Mobile Hippie

UplinkEarth managed to make an enemy out of me today. I don’t use them for my personal blog or any new sites. Frankly, I’m not using Coldfusion much anymore and I don’t particularly care for Windows servers. I rely on Dreamhost and Media Temple for my hosting needs these days. (Yeah, I know that Dreamhost decided to charge me for 2009 a year in advance a couple of months ago, but they fixed the issue and my site was never down—just my available balance on my credit card.)

Hey UplinkEarth, I know it can be hard work to provide good support for a cheap price, but what the heck! Today, I was treated to the following issues:

• The database does not reflect the data that was present as recently as last week. All event data is gone for the moment.
• The files seem to be at least a month old—I had recently updated a couple of files with new code, so I know what they should have looked like. 
• Several files were not restored to their proper directory outside of the webroot (www). My site relied on that data as it was written in Coldfusion and used an application.cfm file, components, custom tags and a bit of magic to serve up a pretty decent custom app.
• Also the “shared” folder is no longer mapped to the shared SSL cert that was related to the authentication scripts on the site.

In the course of handing off a project to another company, I just had the opportunity to say “just build them Boxes and Arrows on Drupal and they’ll be thrilled.” While I was merely using hyperbole to make a point, it got be thinking. What do they use to deliver their content?

The answer is PublicSquare. This is a subscription-based service for creating an online magazine with a community component. I’ve always like the layout and general functionality of Boxes and Arrows and now I know what they use to serve up their content.

I plan to look into this a bit more as the idea of a subscription-based magazine CMS intruiges me. I would have signed up for an account today, but it turns out that they have an expired security certificate on their account sign up page. I wonder if they know that?  (It expired on December 6, 2007.)

Flock Browser - The Social Web Browser

Flock bills itself as the browser for people who like to be connected. Really, I just wanted a browser that I could run the Web Developer Toolbar in now that Firefox Beta 3 has disabled that valuable add-on.

I just took a look the features and FAQ for the new Movable Type Community Solution.

The community solution boasts the following:

• Member registration with extended user profiles
• Forums
• Community blogs
• Custom fields
• Recommendation engine
• Sort-by-popularity

The feature set overlaps heavily with Clearspace X from Jive Software.  I’ve seen Clearspace up close, and I think it is a great product, but a community site based on the code of Movable Type 4—with its extensive plugin architecture and significant user base—could be a significant competitor.  Equally compelling for smaller organizations would the combination of WordPress and BBPress as both are completely opensource—free as in beer, but arguably less stable due to the more rapid release cycle. The growth of solutions in this space has been rapid. There seems to be plenty of room in the blog/community solution space for more players. It should be an interesting market to watch grow over the next couple of years.  

I just took a first look at Mint, a new financial management tool that just won a place in the TechCrunch40. I am impressed. I’ll follow up with a more in depth review once I’ve worked up the nerve to share my online banking information with them…that’s a big leap for me. Until then, here are a few salient points:

• Fast. Signup is quick and easy and the tool itself it lightning quick.
• Free. They fund themselves by presenting you with offers from banks and credit card companies who can beat our your current interest rate. You don’t have to accept any of these offers to take advantage of the free account.
• Easy to use. Mint downloads all of your transactions through your banks online services. (The list of banks is impressive. All three banks I use for checking, savings or credit are in their database.) Once transactions are downloaded, their algorithm goes to town figuring out how you spent your money and giving you shiny reports and pie charts. Mmm, pie charts.
• Claims to be secure. Sorry, this is something I am hesitant on. They appear legit in every way. The banks trust them. They are TRUSTe certified and they use a third party service called Yodlee to verify your account credentials so they don’t have to store them on their servers.

So the only thing that really scares me about this service is how much they will know about you in such a short period of time. They will know where you live and exactly where you spend your money. This is even scarier than RFID in some ways… but it is also the one thing I can’t stand sinking time into on a weekly basis.

I have been using either Quicken or Moneydance for about 12 years now. I rely on that software to tell me how well or how poorly I’m doing financially at any given moment. However, it is a lot of work and a constant headache. Especially since I have to manually download a QIF from one of my financial institutions and “import” it to get transactions. Such a PITA.

If I get up the nerve to go deeper into this, I will post screenshots. (No, I will not include my transaction info.)

Campaign Monitor’s September 2007 Newsletter is packed with great stuff. Besides the design gallery, which is always a treat, the newsletter highlights David Griener’s treatise on the state of email standards (great read) and throws out an article on email authentication–which is so very timely. Don’t get me started on the new suppression list feature–handy–and the new women’s t-shirts! (Okay, so I’m not really in need of the women’s t-shirts, but I’m sure they make someone happy.)

Jive Software just released version 1.6 of Clearspace. Congratulations guys.

FreshBooks is hiring again.

This is quite possibly the most inventive call for applicants I have ever seen. Proof that with a burgeoning company and a copy of iMovie you can make yourself look like fools, but still come off in a positive light.

Nice job FreshBooks.

Disclaimer: I use and love this product.