Matt Henderson's Blog

Today we (my buddy Arto and I. Ok, Arto with me looking over his shoulder) made some major under-the-hood changes to this blog, namely, migrating from the Wordpress blogging system, to Drupal. In particular, Drupal version 6.

Why the change?

• Capability. Drupal is an amazingly capable platform. For example, I’d like to have a content type on this blog called “route”. For articles of that type, I want to include some common data elements, such as a GPS track file, that can be displayed on a Google map, and downloaded by others interested in following my route. In Drupal, I can do this by creating a new content type (node type in geek-speak).

  So in this respect, Drupal is quite a future-proof system (relative to the others), in terms of having the infrastructure to do things in the future, that you didn’t foresee today. (Not to mention some cool technologies coming the Drupal way…)

• Eating my own dog food. My company has been working for the past year or so developing (in collaboration with the US government) an advanced communications and collaboration platform, based on the Drupal platform. All of our work on that project gets released back into the Drupal community as open-source, and so I’ll be directly benefiting from our own work.

• Available support. As a consequence of the above, I’m surrounded by people every day that can resolve nearly any weblog issue I might have. :-)

There may be some initial bumps (I think anyone subscribed to my blog will see the first ten posts marked as unread when they refresh the feed), the migration appears to have gone very smoothly.

Growing up in the US, I remember how annoying it was to receive commercial sales calls on the telephone late in the evening, when the family was sitting around trying to enjoy some quality time together. This problem was later solved (mostly) through the introduction of the “Do Not Call,” registry — a legislated service which marketers must consult before they can call you. If your name is on the “Do Not Call” list, it’s illegal for them to call you.

A similar problem exists today with paper catalogs. American consumers are simply inundated with unsolicited, undesired paper catalogs from a multitude of merchants. While receiving these catalogs can be just as annoying as receiving the marketing phone calls, there’s a deeper, more concerning problem. The production of the 19 billion paper catalogs sent each year in the US takes a huge toll on the environment.

19 BILLION. We throw around terms daily like million, billion, trillion, without really having a feel for the magnitude of those numbers. Consider this, it takes 11 days for a million seconds to pass. It takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass! So, 19 billion catalogs — that’s a lot of wasted paper!

Earlier this year, my company MakaluMedia was offered an opportunity to participate in a project backed by some of the US’ largest environmental and non-profit organizations to help address this project. Today represents the culmination of several months of hard work on this project, and I’m proud to announce the launch of Catalog Choice:

http://catalogchoice.org

Catalog Choice is a free service, that allows people to find and opt-out of the undesired catalogs they receive. The concept is very simple; you sign up, search for a catalog you receive, and opt-out. We take care the rest, and in about six weeks’ time, you should no longer receive the catalog.

I’ve written more about the project over at our company blog.

…then by all means, have our company design your corporate logo!

This past year has been really great at MakaluMedia.

Not too long ago we launched a site — Fincalena.com — representing a milestone in what for me was a really interesting project. For anyone interested, I published an article about it over at Summit, our company weblog.

The Building of Fincalena

Just a little note about the launch of IRMA24.com, the small website we just launched for Jesus Cabello, the electrician that has just made the jump to self-employment, and who did a great job for us in the electrical installations of our new office in Marbella, Spain.

Our company has a little feedback form on its website, and any submitted data is forwarded to me. Today, I received what must be the most interesting feedbacks ever:

Dear Prime Minister of The UK,

A lot of The SMS got Stuck in The Air without Reach (The Whole World!).

One of our recent customers, Outer Level, has written up a weblog entry describing the process of working with MakaluMedia designer Mike Rohde in the development of a new corporate logo.

Technorati Tags: design, logo

John Engler talks about the salaries of small business owners and his uncle estimates that most small business owners pay themselves a salary equivalent to 10% of gross revenues. I just made a rough calculation, and my own salary is about 7% of MakaluMedia’s gross revenues, so that’s probably a decent rule of thumb.

Between reading John’s blog, and Scott Johnson’s blog, I feel motivated to write some articles about starting and running a business.

I’ve nearly decided to use WordPress to implement our company’s intranet. I’m thinking that I’ll use the key/value meta facility to assign content to groups, and then add some http authentication to provide selective visibility to that content by group. What I can’t quite decide it whether to use “Pages” for content, or categorized “Posts”.

If you have any ideas, opinion, experience with this, I’d love to hear about it.

PS: I considered MediaWiki, but found it a bit cumbersome to work with.