New Site Designs

July 5th, 2009

After a long hiatus focusing our company on the direction of the MetaPoint CMS, and seeing the successful release of version 7.0, our company re-focused on design, implementation, and customer service of the areas we do best, designing and implementing Portal Skins for our customers.

Today we finalized the details and implementation of two skins, the Louisiana Department of Education Senior Project Network, and the re-design of one of our oldest clients, iCADsales.com.

This ecommerce CAD software distributor had been using a skin we built for them back in 2005 and had built their company to over 1/2 million dollars a year in sales. iCADsales decided the original skin needed some updates to keep up with the web 2.0 era so they decided to come back to the home they knew and trusted, Portland Portals.

Working with them to define and pin down their design was a challenge as they had no idea what they were looking for, just giving us key indicators such as less cluttered, easier to navigate, fresh and clean. We took the ball and ran with it offering several new gadgets they fell in love with. The site sports use of a large header with shadows giving the site a 3D look, combined with flyover buttons on the subpages to alert users to their important. A garage door main links area enclosed in a 3D box design provides action to the visitor as their mouse slides over the buttons causing a door to open and a descriptive icon to appear. This was a design that was quite intensive to create using all the tricks of CSS and HTML, with very little JavaScript throw in, that we had in our arsenal. But along the way we learned a whole lot more that we can use on our future skin design jobs!

The Louisiana Senior Project Network was also done for a client who has been with us for a while. It is always a good feeling when customers decide to return for design work. It validates the effort you put in and tells you that you are doing at least some things right. The design we originally started working on was not even presented to the customer. One of our designers had to begin without the help of our Art Director who had taken some time off to work on some of her own projects but when she saw the design all she could say was "oh no... no no". Luckily we were not far into the project so little time was wasted when we scraped that design in favor of another. The design was particularly tricky to pin down as we were working with colors that do not lend well to a pleasing outcome. If you have ever heard the song from the rock band Bad Company that goes "Give me Silver, Blue and Gold, the color of the sky I'm told..." you get the idea. Gold is not a color for large areas of screen real-estate but our team put together something that would not irritate the soul while ensuring that the design was well blended and fit together.

Another interesting item to note about the LA SPN project was the rewriting of the MetaPoint templates from table based layouts to a layout entirely dependent on using CSS to accomplish the design. Our work will become a part of the next release of MetaPoint changing the entire product into an updated standards friendly CMS. Not that the Portal System doesn't support standards now, it is just that the various layouts you can apply to a page are all dependent on Tables to position each column. And adding rows other than the header and footer? Impossible to align them with each other.

So it's back to work for the team on the next round of designs and creative work that we love. If you are considering creating either a new design for an existing website, or creating a brand new website, you really should ring us up and discuss what the combination of the MetaPoint CMS and our skin design team can do for your business.

New Social BookMark Gizmos

May 24th, 2009

We've been busy for the past couple of days putting together a few new Gizmos for general public consumption.

Portland Portals, and the MetaPoint CMS, now have a Sexy Social, and a Shy Social bookmarking Gizmo you can easily place onto your Portal allowing your guest to simply click on the site of their choice to bookmark it direct.

We though that while we were putting these together we would do a "mini" series so to speak on what we went through to start with essentially html and end up with these fancy gizmo's riding in the add a gizmo pulldown menu.

So this week lets cover what kind of items one can turn into a gizmo...

According to the research we have been doing a person can create a program out of Perl, CGI, Javescript, CSS or just standard html and wrap that into a Gizmo3000 container and slide it into Metadot. It may be, but I haven;t had the guts to do it yet, possible to run PHP routines inside the template containers. I will have to wait until one of us actually trys it before I will say yes or no to if it can be done.

So, we will be back soon with another piece of the Gizmo puzzle soon, until then, thatns for reading!

Service, Intelligence, and Integrity you can count on!

May 12th, 2009

About six months ago we lost our second private contract system administrator. He just up and disappeared. Stopped answering his phone, no email replies, didn't see him around anywhere. Just vanished... I hope he is doing okay...

But we've only had two so far which isn't bad turnover for being in business for almost 5 years. However, we found that our method of employing qualified people who knew the ins and outs of not only the Linux operating system, but PHP, and Perl, and logging, configuration, mysql, security, etc, etc. was not without some times that we were without coverage.

Now I can get around Linux okay, although from time to time you can hear the system admins screaming from the server room because I made a boneheaded mistake, but in a pinch I can get lots of things done, not important things mind you, but still... things.

