The small firm conundrum

February 10, 2008

Small firms face particular challenges when it comes to deciding what business to take or leave. For example I recently received and offer to do some work for an amount that was much lower than prevailing rates. Of course a chunk of money can be enticing but doing the right thing is also important for small businesses.

In another instance a solo attorney I'm familiar with was faced with a similar conundrum. A large company with lots of cash came to this firm to clean up the web and remove references to the questionable activities of one of the company's beneficiaries. The character who they wanted to help had a record a yard long with endeavors including felony convictions for armed robbery and twisted tails of conning hard-earned money from honest people. On one hand if the proprietor of a small firm took a step back and looked at the situation as a third party that taking a to clean up the reputation of some one who has repeatedly abused the public trust is unethical. Worse yet doing so for a pile of money, no matter the size, means that one's ethics are for sale. However tempting some extra cash might be firms, especially small firms that depend on their reputations, are wise to steer clear of such compromises.

AdSense module gets awesome API

February 9, 2008

The wonderful Drupal AsSense module received a great new update tonight. Ironically one of the notes I made on the plane was to look into whether a universal patch for hiding the currently selected AdSense ID from the user profile made sense. It probably wouldn't have made much sense. Instead I came home to find out that the AdSense module now has a great API and modules can do all sorts of things. In addition there are a plethora of options for integrating with UserPoints, setting ID's by content type or taxonomy terms. All and all an outstanding piece of work.

According to the post the download will be here. Upgrading is pretty straight forward. Remove your old AsSense module and install the new one. A visit to the admin/build/modules page will reveal that you need to enable one of the two included modules, either basic or revenue-sharing.

I've been working recently on a presentation about open source software. This great upgrade will be included as a prime example of where open source and the community behind projects like Drupal make software better than many a closed-source shop.

Check iPhone minutes using only SMS messages

February 9, 2008

While I love my iPhone it has been frustrating that there wasn't a quick way to check minutes from SMS. The phone tells you there are two ways to check minutes (which amount to the same thing). One method is to navigate to the phone preferences, then AT&T and finally to the button to check your minutes which actually sends the *646# code to get the SMS message. So there is obviously the option of adding a "View minutes" user to the contact list and bringing it up that way. For me the annoyance has always been that I wanted to send an SMS to get this information.

Preview of the Forum Thread module

February 3, 2008

Forum Thread ModulePart of devoting my professional undertakings to Drupal has been to begin doing some more serious module development. Thus we have a preview of the Forum Thread module. It is a module that I'm developing for a sponsor and will be releasing on Drupal.org in the next couple of weeks. The design is to take Drupal's standard forums and in the most Drupalish way possible provide threaded forums that are more similar to the traditional forum look of My Little Forum or mailman archives. Having looked at several of the existing forum solutions I didn't care for the "bolt-on" nature of the forums. It seems it should be possible to do it with native Drupal forums and without adding any additional data to the database.

The price of Red Dot content management system on Google

February 1, 2008

Some of the writing I've been doing on content management systems led me to do a search that produces a funny result. Search for price of Red Dot content management system on Google. The top result as of today is this December 2002 issue of Smart Content newsletter published by the Red Dot folks. As it stands at the time of this writing it is a page with a grand total of zero links on it. Yup. There are URL's in the text that one could copy and paste into a web browser but there is not a single link to click on. At first I was just put off because there was no link in the header to take me back to the home page but a quick search of the source shows not a single link anywhere.

Perhaps somebody should get them a copy of Don't Make Me Think.

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