Google Wave, initial thoughts

So our team has been playing around with Google Wave over the last week since being invited to the preview. Technology wise it is quite remarkable, the Google developers have created a life-like conversation application that goes way beyond the standard messenger or email format. However through lack of documentation things can get confusing fast and also I am not convinced (yet) that the system is anywhere near ready. The writers of lifehacker.com have made the first attempt at clarity however with their excellent book completewaveguide.com and I recommend reading that before you start.

Time will tell if this is a workable solution, it may just be that Google has over-complicated something that didn’t need fixing. Replacing email is a big task and I am not sure in it’s current form Google Wave offers an alternative. It is entirely possible that the conversation style will make it hard to follow which will make the tool unproductive and a non-starter. They also have to convince everyone to have a Wave account to communicate and this is something that could seriously damage the rate of adoption. You can’t, after all, teach old dogs new tricks!

Instant Applications with TurnKey Linux and VPS.NET Cloud

We’ve been using VPS.NET for a short time now and mid-june they introduced appliance images from TurnKey Linux. This makes deploying Drupal, WordPress, Rails and Apache servers amongst others quick and easy. Take a look at the following video from the guys at TurnKey Linux demonstrating how quickly VPS.NET can be used to launch Open Soruce appliances into the cloud.

Appliance features:

• Auto-updated daily with latest security patches.
• Webmin easy to use configuration console and web management interface
• Minimal footprint (typically around 150MB) – each software appliance is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to serve its role with maximum efficiency and security.

Appliance list:

• Core
• Google App Engine SDK
• Tomcat
• phpBB
• Wordpress
• LAMP
• LAPP
• Ruby Rails
• Joomla
• MediaWiki
• Drupal 5
• Drupal 6
• Django
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Overall we think this is a simple way to get applications running fast. When you are looking for something out of the box you can’t fail.

VPS.NET has data centres in the US and UK with billing in both currencies.

Quick Tip: Efficiently Manage Your Email

If you are anything like me you process most information through your email inbox. Reminders, tasks and requests flow into my mail client at an incredible rate and traditionally I’ve used an elloborate filing system to process it.

After reading (and then re-reading) David Allen’s Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity it dawned on me my futile attempt to manage it this way was utter madness.

Here is my simple email process as it now stands.

1. Do the action for anything that will take 2 mins or less.
2. Create a new task and define the next step (important!) from each email that needs action.
3. Create a new task as a reminder for anything that can be deferred until a suitable time.
4. Forward anything that needs someone else to action and delete it immediately (trust others).
5. File anything that you may want to pick up in the future but don’t have time for at the moment.
6. File anything else under clients or suppliers, don’t use sub folders as a good search tool will find any specific email you may need in the future.
7. Delete everything else.

Ongoing and this is important, review tasklists from no.2 and no.3 daily and do, file or delete as above. Monitor folder created from no.5 on a monthly basis.

I’ve not had an empty inbox since 1994 and now it is. I’ve even gone as far as archiving all email that is older than 6 months and I now have a happy, clean and manageable mailbox. Reducing stress of it being there and the backup requirements on our infrastructure.

I’m off to tell our clients.

Theme Building Made Easy (Nearly)

We’ve enjoyed working with Drupal and WordPress to provide a range of client websites.  Both tools cover most of the requirements for content management (CMS) that you are ever likely to need. They are mature products and the community support is excellent.

Themes or templates (whatever you like to call them) usually take the most time and as a non-designer it can take even longer. I was excited to see recently the buzz surrounding a new product called Artisteer which made claims to easily generate themes for both Drupal and WordPress alongside the other well deployed CMS Joomla. I was a little skeptical as well if I am honest, having been a developer of websites for nearly 15 years I’ve tried many website generator products that simply failed to live up to the purpose they were designed for. It didn’t take long, 10 minutes and my faith had grown in Artisteer exponentially. It is suprisingly simple to use and does exactly what it says on the tin.

To get you started Artisteer lets you choose your CMS and then will automatically make a suggestion layout for you. You can then use the ‘Ideas’ menu to make some more quick suggestion changes to colours, fonts, layout and background. It then also has CMS specific suggestion options such as header, blocks, buttons, menus and so on.

Once you have a reasonable layout you can then delve deeper into the menu system to modify your base layout and brand a theme for your specific needs. I am not going to go into major detail as you can read about the features on the Artisteer website but you can trust me when I say that there isn’t much you can’t do with it.

With all the positives there are inevitably aspects of Artisteer that would stop someone with no experience completing the end result to a professional manner that all clients should expect. We are currently working on 7 themes and all so far have required a degree of manual intervention to make things work smoothly. Good skills in CSS are still required and because we have that we are getting some great end products.

Overall Artisteer can help a seasoned developer rapidly produce a theme that can be modified to suit far quicker than building one from scratch or using an existing theme as a starting block. This process can save many hours which in my opinion is well worth the $130 license fee.

Artisteer has become a instant friend of Intelligenta and being a stickler for the rules of the web I was pleased to see my first theme passed the W3C validators with flying colours….Impressive!

(We will update this post with examples as they are finished and signed off)