So, we were in the midst of the search for qualified help when one of our servers was hacked by a rather studious Amsterdam wizard who was online just long enough to rootkit the machine before I bounced him off. When something like that happens the only choice you have is to start over from scratch and build a new server similar to the old one.

Needless to say it was enough to heighten our search and with some recommendations from people I have worked with in the past we came across our current team of brilliant system admins. As some of you can testify they have the server sewn up pretty tightly and it has at times been too tight for a couple of you who were blocked by our security from reaching their websites until we were able to introduce them to our "attack dog" firewall.

With the recent server move to the cloud this group of system administrators showed us just how professional and skilled they are. During the migration they were flawless. It took them perhaps 3 to 4 hours to prepare and have all the sites up and running over on the new "machine".

Although we can't really call it a machine any more since it is a bunch of servers working together moving our hosting from location to location as the amount of resources we are utilizing increase and decrease.

So, if a group of Geese is called a Gaggle, and a Bunch of Elephants hanging out together is a herd, what do you call a bunch of servers which provide ultra redundency in a dynamic resource availability model? A robot?

Back to our story... When it was time to finalize the move, it was done in less than an hour. I had expect the changeover to take 8 or more hours telling each of you that things would be down or unreliable for a lengthy period. Boy did they prove me wrong... The final step of the move was a simple change to the DNS and we were online and doing business. We are now floating in "the clouds"!

It sure is nice to have that kind of backup that you can rely on. I sure wish all the services and products we consume in our daily lives could be that reliable.

Scott Hucke
CEO

False Starts and Dropping out of the Race

May 7th, 2009

Just like this news item, the MetaPoint CMS Social Collaboration platform has been plagued with false starts yet we never gave up, kept driving forward and finally broke through the tape, and surprisingly, we were the first ones to sail through. I had been trying to get this item finished for about a week and everytime I would start I would have another fire to fight...

A little history about MetaPoint for those of you who are not aware, in late 2006 (man, has it been that long?) the Metadot Corporation put out their last update to the Metadot Portal Server software. Greedily we all grabbed it and put it on our servers hoping more great stuff was coming. Unfortunately Metadot had other plans and was moving in with a gal named Ruby on Rails and thus the software we had all learned, had all built our livelihoods, and those of our companies was abandoned, like some fish carcass wrapped in newspaper and absent minded dumped in the garbage bin of history. Since that time, pockets of us have been out here knowing we would never love Ruby, would stick by our good fiend and long time partner Perl.

So, about a year ago a few of us started talking to each other about how we had been done wrong, tossed out like that smelly fish carcass which by then was really starting to stink. Long story short a few brilliant developers felt they had waited long enough for the folks at Metadot to come to their senses and turn out a new release, so they took it on themselves to organize a posse. After all, the beauty of Metadot was that it was free and Open Source, and was always intended to be jointly developed. So along with a few business types like myself who really got in the way more than helped, formed a new group and decided to take our name from the smelly fish, Metadot, and the leader in this particular web services category (though not due to quality but due to sheer brute force) Microsoft SharePoint. We settled on MetaPoint and we went to work defining a very loose organization whose primary goal would be to develop the future of our friend. So now we are here, and we have accomplished step one, releasing a MetaPoint CMS 7.0, based on Metadot, but changed enough internally to begin the long road back.

So whats in this new release you might ask? Well, that's why I called you all here finally today. Several new features are included, but more importantly, the groundwork has been laid to take the half of the portal that did not get an update and make every thing flexible and open. So, the things you and I really care about are the new Gizmos. I am getting to it, you have to wait for it...

Without further ado, here is the new stuff...

A. Flickr, YouTube, and Google Mapper Gizmo (each of these require a special setup so see the page on setting up Media and Mapper gizmos here within the Portal).

B. A blog, and blog entry Gizmo... with Comments. And the comments have our new unified Captcha system built in so no spamming my blog. This will be included with all the items that ask for user input at some point so we can keep the infamous form spammers from wasting our time. One really nice move forward for the blog is it comes with an RSS feed. We can not spit out our drivel as well as the collecting of drivel that has always gone on with the my page feature.

C. Ah but there is room for others drivel as well! We put everyones drivel, at least those that support RSS feeds everywhere because we have an RSS gizmo that can be put on any page and brings in RSS content. Portland Portals can also install RSS feeds exporting from your news items and discussions as long as they have a channel associated with them. Please inquire with us if you would like this service.

