle of the night if anything goes wrong :-).  Okay, that's part of the love-hate.

But in general I love the phone.  Everything works.  I've not found it difficult to deal with.  And after a fury of downloading apps, I've finally settled down and started to actually use it.

Here comes another hate part.  My home office is in a very rural area in a horseshoe-shaped valley.  Cell phone coverage was always sparse with AT&T, but with Verizon it has been the pits.  It's okay if I leave the house.  It's great in our driveway.  But in my office it's dropped-call-city. 

Verizon sells a small femtocell system for just this purpose.  We have great broadband coverage here (fiber to my house - in the middle of the country) but as I said, cell phone coverage is spotty.  This little puppy plugs in to my router and becomes a little cell phone tower right in my house.  Covers the house and a fair amount of the outside really well.  And is just about completely transparent when set up.  So I've gone from no bars to 4 bars of reception in my office, and my clients no longer have to put up with being bounced to Google Voice almost all the time. 

Happy Steve.

A great article on Mashable about using Facebook pages effectively for your business or nonprofit.

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.

The recent NTEN report 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey has just been released, and it gives very high marks both to Drupal as a CMS for nonprofits, and to the use of CiviCRM for donor and activist management.

By the way, NTEN is highly recommended.

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.