The Frugalist

In the very simplest of terms:

Plone is to your Website

what

Windows/Linux/MacOS are to your Computer

Plone is not a website builder, though it is very often used that way. Plone is a world-class content management system (CMS) that can be used over the internet much like you use a local area network (LAN) to work within your office or home.

Because Plone is completely web-oriented it is usually accessed with a web browser and it operates like an advanced, dynamic website. For that reason Plone can be used to create anything from a very simple business website to a very large, feature-rich social networking community.

Underneath Plone is Zope, a very sophisticated webapp server developed entirely in a state-of-the-art, pure object-oriented language called Python. Plone itself is written in Python too. Python is widely used by web/development experts like Google, Rackspace, Industrial Light and Magic, AstraZeneca, Honeywell, and many others…

All three of these technologies come from large, active, open source communities: plone.org, zope.org and python.org respectively.

Some of the reasons why this is very important to you are:

• the developers created this software for their own daily use, in the real world
• these technologies are NOT developed and licensed as commercial products
• by necessity this software is tested brutally and errors tend to get fixed quickly
• you are never tied exclusively to any one vendor or company
• the system is completely customizable and scalable to meet your future needs
• complete standards compliance means your site will stay current and viable

The ‘future-proof’ nature of the Plone/Zope/Python stack is just one its many enticing benefits. Even better, the licensing of these technologies guarantees free and open distribution which means anyone can afford to use it, and can do so without fear that it may someday vanish.

The fact that the developers use the system themselves and their total lack of financial demands means that all Plone/Zope/Python development is motivated by real integrity and a need to do things right, not to turn a buck.

It also means, for you, instead of paying massive license fees for the software, you will only pay for the server resources and the technical expertise you need to put the system into use, then maintain and support it.

And make no mistake: The acronym ‘CMS’ is already being misused to describe site-builders and blogware, but Plone is the real deal. Organizations as diverse as NASA, Oxfam, eBay, Trolltech, Nokia, Utah State University, the CIA and Novell use Plone for content management.

Plone is very robust and has been gaining wide acclaim for years, well before most other CMS products got off the ground.  One partial list of plone sites is in itself several dozens of pages long and by July 20, 2007 Plone had already surpassed its one millionth download.

For a system of this size, with this flexibility and of this quality the savings are nearly incalculable. No small or medium sized business could expect to develop a system of this magnitute and most small businesses could not afford to license anything like it.

In a very real way Plone gives you a multi-million dollar software team, virtually for free.

This may not be new to twitter, but it is the first I have seen of it.

Twitter accounts are being used to feed adverts/links under false pretenses. The accounts are created with profile names of famous people (Namely Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) and are not in fact the real people, but rather a link feed.

They spread simply by following you in hopes you will be curious and follow them back. The problem is that there are in fact many legitimate famous people who are using twitter so you will need to use some discretion.

If you use twirl you can easily view a person’s profile (and recent tweets) without having to follow them first. The scammers appear to be one ad link after another.

It’s not clear to me if there is any security risk or not or whether this is simply an annoying link feed. It may be possible for them to monitor your tweets for information about you, though I doubt they are (yet) that sophisticated.

At any rate, I thought I would advise those of you within my reach that if a famous billionaire decides to follow you, it MIGHT not actually be the real person.  Drats, eh?

Live well and tweet safely,

Ian

Facebook is redesigning the profile, but we will not see it until spring. Meanwhile here is my take on how it aught to be and I am keen to get your feedback.

First, here are a few points of contention I have with the current profiles.

• the new privacy settings are a good idea but not very usable - especially for those with many many ‘friends’
• we are in varying degrees of conflict about how much personal vs professional information to share, since we have an ‘all in one’ profile.
• those of us who wish to keep a more ‘professional’ business image are having to resist/ignore much of the ‘fun’ side of facebook - or having to keep our business contacts on LinkedIn instead.

As a facebook user here is what I want to do:

• First: my main profile should be ONLY for information I expect to share with all ‘contacts’ (aka friends)
• Each item on the main profile should be marked for it’s level of privacy (such as ’show to all’, ‘groups and friends’, ‘friends only’… etc.) - [much like it already is]
• I then want to organize my contacts (friends) into subgroups at my discretion (ex: social, religious, associates, employers, family.. etc). [note: this feature has recently been added]
• For each subgroup I want a ’subprofile’ that is information items added to the main profile for people in this subgroup (only).
• Each subprofile item should also be marked for privacy like the main profile items are.
• Members of multiple subgroups would see a merged profile: the main profle plus all of the appropriate items (as per privacy) from the subgroups.
• I must be able to view my own profile:

exactly as each subgroup would see it

as if viewed from different places (ex: for each of the privacy settings)

as any specific contact would see it

and be able to edit it ‘in place’ if need be

I personally think this would be much more intuitive for everyone and would provide reasonably granular control over profile information. My business associates, romantic interest, church and family could all see the information most relevant (or appropriate) for them.

Perhaps even your facebook apps could be added per subgroup (and privacy level) if you wanted to keep some things segregated. Mini feed and notes etc. could also be filtered according to the profile.

In the longer term I also think that a profile structure could become universal

• I only one profile/subprofile structure to maintain
• I want it to work across all my contacts - perhaps via OpenID, etc.
• I want it safe and secure - perhaps only on my own device(s)

So… that being said: What do YOU think?

Just hours after posting my article recommending the latest Safari browser I started hearing about problems with Flash sites and possibly others, so I created a fresh, default install of 3.1 for XP/Vista (without Quicktime) and I went looking for trouble.

Where to? Well, the Flash website seemed a good place to start. At the Macromedia page I was told, “You have version 9,0,115,0 installed”. Ok, good to know, but there wasn’t any flash on the page and the Macromedia.com default page just forwarded me to adobe.com.

But voila, the adobe site has a flash banner promoting Acrobat Reader. The presentation ran fine, though I wondered if I had noticed a (very slight) jitter, so I opened the same page in Firefox and ran them side by side.

While the Firefox media ran at normal speed and ran smoothly, the Safari version ran about half speed, or worse. I had to close the Firefox page to get Safari back to speed. The Safari load/reload times for the Flash were none too impressive either.

So, it certainly didn’t take long to find a problem, though it helps to know what you’re looking for. I could have gone on and looked for more, but there seems little point.

Either way, there is a problem with the Flash addin and several issues have been reported by others such as Alec Saunders and Paul McDougall, so I must withdraw my original recommendation of Safari.

Meanwhile, I CAN recommend Firefox with absolute confidence. I have been using Firefox almost exclusively for several years and it works like a dream. It is free, is truly standards compliant and has captured a growing share of the world market.

Download the free Firefox web browser