BMC

Things to do with this site.

SIte moved to Rimu Hosting

Bryght is shutting down hosting, so I moved to Rimu Hosting. I already run the Bootup Labs site there, and have recommended it to a number of other people. Do I have more to say about Bryght? Not right now, although it feels like I've got a lot of stories tucked away that need to get told at some point.

I've got a Miro VPS 2 - $30 / month, 400MB memory, 4GB of storage. I never get a control panel - it's running Webmin on CentOS, and I asked for the newest version of PHP, plus Apache and MySQL set to run at startup.

It's actually been a pleasure to "move in" to a new server. The old system had been running for a long time, and various failed experiments at different upgrades -- most around PHP and accelerator versions. Also various different test installs of a variety of sites.

Site upgrade: Acquia Drupal 6

As of yesterday evening, this site is now running Drupal 6 on a single Acquia codebase that also runs Seven Hills B&B (my parents' bed and breakfast site -- upgraded all the way from Drupal 4.6!) and Food Like That (my food / recipe site)

I continue to recommend Acquia for sites large and small. For smaller sites, if you've got some extra time around the holidays, the "Community" level of Acquia Network support is free until December 31st of this year. And once you sign up, you have that access for a full year. I have subscriptions for all the sites above that I've mentioned. You might have some non profit or smaller business sites that you help out with that would be a good fit.

For larger sites, you may be customizing too much to take advantage of Acquia. But, for startups just building out their Drupal implementation, having the consulting team and "backup support" of Acquia makes the Standard or Pro levels definitely worthwhile.

Anyway, end of the Acquia commercial :P I'm a fan of what those guys have done so far, but still would like to see a better install profile. This should directly lead to needing less of a Drupal developer to get somewhere fast. I used to joke about Cisco, which often gives out free / cheap hardware to non profits, that the equipment was worthless unless it had a Cisco Certified Engineer strapped to the top of it...

Sucking in Delicious

I finally took a little time to update to the latest Feed API and start sucking in my Delicious links. I'm not quite ready to mix it into my Feedburner feed, since I want to do mapping of the link field to my "native" weblink type, as well as the tags aren't transferring across.

The big thing this enables is commenting on my delicious notes. Meta observations on the link in question. As Richard has previously noted, my Jaiku instance actually also provides this: a second permalink where comments are enabled.

All Consuming is the other web service that I'm definitely interested in sucking back in here. I've been keeping it fairly up to date with my reading, and I know lots of people that also like to read similar books. RSS as the simplest systems integration format. Fun times!

Boring site note: which feed do you want?

I put together a feeds page which describes the content of the 2 main feeds I have available*.

Feedburner (which I recently re-fell in love with after re-tuning this site and adding the Drupal Feedburner module) tells me that about 450 of you are subscribed to my main front page stuff (out of which I recently removed my del.icio.us link splicing), and about 100 of you subscribe to the front page + personal + Flickr + del.icio.us links super feed of doom.

But wait! There's more!

Drupal 5 Upgrade

OK, BMC is sitting on Drupal 5 now. From 4.6 to 5.0 in one fairly painless move. I expect lots of stuff will be broken. I've got SimpleMenu, which makes me happy.

I'm going to be re-arranging things a lot and try and draw a bunch of my presence back into this spot. Including a partial re-integration of personal.

A Vancouver Job connection area here on BMC?

Om Malik writes about Niche Job Boards Rising:

CrunchBoard, 37Signals and PaidContent - they are all bringing attention to the fact that narrow niche sites work, and the job boards don’t seem to have the necessary impact or perhaps get the right kind of users. These three sites have very strong communities, and as a result their job boards work and will continue to work. These three boards should enjoy success, because the number of technology job listings in on an upswing. Indeed.com reports that there are 121 job listings per 1000 people in San Jose, and 74 job listings per 1000 in San Francisco.

Recently, I've been toying with the idea of adding a "jobs" section to this site. Why? Well, I think I have some interesting ideas about jobs, resumes, and linking. Secondly, I constantly run into great individuals looking for jobs, as well as interesting companies looking for employees. So, bringing them together in a dedicated section might be an interesting idea.

BMC Blog Design

Potential new design for BMC from cathycracks

Cathy Wang was bored one night recently and sent me this potential new design for my site -- thanks, Cathy! I started talking to Cathy perhaps 6 months ago or so, before she got snapped up by Raincity Studios (she also works with Alex Williams, doing work on the Podcast Hotel).

Of course, it has the requisite "Photo by Kris Krug", and this screenshot is of an interior "static" page. Green would be a new colour for me...I long ago picked dark blue plus the yellow-gold highlight as "my" colours....but then, I don't even have a real brand for BMC other than my name itself. Maybe I should go shopping for a new domain name as well?

The big task, which really should come before the design, is to re-examine my info architecture. There is a lot of different type of info on this site, and I also have content in several external places I would like to highlight/integrate a bit better (e.g. sync local weblinks with my del.icio.us account, have posts from my Bryght blog appear here and perhaps vice versa).

Notify (I might have accidentally spammed you)

So, I just turned on the notify module here on my site. I noticed that *I* just got a massive email sent to me from the site with lots of posts in it. Err..I may have spammed everyone with an account on this site.If you *don't* want to get email every week with any of my new posts, you can login, and go to the my account link, then hit the "my notify settings" link. So, if you got a big long email from this site...sorry for the spam!

Recommended Links

I just created a new section in my handbook called Recommended Links. Before, I only had one link, Troy Angrignon's post on the mental evolution that people go through from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

I've just added a second: Danah Boyd's post on Why Web 2.0 matters, where she goes through more of the social and business changes taken place that are being aided/accelerated by technology.

And yes, there is What is Web 2.0 as well. This is my corner where I can send people a single link and tell them to read the posts linked there, then come back and talk.

B. Mann in Wired News

Thanks to everyone that emailed to congratulate me for the quotes in Jeff MacIntyre's piece on Flock in Wired News. Occasionally, messing around with a lot of web technology *does* lead to good things.