Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

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.

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

Well, looks like absolutely nobody is capable of learning about redundancy.  Last night a single fire in a data center in Seattle has completely taken down authorize.net.  Authorize.net is arguably the biggest player in Internet credit card processing, so it appears that a very large percentage of the ecommerce sites on the Internet have been out since some time last night.  Rumor has it that either most of the credit-card processing has come up, or will soon, as they attempt to get power restored to the building (the rumor is that sprinkler systems took out all the emergency

Well, that was interesting -

Our colocation facility in Michigan fell off the internet for a while today - this caused an outage of about 15 minutes for some of our hosted web sites (including this site).  We're still waiting for news from the colo facility, buit it appears that things have now recovered. Some of our sites and mailing lists werre unavailable from about 3:10 PM Central until about 3:25 PM Central.

Every so often we stumble across  a piece of Open Source software that is really exciting.  Omeka is one of those items. It is designed as an Open Source package to allow museums to build interactive web sites and internal displays with a minimum of trouble.  It's already being used by quite a few different museums, and looks very promising.  It's available for free download, and we're starting to play around with it here.  We may offer this as another hosted option, along with Drupal.

Cruiskeen Consulting LLC is a general Internet consulting company based in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

We offer a wide range of services. Some examples include:

• Web Design - Let us design your web site, including features that will let you and your readers manipulate content on the site yourselves. Enter into the Web 2.0 world. We can provide complex database-driven web sites that are nonetheless simple to update and manage. Take a look at some of our web designs. We specialize in highly interactive, easily-maintainable web sites for nonprofits, political groups, and small businesses. We are particularly involved in building on-line communities and self-service directories of all types.All of our web site development is based around the Drupal Content Management System.
• Web Hosting - we host complex Internet applications, as well as simple web sites. We own our own farm of web servers in a first-class hosting environment with redundant Internet connections. We're not a cheap generic web host - we can work with you to meet customized needs and to host applications for you. You get a real, local person to call, with 24-hour emergency paging and site monitoring.
• Email Services - We can host your email at our site, including Spam and Virus filtering, or help you make your own email system work better.
• Backup and Recovery - Let us help you back up your systems effectively, either using our own remote hardware, or setting up your own effective backup system. We offer a very simple backup facility that will let you automatically back up your own computers to our servers at an extremely low cost. This service includes  Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers.