web notes - a blog

• High quality sites for mid-sized businesses
• Attractive, easy to manage sites for small businesses
• Robust open source applications, distributed as a free, possibly limited version, and more powerful system for a fee
• Interface systems, to make it easier to connect different systems
• Web security and disaster recovery
• Maintenance and upgrades of existing sites
• CDNs
• Search systems
• Personal portals that allow people to assemble a view into the Internet as they want to work with it. This includes supporting many applications with flexible interfaces.
• Plugins for applications, especially those that improve data connections between PC and web based applications
• Mobile access
• Architecture definition to allow legacy sites to grow gracefully
• Design, high quality design
• Tools
• Content moderation
• Advertising management. This is the analysis of the cost of advertising and determination of revenue.
• Dynamic partnerships that allow many organizations to seamlessly contribute to a system, with loose coupling
• Archival of content
• Advanced content caching closer to the last mile
• Greater offline power with asynchronous web interfaces, and the PC based applications to take advantage of it.
• Increasingly sophisticated site development methods
• Training, at all levels
• Hosting
• Support and consulting
• Project management

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems and modular web application architectures available.

It would be an excellent system to deploy an RPM management system on. This system would generate .spec files for the modules, ensuring dependencies could be enforced and allowing the use of yum or other methods to automate upgrades.

The success of this approach for developers would be dependent upon their ability to architect their implementations without modifying Drupal and interfacing correctly to the module system.

It also requires that Drupal serve as a server component, rather than just an account-level application. Managed carefully, with configuration files and other innovative methods, rapid deployment of manageable Drupal sites would be extremely cost-effective.

http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2008/06/23/open-source-rpm-spec-file

The key to a successful collaborative environment is to clearly define the responsibilities of each team member and grant them the freedom to meet those responsibilities in the best way possible.

It is extremely important to staff these teams with professionals that have the education and experience to do more than what they are told. They need to understand what needs to be done, and do it, identifying issues and resolving them independently, ever mindful of their contribution to the team, and the available time and resources.

Team communication should evolve with the team. Any process that produces the desired results is adequate.

Location can be considered a commodity - something which is purchased. The cost of business real estate, whether leased or purchased, is not only financial, but affects the people who are willing to visit your business and work there.

Most people don’t want to commit to a location for a job. Today’s career environment is very fluid, businesses change frequently, and the cost to purchase and settle in a home is high.

Thus, when choosing an office location, it is extremely important to position it where the people you want to staff it with are willing to go. The only truly reliable way to identify a location that will attract ‘good people’ is to select an area with similar businesses. This can be used to roughly estimate the available talent pool. Bear in mind it is unlikely you will find an exact population of perfect employees, but by the same token, a general skill set can often be discerned (for example: software, hardware, education).

In the event that the existing location is causing the business to suffer due to difficulty in hiring and retention, there are several possible options:

• Allow telecommuting - extremely cost-effective, potentially risky. Creates communication overhead.
• Open a satellite office - may greatly increase overhead, and includes some of the telecommuting risks/expenses.
• Move - choose a new location, perhaps by starting with a satellite office.
• Import employees - strive to find people eager to relocate into the region.

cPanel/Fantastico has a very cool feature that checks the version of installed applications against that which is currently available and alerts the administrator if an upgrade is recommended or required.

This type of application would be very valuable for a web company that installs open source software. Most of the time, each installation is the latest version, and when the project is done, maintenance is often forgotten or delayed.

Imagine a script like cPanel/Fantastico that could alert the company when an upgrade should be done.

It’s not that simple, though.

Open source is very easy to modify, and additional modules or plugins are often included. If an application has an active community, there can be hundreds or thousands of addins, which will all be maintained slightly differently.

There is no easy answer. However, if you set security as the primary goal (which you should), write a very simple script to get the application version strings from applications, and then use RSS feeds or other simple tools to check on the current status of the applications, as well as security reports/updates from the vendors, you should be able to track when upgrades need to be done.

Another approach would be to continuously monitor and upgrade applications with every version update. This would probably not be cost effective.

If you can run several sites through the same application installation, with separate databases, you may reduce the cost of maintenance, although the complexity of managing the applications increases exponentially.