Bryan Ruby

Information Week has an interesting article about those involved in such online ventures as digg, del.icio.us, Zoot, and Six Apart's Movable Type. Basically, the article discusses how people have made their money off of blogging or providing the blog-like software and services.

Most people who pull down a paycheck dream of making a living at their hobby. For IT managers, the dream is more within reach than it is for most professionals, as their technical skills can give them a head start in building businesses on the Web. A supertalented few have even made fortunes.

Work continues for the release of Wordpress 2.0.4 and eventually Wordpress 2.1. The developers are planning a Wordpress bug hunt on Independence Day (in the United States). The following information was posted on the Wordpress Development blog:

"But unlike the emergence of the minicomputer and the server, the rise of the PC had special meaning for IT managers: It meant they were no longer in control. That Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet user was programming, whether the IT shop liked it or not."

- Computerworld, Editor Mitch Betts, 10 IT Developments of the Past 20 Years, May 22, 2006.

I don't care who you are. I don't care how much education or how little education you have. If your profession is in information technology (IT), you and I share the same exact thoughts, questions, and even dread toward this particular topic. The topic is user surveys.

So Earl Miles, tell us what you really think about Drupal's administrative menus:

Drupal’s actual administrative pages suck ass. It’s not just the organization that’s wrong, as I had actually thought going into this. Unfortunately, no, it’s worse than that. While there are some pages that are (by dint of their brevity) relatively good, there are other pages that are nearly unworkable. block administration, menu administration, module administration, access control administration are all headache-inducing pages.

The Google Adsense module for Drupal has been updated by 2bits. Since we use it here at CMS Report, we thought we would also talk about it here. Some of the new features include:

The local newspaper for Sioux Falls, SD contains an article about an online service called Feed Rinse. The service "can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more." According to the article, the service is making national headlines on their Feed Rinse product. I've never used the service, so I can't really give it thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some excerpts from the Argus Leader:

Those looking for SMF, a forum-based CMS, could not reach SMF's host server the past few days at Simple Machines. SMF's server was down for an extended period of time from July 22nd and 23rd. Thantos, one of the SMF developers, posted a message that only gave vague reasons for why there was a server outage:

The cause of the outage was the result of a non-technical issue involving our service provider. Failings happened on our both our part and their part. We have resolved the issue and are taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Most of us in IT are aware of the recent data thefts of personal information within the United States government. Over the past couple weeks the VA admitted that files containing personal data for more than 50,000 active duty and more than 26 million veterans was stolen. In related news it was also reported that the "Energy Department disclosed to Congress on Friday that it suffered a security breach from a hacker in September that compromised 1,500 personnel records".

With the above stories fresh in our minds, we have chosen an opinion piece by Frank Hayes as this week's IT Quote of the Week:

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We've been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet's filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org: