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  • Not getting anywhere…

    Mirco 11:06 on Friday, 22. May 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: administration, aperio, autofocus, blogs, changingroom, citydreams, consolidation, corporatemag, decisionexample, demo, design, elements, equilibrium, features, , folio, freemium, magazine, meganews, , nami, news, photoblog, portfolio, restructuring, thelatest, , undercon, , webdev,

    Remember I wrote something about restructuring my (currently 4) blogs and combine three of them into one?

    Not? well, it’s already been 4 months and I’ve not been getting anywhere close to that. Partly because of my lack of time between my working schedules, and part of my lack of experience with wordpress themes.

    The initial plan was to create a new theme that reflects the different parts of content I’ve been covering in these three blogs. currently I think it would be easier to take an existing Magazine style theme and tweak it to my needs, but I’m still in a decision phase.

    Here’s what I came up with until now:

    Freemium seems to be one of the most versatile themes currently out there. Lots of tutorials on how to customize this theme. But since it’s that popular, this would just lead to another boring blog layout.

    TheLatest is a magazine like new theme. Feature wise it has everything I’d need, so with a litte effort to spice up the dull color scheme this would have good potential. MegaNews is pretty much the same in over crowded. more and narrower columns and huge advertising spaces… which I don’t need at the moment.

    CorporateMag is a sleek contemporary blueish design. It has some nice features and probably need to be replaced with next years fashion. One thing that caught my eyes were the stretched images. Seems like it uses the same pictures for both the feature bar and the article header, which is slightly wider and though stretches the images out of proportion. I hope this is not intended and only a bug in the demo.

    The Unstandard does a good impression, and only needs some minor modification for the headline images. everything else in clean and very lightweight.

    Another clean theme is Equilibrium with a similar approach. Image header with a short text excerpt and support for featured content.

    A creative couple of themes would be Nami and City Dreams, although I’m not sure how much of re-coloring it will need to fit these two to my type of content.

    During these last months a seconds idea came to me. Why not take some of the photos I’m loading onto Flickr and make a separate photoblog. There’re some nice themes out there that would suit this idea.

    AutoFocus would support not only a simple photoblog but with the clean text article format also a more story telling or news themed scenario.

    Aperio is has similar features, but with it’s 4 column single post pages the text posts are displayed in a very narrow format that is not suited for longer posts.

    Folio Elements is a very good example for a Portfolio only theme. You can scroll through single photos with small text portions… nothing more.

    The Transition from one Blog to another has to be styled too, so here are two very beautiful examples of what to display in between blog releases:

    The Changing Room and UnderCon. Both support FeedBurner RSS and Email and are fully customizable.

     
  • CoreConfigurator for easier Windows Server Core configurations

    Mirco 15:33 on Tuesday, 1. April 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , administration, core, , , , , tools, windows server 2008

    CoreConfigurator is a basic GUI configuration utility for Windows Server Core 2008 configuration and management.

    It will ease some of the common administration tasks on a Core Server installation.

    You can download this tool here >> Microsoft Israel Blogs

     
  • Let's Face(book) it

    Mirco 8:00 on Monday, 12. November 2007 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: administration, antisocial, content, control, extremism, , , , racial, , spam

    dubios”…
    Born with no soul
    Lack of control
    Cut from the mold of the anti-social
    Plug them in and turn them on
    Process the data
    …”

    >> Papa Roach – Dead Cell (Infest / 2000)

    I’m not sure if they in reality were talking about Facebook.

    The more and more the site (and the hype) develops the more I get the feeling it’s going terribly wrong. Being member of two networks and several group I noticed two things which really start getting me pissed.

    One is that the corporate use is not used at all. My company has Networks in several social communities and the Facebook network is the least active although biggest by number. This could be caused by the members (yeah, I know: user generated content) and be limited to my company, but I don’t really see a point in using Facebook as a corporate platform, especially with all the tracking and profile related advertising.

    Second. There simply is no control of the content in the other networks.

