Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

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.

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 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.

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.

Just thought I'd make a list of recent things I've tried out that I really like:

VIrtualbox - I'm running VIrtualbox OSE on my Linux desktop.  This is great, as I get to fire up other virtual machines on my desktop with very little trouble.  At the moment I can run either the Windows 7 release candidate or Solaris as a window on my desktop. So I think it's time finally to get rid of dual-boot on my desktop,and just run Linux on the desktop with the ability to run WIndows 7 in a window for those few times I really need Windows (this is partly for dealing with client issues, and partly because I've not yet weaned myself from Quickbooks).  It's sort of RAM hungry, of course, and I think it's time to apply more memory to this cranky old desktop system, or perhaps to upgrade the motherboard to something vaguely modern. 

Windows 7 - Well, it's not so much that I like it as that I find it much more tolerable than Vista.  Its not that Iv'e given it an extensive workout, but it's a lot slimmer than Vista (it's LOTS faster in the virtual machine on my desktop than Vista is running natively). 

Acer Aspire One A0751h - I bought this little netbook because my laptop was getting crankier and crankier after almost 4 years of use (I was getting tired of bending the screen just so to get it to boot) and I wanted something lighter and with more battery capacity.  I  bought one with the 6-cell Lithium Ion battery.  This particular model is either a really big netbook or a really small laptop.  I'm struck by how similar it is to my old IBM Thinkpad 360,  but with a processor and memory capable of running a modern OS.  With the 6-cell battery, a gig of RAM, a 160-gig disk, an 11.6" screen and wireless, it really meets just about all of my portable laptop needs, and it will run  between 5 and 8 hours on a charge (depending on which OS I'm running and whether the 802.11 card is running or not).  I can finally get through a day at a conference without searching for a power strip. 

This machine is a little odd in configuration, largely because of some of the odd restrictions put on it by the Microsoft/Intel cabal.  It's a netbook with a larger-than-10" screen.  So Micorosoft won't let them put XP on it unless they slow the processor down to 1.2 gig.  This is nuts.  So -- I have the nice bigger screen, and a REAL size keyboard, but I need to have a slower processor.  Also, Intel apparently charges more for their processors if they're hooked up to a bigger screen (which makes sense because - um - well - because they can, that's why) So I end up with a slightly crippled netbook because of market manipulation.  I can have a faster CPU OR I can have a bigger screen, but I can't have both unless I run  Vista.  Cripes.  Anyway, I really like it despite that.  The CPU seems fast enough for most of what I want to do with this system, and having a full-size actual keyboard makes up for a lot as far as I'm concerned.  Besides, it's red, and really cute.

For years now web developers have been wishing that Internet Explorer 6 would go away.  This has been like tilting at windmills, since many businesses are still running Windows 2000, which has never had a newer Microsoft-sanctioned browser offering.  The faults and irritations of IE 6 are legendary, and have caused the hair of many a web developer to fall out prematurely.

Really nice article on Mashable about how arts organizations are using social media - lots of good ideas.

Drupal Camp WI was great, with a lot of exchange of information and ideas.

Spent a good deal of time both going to the state Democratic Convention, and then making an extended road trip to Troy, Michigan to expand our web server colocation presence.  We now have more servers, more capacity, and higher-speed configurations.

The CiviCRM folks are having a documentation sprint to write a new CiviCRM book.  This is something that's been needed now for some time.  The book will be available as a free download, or as a printed book you can purchase.  We'll let you know when it's available, and what we think of it.

There's a new report on CMS systems from the folks at Idealware.  Ignore the fact that we're one of the sponsors ard are listed in the report -it's a really good unbiased view of the different CMS systems and how they would fit into a nonprofit's world.

The folks at Idealware publish a lot of interesting and useful reports on using technology for your nonprofit group.  They've just released an article on using RSS and RSS tools for your nonprofit.  It's a good read.

http://www.idealware.org/articles/rss_tools.php

Time to talk about a few things I've used lately that I like:

Artisteer - I blogged about this recently on Drupal For Users.  Artisteer is a theme generation program that lets you build themes for Druipal, Joomla!, Wordpress, and a few other environments.  It's fairly bare bones in a lot of ways - it lets you generate pretty and well-formed themes (at least in Drupal, which is the only place I've tried it).  On the other hand, it currently only runs in WIndows (ick and double ick) and won't do any of the really neat things possible in Drupal.  I can see myself using this as a rapid prototyping tool though, doing the first 80% or so of theme development, after which it will be time to drag out the PHP and CSS skills to do the rest of the stuff.  I'm hoping this tool will improve with age.  Even with the limitations, the standard version is $129 which will probably pay for itself the first time I use it.

NOTE - Artisteer 2.1 just came out - it's a big improvement. The primary improvement is a lot of bug fixes, a little more flexibility, and the fact that the default themes are now built with multiple real Drupal regions, so in a lot of cases you're not going to have to muck around with sticking new regions in the themes.  This site is currently displaying using a simple Artisteer theme that I built in about 15 minutes.

Swekey This is another product that gives me mixed feelings.  Basically it's a little USB key that you insert into your computer, and that generates one-time passcodes.  Typically you'd use it to secure web sites and applications.  I use it to make sure that nobody is logging in to my web sites as me - if the key ain't plugged in to the computer, I can't log in.  If the key gets unplugged, I get logged out.  There are fairly nice integration modules available for it in many different web applications, including Drupal, Squirrelmail, and more.  My main reservations about it involve the fact that I've had some issues with it in Windows.  Works pretty well on my Linux and Mac machines, but it's had fits with both of the Windows systems I've used it with (though apparently this is due to various issues Windows has with hot-plugging USB devices - I actually mostly got this squared away, but it required a lot of disgusting register editing - on the other hand it fixed  a coupel of issues I've been having with CDROM drives in Windows as well, so ---  Gist of it is, this was mostly Windows brokennes, not Swekey brokenness.

CrashPlan - This is a great backup system that we've been using internally, and that we're starting to offer as a backup product.  It's the first backup product that I'm really happy with (other than big expensive backup systems that I used to wrangle, and a few of the open  source apps like Bacula).  Once it's set up and installed, it just takes care of itself, continually backing up your system while you work.  One of the innovative things about this is the ability to back up to a remote server on the Internet and to a local system in your office at  the same time.  Gives you the best of two worlds - quick restore from your local server and an archival copy off-site for emergency restores in case of a physical disaster.  We're now offiering a managed service basd on CrashPlan where you can automatically back up your systems both to our own backup servers and to your own local server or spare drive.  Highly recommended, works with Linux, Windows, MAC, and Solaris.  There's also a smaller version that's available as a free download if you just want to back up to disk amongst your own systems (though you need to pay for this if it's for commercial use, or if you want the full feature set of the system).  Let us know if this interests you.  Backup prices start at $5/month per system, depending on how much disk quota you need for backups. 

AlertThingy - This is the first tool for tracking social network updates that I've actually liked enough to use.  Follow your Tweets, Facebook, RSS Feeds, and a lot more in one window, and post to Twitter and Facebook from it. This just gets better with every release, with more added features and services.  Now if I could only convince myself that all of this constant interruption is really a good thing.