cmurray.org

I have been really digging the Wordpress iPhone app for a while now. Today, while waiting for my car to be worked on, I installed and configured Wordbook to publish my blog posts to Facebook, all from the little screen on my phone. This is a test.

Okay, I don’t have a Kindle. But I noticed just today that I can download Kindle books from Amazon and read them on my iPhone.

First, I download the iPhone app that Kindle provides. Then I go to Amazon and find a bunch of free books, just to try it out. I download “The Cook’s Illustrated How-to-Cook Library: An Illustrated Step-by-step guide to Foolproof Cooking.” I didn’t find a lot of free stuff worth downloading, but again, I’m just trying it out.

Sure enough, the download works and the title appears in the iPhone app. I am very pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to read. The screen is clear and sharp, very crisp text and illustrations (thankfully, I do know the proper way to carve out an avocado). A simple flick of the screen turns the page, a tap retreives the menu items.

For what it is, I can easily see reading a book on this thing. I’m sure there’s all sorts of reasons why the Kindle is better, but I already have the iPhone and the app is free. Bravo!

This last week saw the release of the new ITSMA website (www.itsma.com). To the casual visitor, the site remains largely unchanged: a few style alterations here and there. But it’s the backend that got the major overhaul. Until a few months ago, ITSMA was a site comprising thousands of static pages and some fairly complex e-commerce functions. And as you might have guessed, it now lives within WordPress.

It’s safe to say that with this and a couple of other recent projects, we have pushed the limits of what WP is meant to do. But in doing this, we’ve not only demonstrated that at it’s core WP is a fully capable CMS, we’ve also learned some very cool things as well (especially regarding the use of custom fields).

One complexity of this project was the amount of data required to migrate. While most of the pages were static HTML, much of the data actually was duplicated in a database, which we exported to spreadsheets to organize and then import into the MySQL database in WP. (When migrating data into WP, you’re not only pulling in the article content, you’re breaking apart the metadata and spreading that across related tables.) This activity was further complicated by the large number of categories and tags to be applied to each article, and also by the number of authors involved.

Another complexity was migrating the existing design templates to the new platform. If you’ve visitied the ITSMA site, you can see that it is an extremely tight and well-designed site (designed and built by the infinitely talented Maria Lindberg). Tearing those templates apart and rebuilding them with WP functionality inside them was an exhaustive chore.

You may have noticed my recent ranting on using WP on a Windows platform. That was inspired by this site. This is the only site currently in our roster that runs on IIS. So many complications and issues that generally are not a problem when running in a Linux environment. Then again, we’ve learned a lot and solved a lot of problems for next time.

In terms of e-commerce, we essentially have two platforms running here: content lives within the WP system, but we’ve left in place the Windows-based purchasing system (this was an extremely costly system to ITSMA and not something we wanted to rebuild, at least not in Phase I).

I have to thank my old CIO.com colleague Chris Koch for bringing me in on this project. I was excited to work with him again, and to see if WP could handle this heavy load (and it does, beautifully). I’m very grateful to the entire ITSMA team (Maria especially) for their support and patience in what turned out to be a project larger in scope than any of us expected.

If you’re going away for Easter, don’t forget to leave a note.

Don’t forget to upgrade your Google Analytics code. This report points out that nearly 40% of sites using the code are using the older version. If you are using the old code and do not upgrade, you metrics may go dark. Anyone can contact me if they need help with this.

It occurred to me recently that maintaining both a personal blog and a business blog is foolish. Therefore, with the launch of my new business and the new site, I am going to retire the cmurray.org blog and write exclusively at The Northborough Group blog. This gives me the opportunity to continue writing about the things I do and enjoy about my work, but also provides a communication channel with my customers and partners.

So, if you’ve been kind enough to read here, and even kinder to grab my feed, I’d ask that you simply replace your bookmarks and feed addresses and join us here: The Northborough Group blog and it’s RSS Feed. Thanks for all of you who have read and commented in the past; let’s continue the party!

I’m driving my youngest daughter to school yesterday. We drive by the University of Phoenix complex out on Route 9 to get to her place. On and around the campus are dozens of geese constantly milling about, feeding on the grass, wading in the brook, and otherwise going about their business while the cars and traffic go about their’s. I’ve seen many times where the geese crossing the road to the other glade held up traffic for several minutes. And that’s what happened yesterday.

Sophia and I were watching the geese orderly making their way from the top of the campus to the glade across the street. We stopped and watched gleefully, as did the oncoming traffic opposite us. From behind me, a car comes flying up, makes a hard bank around me, and continues on toward the flock. Having plenty of time to see what was going on in front of us, it continues at full speed, taking down one of the older geese in its path. It hit the poor bird head on and even crushed part of his back. I couldn’t believe it as it continued on, without slowing at all, the brake lights never once lighting. I swore loudly, but then quickly redirected my daughter’s attention to the little geese formed to our right in the grass. That poor bird lay there, his long head bobbing and swaying, swooning, until he collapsed and fell over. The other birds looked on for a moment, and then made their way to the other side. I was truly shaken when I dropped off my daughter, and for the rest of the day, to be honest. When I drove back out that way, I could see the poor bird laying there while the rest of the flock stood, all in a row safely in the grass, looking helplessly at their lost comrade. Truly awful and sad.

I want to introduce a new blog to the internets tubes. My oldest and best friend, Rodger Coleman, is finally writing and I urge everyone to check him out here: http://nuvoid.blogspot.com/.

Rodger and I have been friends since childhood. We went to the Conservatory together, played in bands together, and have shared most of life’s ups and downs together. Rodger is out here writing about what he knows best: music. Apart from being a truly gifted musician (piano and guitar), Rodger knows more about technology and the music industry than anyone I know. He also has one of the greatest record collections around (including countless hours of Dead tapes).

I have been telling Rodger for years that he should write. I am thrilled he finally is doing so and I check his feed often for updates.

This is post using mo:Blog on a Treo 700P. It was remarkably simple to setup. There are more features than are demonstrated here (file uploads, for example). Pretty cool.