I have been blogging for many years. During that time I have used many other platforms including hosted software from BlogCity. TypePad, and Blogger. I also used Moveable Type briefly and a highly customized version of Joomla! (before that MamboCMS). Last fall I switched to WordPress as my primary blog platform. Though I haven’t been bowled over by WordPress I have come to the conclusion that it is the best blogging platform for me because it’s easy-to-use, has the widest variety of features, extensible, and it’s open source (with a thriving community of developers– over 90 developers were credited with contributing to this release).

Yesterday the long awaited and somewhat delayed WordPress 2.5 was released. Today, I updated my installation today and though I had a few problems the upgrade to the new version was definitely worth it.

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Technorati Tags: Blog, compatibility, Google Analytics, Gregarious, Joomla!, Open Source, plugins, Popularity Contest, review, Software, WordPress

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienating the community that so far has driven their success.  

Despite being the owner of the Drupal brand and employing the project lead Dries Buytaert, Acquia has to figure out how to balance their commercial concerns as well as the care and feeding of the vibrant Drupal community.  Luckily on the announcement of their funding Dries is saying all the right things:

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment,because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we’re going to do our part. We’ll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc.

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Technorati Tags: Acquia, Alfresco, Drupal, Hunter S. Thompson, Joomla!, marketing, Open Source, SugarCRM

It’s that time of year again where I go through a number of new year rituals. That includes those for work. That includes trying to get my office in order, clearing my inbox, and catching up with my correspondence. I also adhered to my personal rituals derived from my Pennsylvania Dutch roots and ate my pork and sauerkraut for luck. Plus I made a few personal resolutions that I will no doubtedly break by the end of January.

I thought I would make a few technology/blogging resolutions for the year and see how they pan out.

1. Become a Better Blogger – I like to blog, it’s nice to share my opinions but one thing I would like to do is provide better content that is written better, spelled correctly, and effectively communicate my ideas. I also hope to keep a more frequent posting schedule.
2. Devote More Time to the Open Management Consortium – I co-founded the Open Management Consortium in 2006 and I think we were successful in helping highlight the opportunity for IT professionals to improve their infrastructure by using open source technology. However, I think our time to make some more concrete progress is here. Yesterday, we launched a beta of a more collaborative web site for our organization with the help of the Dawn Foster folks at Jive Software. I hope to demonstrate some tangible progress on this front this year. 
3. Write More – I used to write quite a bit, published a book and have been the editor of a few trade mags. I find writing to be cathartic and is often a good way for me to vent or work out an idea. I would love to write something more substantial this year, perhaps an eBook.
4. Improve My Website – For years I was a Joomla! user and blogged using that software (though it’s more suited for content management then for blogging). I have been using WordPress for a few months now and hope to get things as polished as they once were with Joomla!
5. Produce a Podcast – I love to listen to podcasts. I would love to create a podcast or series of podcasts that highlight Zenoss Core or other technology issues.

So Happy New Year to all and good luck with all your own New Year’s Resolutions. 

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Joomla!, New Year's Resolutions, Open Management Cosnortium, WordPress

When I type content in Joomla! I had gotten javascript security errors from the Rich Text Editor (RTE), Here’s how to fix it.

For Windows:

1. Quit Mozilla. If you have Quick Launch running (in Windows, an icon in the toolbar), quit that too.
2. Find your Mozilla profile directory. On Windows, this is often located in c://WINNT/Profiles//Application Data/Mozilla.
3. Open the user.js file from that directory in a text editor. If there’s no user.js file, create one.
4. Add these lines to user.js:

   "1">user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "allowclipboard");user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites", "http://www.yourservername.com");user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy", "allAccess");user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste", "allAccess");

5. Save the file, and restart Mozilla. The Clipboard buttons should now function.

For Linux Shutdown Firefox and then do as instructed above.However in Linux the Firefox preferences folder is in a different place, mine is located in  /home/$username/.mozilla/firefox/default then locate the prefs.js and add the lines from above to the bottom of the file. I didn’t need to create or add a user.js to my installation for the problem to cease but perhaps you may.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Joomla!, Mozilla, Rich Text Editor

When I type content in Joomla! I had gotten javascript security errors from the Rich Text Editor (RTE), Here’s how to fix it. 

For Windows:

1. Quit Mozilla. If you have Quick Launch running (in Windows, an icon in the toolbar), quit that too.
2. Find your Mozilla profile directory. On Windows, this is often located in c://WINNT/Profiles/<your Windows login>/Application Data/Mozilla.
3. Open the user.js file from that directory in a text editor. If there’s no user.js file, create one.

4. Add these lines to user.js:

   <font size="1">user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "allowclipboard");user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites", "http://www.yourservername.com");user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy", "allAccess");user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste", "allAccess");</font>

5. Save the file, and restart Mozilla. The Clipboard buttons should now function.

For Linux

Shutdown Firefox and then do as instructed above.However in Linuxthe Firefox preferences folder is in a different place, mine is locatedin  /home/$username/.mozilla/firefox/defaultthen locate the prefs.js and add the lines from above to the bottom ofthe file. I didn’t need to create or add a user.js to my installationfor the problem to cease but perhaps you may.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Joomla!, Mozilla, Rich Text Editor