Donner’s Daily Dose of Drama

www.austria-boston.org, an ASP 1.0 site, was hosted by a company called Burlee starting about 6 years ago. Burlee was later acquired by Interland, and ended up as a part of Web.com. The hosting fees were never adjusted and ended up being disproportionally high, so I started looking around for an alternative to realize some savings for the Austrian club.
Since I had already been a Godaddy domain customer for a number of years and their Windows hosting plans were priced at what seemed a reasonable level, I decided to try GoDaddy hosting. I went with their 2-year Economy plan at $3.19/month. I described some implementation details of the site during the sales call and was assured that the migration would be possible without any functional limitations in the new environment.
The site has now been running at GoDaddy for several weeks and it is time to summarize the experience.

The characteristics of how people use the web are changing quicker and more profoundly than ever before. Some of the paradigms that we have grown so used to over the past 10 years all of a sudden don’t make sense anymore. This is the Web 2.0, it is great, I am all for it. As far as Ajax is concerned, I don’t think that Javascript and XML are the right platform for enterprise-class software development, but hey, it is all that Microsoft gave us.

Last week, I attended the Sys-Con “Real-World Ajax” Seminar in New York. I have not yet decided if the event deserves a blog entry - some of the 10 presentations where definitely interesting. But one thing that came up consistently was the term ‘mashup‘. A mashup is a web application that combines data or services from different sources to create added value. I was initially not excited by this concept - integrating content from multiple sources sounded too much like ‘portal’.
But when I discovered this matrix, mashups got a whole new dimension for me. There is definitely something big going on.

My Point of View paper was published on Molecular’s website today.

From the content:

It would be hard to imagine today’s Web without Content Management Systems (CMS). The volume of content on the Web is increasing at a record pace, yet businesses and consumers alike are expecting to find just the right information, in just the right place, and at just the right time. Only a mature CMS can help control these opposing trends.
Although CMS products have become a virtual commodity, a custom implementation is still a significant undertaking that must be carefully planned and executed. Therefore, it is important to understand the various applications of a CMS and the potential value they can provide in a specificbusiness situation. This paper will help you to understand what a CMS product should do, what it cannot do, and the key criteria to consider when evaluating and selecting a CMS for your business.

When you need to localize and categorize