Pratt Web Services

I just got an email from one of my clients Tony Chen of SavvyDaddy. I've been playing Website Janitor on his Drupal site for a couple of weeks now. The Chicago Sun Times picked up his fund raising efforts for Disaster Relief in Haiti.

It started as a simple question.  "Should I keep them [a small group of sites]as separate installs or make a multi site  - which I've never done?"

I have several sites setup as multisite. All are for clients that have several domains running. So I'm familiar with the process. And when I worked at Business Objects we ran our subdomains on a multisite installation. But several days ago I decided to make some changes.

I have ten or so small sites - almost brochure like. That were getting to be a pain to keep updated. So I did two things:

"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." Bill Vaughn

Simple is good for me.

Be it resolved that I shall, this year, write a poem each day, journal at least five times each week, and write a blog entry each week.

FutureNow's article on using the data in Google Analytics got me thinking. Dumpster diving is a great analogy. There are some really good points about making sure that you are using the metrics. I have a hard time getting most of my clients to set goals for their site. Still I think there are important things that can be learnt. Most of my clients are relatively small. 250 hits a day is pretty good for most of them. But that's all they need.

Or Smashing Magazine comes through again:
Getting Started With Content Management Systems
Anybody contemplating the big picture should read this. It is the most succinct summary of why and more importantly what to think about CMS.

Though this site is not on my hosting, I built it with Drupal through Cpanel and ftp. Used to working on the backbone with shell to move files and compress and uncompress files, it slowed down construction and introduced some interesting challenges. The site development came to me through a system adminstrator/contractor. He supplied me with a psd from a graphic designer that I had worked with before. I worked out the functionality and created the Drupal template from the design.

One of my early sites built with the templating system of Dreamweaver, the Lifeforce site focussed on developing business for the new business. The architecture of the site evolved with the business. Trying to extablish the businesses credentials in a field where there are many fly-by-night operators - the site emphasized the training, insurance, and certification of their employees.

Ten years ago I walked away from a career in "Community Development". I was tired of fighting government bureacracy, trying to convince politicians that people were important, and making businesses that should never have even been started - viable.

In a trip down a trail of broken websites, looking for answers in all the wrong places, I found an old friend. Back when I was starting to learn web design and all things wild and wooly on the Internet, there was a cool site called Web Monkey . I learned how to use CSS on the site. It was my primer in Javascript. All sorts of web-related bits and pieces. And today I found it again. Relaunched as 2.0 beta, the stream of content seems massive.

I had a great deal of audience help in my presentation on Panels 3.

The website is online at http://panels.anguspratt.com Login is Guest and guest to see the different panels for anonymous and authenticated users.