Lost Gmail - Email Hosting Challenges

Email is becoming an increasingly complex and unreliable medium. We expect email to be instantaneous and all pervasive. We depend on it arriving moments after it is sent because it almost always does. Last fall we switched to using Google's Apps domain hosting service to see if we couldn't test out this product before recommending it to our clients. Email hosting is a difficult thankless task because it has become such a critical form of communications. In general we've been very happy with the services provided by Google - particularly with spam reduction. But even with all of the resources...

Web Hosting Dilemma

As a small web development company that also does web hosting for some of our clients it is difficult to even consider competing against the thousands of companies out there that specialize in it. In the last two years we've started to move away from promoting our own services and instead focusing on providing technical support for folks who want to choose to work with another web host. Partly this is because many of our clients have very strong feelings about where their site is hosted (either because off past experience or the monthly cost). It is also because it...

Server-side Scripting on Magma

Earlier this week we had a lot of trouble restoring data on a client's site which was hosted with a web host that we have worked with for a number of years. People always assume that their web hosts do keep backups, however this totally depends on the host and the package that the client chose to purchase. Fortunately the client had selected a package that contained backups, however restoring data from a backup isn't trivial and it all had to be managed through trouble tickets as per any large web hosting company. To gain a bit more control of...

Government Software Innovation

Being based in Ottawa, it is hard to ignore the opportunities available in providing services to the government. With federal, provincial & municipal governments all with offices in the city there is a huge opportunity for innovation and cooperation between different departments. Most Canadians don't realize this, but our country's largest single software producer is our public service sector and yet the experience, tools and intellectual property developed by government workers is rarely shared with other divisions let alone with the citizens who paid for its development. I have received a number of phone calls from government employees who are...

Helping Habitat for Humanity

OpenConcept is doing more work in providing technical support to other web consulting companies. Most recently we were called in by HJC New Media to help launch Habitat for Humanity Australia's new website . We were essentially involed in creating some php scripts for managing and collecting contact information from their contact us page as well as their eNewsletter. We were also involved in communicating the client's needs to the web host and flicking the switch for the final launch. Like many NGOs, there often aren't inhouse technical people who can help support them in their choices of technolgoy. The...

Speed Demo on Drupal's Search Engine Optimization

I signed up to do a speed geek at Drupal Camp, but mostly out of habit. I first was exposed to it at AdvocacyDev 1 and later at the NTEN conference. Both times I was exhausted after presenting 5 five minute presentations, but found that it was a worth while experience. I'd never given a speed geek about Drupal before though and thought that nobody had mentioned search engine optimization at the conference. Seemed like something that folks would be interested in and felt that OpenConcept had some recent experience to contribute to this. At the last minute the speed...

Toronto Drupal Camp

OpenConcept is pleased to be participating in the 2nd annual Toronto Drupal Camp . Ravi, Ethan & myself will be heading down to participate in workshops from other Drupal developers. Meet with other users and developers here in Ontario and get a better sense of how people are using this software. The community around Drupal is quite engaged and there have now been a number of conferences organized internationally to get together developers. International conferences have been held in Amsterdam , Brussels Vancouver, Portland , the Yahoo! Campus and this fall Barcelona . It was nice to see that the...

Drupal's Pony Power

The whole Drupal Song as featured on the Lullabot podcast made me think a bit more about help play a bit more with the culture of Drupal. We all know that Drupal is a great CMS that provides individuals and organizations with a scalable, user-friendly interface. But does it have pony power? Now we can say that with absolute certainty it does. I purchased a Konrad Pony T-Shirt from Angry Sheep Designs when I was in Halifax a month ago. It was popular and I had some requests for more My Little Pony styled products. I thought that a Drupal...

Why Unions Should Provide Free Websites to Their Locals

I want to start out by saying that this isn't just something that is an issue with unions and locals, but is also a challenge with any organization with member groups that end up needing to have a website. This could be riding associations for political parties like the NDP or local chapters of the Sierra Club . There are a number of reasons why national or regional organizations like these need to be investing in the net on behalf of their members. The easiest way to do this is to offer sub-domains to member organizations so that they can...

Critical Static Page Caching

Note: We've discontinued this process and are using Drupal's boost module as it now fairly effortlessly allows us to produce cached versions of all pages for anonymous users. Some day there will be a Drupal module that effortlessly allows users to build static caches of their entire site so that plain old HTML can be delivered to 95% of your visitors and you can choose the refresh rate that is appropriate for you. Most sites have old content on it that won't change but every few months and regardless of how many times it has been crawled it seems that...