Deeds

Every year, I like to slow down my technology usage for a few weeks. I don't think as human beings we were meant to be immersed in the huge quantity of digital information that we are today. From the moment I am awake to the moment I go to bed, my body is being loaded information. The email, cell phone, and the Internet seem to have a never ending presence in the lives of us IT folks. I don't have much control with removing technology from my work day, but I do have options in my personal life. It's time for me to unplug and officially begin my annual Technology Break.

This month marks a new milestone for CMS Report, the blog, news, and aggregated website turned three years old.  When I wrote the first post, I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to take the site, but I knew my enthusiasm for Web content management systems would get me wherever I needed to go.  Three years later, CMSReport.com has seen over 1,700 original articles posted at the site.  Pleasing to me, not all of these posts were written by me as I have always appreciated the contributions of content by others here at the site.

CMS Report and I now have a Twitter account.  This adventure into micro-blogging reflects my willingness to be easily coerced into doing things I normally wouldn't do after long months of winter cabin fever here in South Dakota.

Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of

Occasionally, I see a post that I have written as a reference in a white paper, a book, or somewhere else online.  I actually started CMSReport.com as a place for me to learn more about Web content management systems and information systems.  Whenever someone references CMS Report it signals that we have gone full circle where someone is also learning from me.  There is not a more awesome feeling than this.

One thing I have yet to achieve is being a legitimate reference at Wikipedia.  Until now!  CMS Report is being referenced on the wiki page for Frog CMS.

A month ago, I started observing an increase in traffic from a relatively new aggregation site called Alltop.  CMS Report is now being featured in Alltop's content management page which is dedicated to "all the top content management news".  Alltop recently expanded the number of topics they cover and I surmise that content management is one of those new topics.   While there are already a number of news aggregation sites referring their readers back to CMSReport.com (and if you're one of them...we thank you), Alltop is special.     

What makes Alltop so special? First of all, the site is a project associated with Guy Kawasaki.  Guy Kawasaki has a history with Apple but he is one of those successful IT guys with so much confidence in himself that his time at Apple alone doesn't define him.  If you check out his blog on a regular basis you'll come to understand what I'm trying to write here.

Secondly, Alltop is special because it was developed by a neighbor, Electric Pulp.  Electric Pulp is based in my city, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a lot of successful tech companies with national presence to be found in Sioux Falls.  Go figure that one out.

There is so much that I want to do here at CMS Report, but my time has been limited these past couple weeks.  Some things that have been going on in my world:

1. As a judge for Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Awards, I gave the publishing company my vote on the "Most Promising" CMS.  I dedicated a couple weekends to get the job done and I plan to post my reviews after Packt announces the winners (October 28).
2. I made the decision to drop my reseller account for Dakota Hosting.  The number of clients I host are few and over the past two years I've only been breaking even.
3. My post on Dell's Inspiron Mini 12 netbook brought in quite a bit of traffic to the site.  It looks like I may be a couple weeks off in my prediction for when this new netbook will finally hit the market.
   

During the past week, you may have noticed that I'm posting less at CMS Report. I love the opportunity I've been given to blog about content management systems and pointing readers to the great articles I've read at other sites on the Internet.  Discussing information systems and information technology is not only part of my career, but it is also my hobby.  However, when the weather warms, the trees grow their leaves, and children playing outside can be heard...I yearn for a break from technology.  The other me beckons to spend time camping, hiking, going to baseball games, and simply being outdoors.

As most Drupal users already know by now, Drupal 6 is currently at a Release Candidate 3 stage of development. For the Drupal community, this is a time when the developers are wanting people to test, report, and help fix any bugs found in these development version of the Drupal software. At this stage of development, Drupal.org still does not recommend Drupal 6 to be ran on the production server.

As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.