    Well, you could think if someone spams the discussion boards with cracked computer game CD keys and advertises websites selling these keys, the threads would be removed and the account disabled. At least I did.

    If you report the threads, they are deleted some days after, but the account stays active and just posts some more advertisements.

    On the other hand you have some, lets call them… Bob, flooding the boards with any kind of religious, extremist, racial, antisemite, younameit content and you can do nothing about it other than report it to Facebook and wait for nothing to happen or abandon the group or network.

    Usually I’m not a quitter, but at the current state the Facebook system is in they can keep it!

    Like the song said, take a stupid idea, create a hype, drag the people in and sell off to the highest bidder.

     
  • ITology

    Mirco 15:35 on Sunday, 11. November 2007 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: administration, approach, , , , maintanance, , open source

    “We use Windows/Linux/Unix/MacOS/Oracle/DB2/SAP/etc.”

    “It has to be OpenSource”

    “We don’t use Microsoft”

    Do any of these sound familiar?

    In the last few years IT seemed to have developed an almost religious approach to solutions and tools. Especially with the growth of the open source movement.

    Don’t get me wrong. I like open source software and use a lot of it… at home.

    When I ask the CIOs and administrators I’m consulting about the why I usually get the “because it’s free” answer. OK, companies these days cut the IT budgets and don’t want to spend any money if possible while at the same time demanding an upkeep or improvement of the current service level.

    Using open source software can help cutting cost, if you’re willing to do without support or warranty. Another thing are the varieties of different open source license agreements. Some of them simply won’t apply to a business environment.

    Using ideology or the most current hype is the wrong approach to any problem.

    Start at the solution. Define what you currently need to solve and take your current IT environment into planning. Building a new solution from scratch isn’t the best idea, because you probably already have some of the components you’ll need to implement your solution.

    Example: We were consulting a new customer who had some issues with the administrators workload. OK, that’s not very unusual. Most managers will lay off some IT personnel before decommissioning unused hard-/software to save money.

    Well, it turned out they had no automated installation process for the workstations, no software deployment, no patch management, no document management, … and no budget.

    At this point as a consultant you have two options: Pack you bag and go home, because no budget means no money for new contracts… or find out what they already have to reduce their workload, and cost structure, which will free money from the IT budget.

    I usually tend to use option b.

    Why? Because this is why they called us in the first place. They just didn’t know.

    Most companies have a Microsoft Windows based environment. Yeah, I know they’re evil.. just like Google, Facebook, TimeWarner, Fox and George Bush jr. but in this case actually makes all of the problems listed above very easy to address… and the best part is, it’s totally free software.

    Free? Yep, almost everything you need to solve this is already built into Windows Server, so the only invest in the solution is the time to install and configure.

    • Automated installation is provided by RIS, ADS, WDS. RIS is a component of Windows 2000 and 2003 (up to SP1), ADS is part of the AIK collection which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. WDS is the new service which was installed on ‘Windows Server 2003 with SP2 and is dedicated for installing Vista. All you need is a server (which is no DHCP) with a second partition with about 4GB of free storage.
    • Patch Management can be done with WSUS, although it’s only for Microsoft products it will reduce the manual administration tasks on the workstations significantly. All you need is a Windows Server 2003 you can install an IIS on and a SQL Server 2005 (if you have on good, if not you can use the Express Edition in small and medium environments). Just keep in mind that you will have to authorize the downloaded patches before they can be installed.
    • Document Management is more difficult. But as long as you only want to keep project documents organized and want to get everyone using the same document templates… why not use SharePoint Services? Like the other two it’s free and well documented and most importantly easier to manage than a loose fileserver with shared folders.

    We could have tried selling some overpriced enterprise solution or opt with an all open source system, but using what they already have is the best approach.

    The administrators don’t have to learn an all new software of operating system, but instead learn how to use their operating system more effectively. It will save them a lot of time which had been wasted with manual administrative work and allows them to spend more time on the really important tasks.

    It’s basically like IBM said: “Find out how to make money with things you already have”, although I don’t think they intended to give you an almost cost free solution.

     
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