CustomerCentrix

The default (bluemarine) theme in Drupal seems like a bad choice, but programmers, even good ones, aren't known for their graphic design talents. The other 3 that are part of the default installation are better, and I have chosen the pushbutton for this site and am trying the chameleon, interlaced and spreadfirefox themes on other sites. These seem to work fine, but have various quirks with headers and styles. I am wanting a simple, preferably tableless theme as a starting point for building some custom themes.

I also tried argeebee briefly, but it doesn't seem to work in Firefox. So, in addition to the four available in the base install:

We are currently using SpamBayes and Thunderbird native spam protection. SpamBayes seems to work a little better, but does not integrate with Thunderbird. Supposedly, Thunderbird uses the same algorithm as SpamBayes, so it may just be an incorrect perspective of what works better because you have a bit more information and control using SpamBayes. My goal is to improve how this works somewhat by instituting some server level prevention as well. There are many options, including a couple that come integrated with Plesk:

SpamAssassin
  Spam Assassin

BDF is now active. They expect to be taking children for therapeutic riding next month.

Although not a big deal at this point, the pipeline graphic (and probably others) was missing. I suspected that this was because of the new server having a different configuration and missing the graphics libraries that are necessary to dynamically generate this image. Glad that I didn't dig too deep in this direction before finding in my http log file that a file could not be generated in the cache subdirectory. Changed the permissions here to 0777 and all is well.

The log file is located here:
  /home/httpd/vhosts/customercentrix.com/statistics/logs

the error was:
  [client 68.35.54.251] PHP Warning:

I have been reading much more lately about marketing and sales and am trying to apply some of what I have learned. Here is an article that I just read:

Your tagline probably sucks

Lots of truth here. Also, it is interesting that the phrase customer-centric is used ;-)

Changed the tagline on this site from:

Customer-centered business technology

to:

We satisfy your business technology needs

An improvement? To me, it seems that there is not much difference here, but I wanted to change it a little.

What are interesting, freely available sources of information and topics of discussion that could be foundations upon an online community? How about:

• Census - pretty dry, but possibly good source of geographic info and demographics
• Maps - APIs from Yahoo, Google, etc come to mind
• Satellite - goes with maps, but interesting stuff recently available from Google or MSN Earth
• Weather - lots of sources, possibly historical data and almanac
• News - local as possible, maybe headlines from weekly or free papers - might be possibly to scrape headlines from these (not sure about legal/copyright) - best sources are probably blogs or personal contributions

Not surprising, but there are a few things different with the MySQL files. I am not sure if they are binary incompatible or not, but they cannot simply be copied from an old database on another machine to a new one. Not surprising, I dumped the old one and restored the data to the new server easily.

The upgrade of Plesk was, in hindsight, maybe not a good idea. As has happened before, there are a few bugs. One that I had to fix manually with a previous upgrade was with the ioncube loader. The reference has to be moved from one ini file to another because it has to be loaded prior to other extensions. 6 months ago it took a day or more to figure this out. Fortunately, I remembered and have learned enough since that it was only a few minutes to resolve.

General opinion of Plesk is that it looks great with a nice interface, has decent functionality, but lacking in QA (lots of bugs). With each upgrade, one would hope that bug fixes outweigh the new bugs added or old bugs reintroduced. But this is often not the case. I am more inclined to update Plesk rarely if ever. It has definitely been a positive factor in allowing me to do things with Linux that I would not have otherwise been able to do (or rather much faster). It has also forced me to do some debugging of things that I would not likely have had to deal with.

A rich text editor is a given in the world of desktop computer applications. Nobody, except for maybe a few programmers, uses notepad when wordpad is available. The vast majority of computer users these days have MS Word as their primary tool for creating documents. When we move to web applications, things change a little bit because the functionality that desktop users have come to expect with Word are fairly heavy weight in terms of the code necessary and overhead in processing. This makes it a challenge to run a nice, full-functioned word processor inside a browser.

There are a variety of solutions for this problem. The basic categories are listed below with comments regarding their use.

From version 3.23 to 4.0, this installation is reputed to cause some difficulties with Plesk. Not having done much with Linux, I waited until we had a new server that would be easy to restore if necessary and not affect any needed sites or applications. Found and copied these files to the server:

MySQL-shared-compat-4.0.26-0.i386.rpm
MySQL-server-4.0.26-0.i386.rpm

The first was necessary because of a dependency issue with shared libs. Ran RPM -U with these and got a warning (MySQL-server-4.0.26-0.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 5072e1f5) but otherwise seemed to work ok. Plesk still works until I tried restarting and now gives this error without even showing the login screen: