Lost!

Leaching images is a nasty habit. If you don’t know what leaching is - it’s when you put an image on your page, but pull it from another website. Kind of like the WordPress logo in most templates - it pulls directly from WordPress in case they change the logo later - it gets updated across the world.

Anyway, the John McCain camp decided to leach an image on their MySpace page. The owner found out and decided to teach them a lesson instead of just killing the pull or the image. He basically took a menu and turned it into a campaign policy message about Gay Marriage. Check it out on Newsvine. Boy, I’d hate to be the webmaster of that site…

I’ve heard of this several times, but it seems that uberreview.com has a video on how to do it: Replacing your own laptop batteries…

This hit Slashdot about an hour or so ago and it just really hit a sore note in my book. Diebold has, yet again, made history by suing Massachusetts over a contract they LOST. Diebold firmly believes that they where the company that deserved the contract and want Mass to prove that Diebold actually lost the bid. This would be like me looking at Alfresco vs Sharepoint - choosing Alfresco and having Microsoft sue me because they lost the bid and thought their product was better.

Now, I understand how government contracts go, but I can’t believe Diebold actually thinks they’re going to make friends by doing this. Check out the story.

After writing for awhile, I decided that it would be best to break this into a 4 part series: Part 1: 1st impressions (this was a few weeks back) Part 2: Company Sales and Service, pricing and install. Part 3: Usability, Community feelings and customizing. Part 4: Support Experiences and overall thoughts.

First Thoughts
I’ve been custom coding Content Management Systems for awhile. I’ve worked with Mambo/Joomla, a little Drupal and a few others like PHPNuke, and even custom coded a few CMS’ for specific websites. But now I’m in a situation where we’re pricing a SharePoint Portal Server because there’s no point in reinventing the wheel for the hundredth time, not to mention it saves money. While the initial software (ie: The actual program.) isn’t that expensive compared to other software packages we’re looking at, the CAL’s (Computer Access License) are going to kill us by bringing the total for SPS and all the CALs being most of our budget for software for the year.

In attempting to do research on SharePoint vs Alfresco, I was quickly humbled by the fact that Google thinks that the best site for comparisons is my own site and even then, the article wasn’t a true comparison (Note: That story turned into Part 1). No one has really compared the two. I had stated in an earlier story that I would look over Alfresco and do a story on it, but it just so happens that I was able to merge both work and my own curiosity into one. Continue reading…

After getting my dream job (I work on a website that has a Google Rank better than my own), several things have happened over the last month. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll be leaving Germany to return back to the US, due to a job change on my wife’s side. While I don’t want to leave my job, I support my family in every way possible. Now, in preparation for this move in the next 3 months, I reactivated my resume on Monster (just Monster). I knew things would quickly get out of hand, but I was surprised to see how quickly. In 48 hours, I’ve received 5 recruitment emails, including one from….Microsoft themselves. Continue reading…