D. Something as simple as a Page Counter can be so satisfying when it comes after such a long wait. Perhaps you want to advertise like McDonalds does, as in Over 3 Million Sold! Put it on your page and put it to work for you...

E. We built a bunch of new skins. We were really tired of the same old crusty skins that really did not work that well and were not very pretty. So Portland Portals donated their designers time to put together a series of different colored generic skins that can be used by practically anyone, and are simple enough for those just starting out to get a decent looking portal with very little effort.

F. Finally, and this really does not do justice to the internal work that we did on the core architecture, we have a new WYSIWYG editor. It is pretty sleek, has the stuff  of the old editors and actually works. Remember when you used to grab a picture from the picture library and drag it onto your page or section? Yep, it's in there. It also has a button to clean up those pages that were pasted into the Portal directly from Microsoft Word. Now, we did not include this within everyone's Portals yet because we wanted to notify you that the editor would be changing so you could notify your staff that this shiny, flashy new WYSIWYG is a new improved (SUPPORTED) editor for their enjoyment. Within the next few weeks all of you should be migrated over to this new editor!

Well, it was a pretty good round of development during which we were able to put together some infrastructure to support the effort. When you have time we recommend you take a walk over to the official MetaPoint CMS website and take a gander at the roadmap we are working on for the future (http://www.metapointcms.com/index.pl?id=2274). We may not accomplish all of it but we are going to work hard to try.

So here is where you come in. We can use any help any of you, your friends, colleagues, teachers, students, mothers and fathers can give to move this product forward. Think you might not have anything to offer, I am sure everyone can help in some way. We will be launching a an effort soon to allow adopting a line of source code of your very own, you could help out by sponsoring one. We need pages formatted on the MetaPoint website, items pulled from long page lists and divided into sections. We need Marketing people, PR people, even social networkers can help spread the word and inform people about the benefits of using MetaPoint CMS, and the direction we want to move this product. Are you a writer, spin a story about what you use the MetaPoint Intranet Extranet portal for and we can include it on the blog page, know how to create tutorials, or capture videos into training materials? We need a really good demonstration on our demo page.ETC. ETC. At the very least, find two friends who are needing to have a website or web presence, or a company who would benefit from the project management and collaboration features of the portal system. Business development...got time to work deals with the likes of twitter, digg, technorati, ning, linkedIn and Plaxo, Zemanta and Disqus, any little bit will help.

With your help, we hope to get the number of those involved with the building of the future number in the 100s by this time next year. Ask yourself how you can give a little of yourself to help...

Thank You

Scott Hucke

CEO

Portland Portals

Head Cheerleader

MetaPoint CMS

MetaPoint CMS 7.0 has a new Outfit...

May 5th, 2009

I can remember the first time I used Metadot some 7 or 8 years ago. I had been running a team of software developers for a major Computer Aided Design corporation which happened to be bigger on ideas than they were on resources. So we had developers working for us in India, Belgium, The United States, even Japan.

Up until that point I had employed a hosting company to provide us with a Microsoft SharePoint Server shared hosting account and the developers could use it to get support files, ask questions in the forums, etc. SharePoint was really, really ugly, and very restrictive in where you could place controls, and what you could or could not place on your page.

But we didn't know any better so it was "good enough" (The Author wonders how many folks out there are stuck on Microsoft SharePoint and think it is okay and state of the industry because they don't know any better... They say Ignorance is Bliss).

One day Disaster Struck. The sky fell, the Earth stood still, they forgot the bacon on my BLT, and the mortgage and car payment was late... It really was quite traumatic after all. Worse than the drama, was my loss of confidence allowing others to perfrom IT work without close, close supervision.

it was one of those days where you look back and ask yourself how a company could have ever hired such an IDIOT (do I sound bitter?, heheh) and how people like that get to have a vote.

What happened? We requested a minor formatting error be fixed in our SharePoint, something that really only required a tweak to the database, nothing major. The next thing you know, the "technician"? (and I use that term loosely), who had not backed up the data, had never worked with Microsofts databases before, and have never even seen a paycheck from IT work, had WOOT?, overwritten over 3 years of historical Intellectual Property. But its okay right, that's why you pay extra for backups, so the company you have trusted with your company's past and by default, it's future, could just restore the backup and all would be right with the world, right? Right?

Okay, you know the rest of the story, we didn't get anything back, couldn't sue, and had to start over. So, I refused both to return to the Einsteins who had messed things up so badly and to return to a SharePoint system designed so horribly that a simple database restore could not be accomplished when hosted in a shared environment (Hey, all you SharePoint lovers, bet you didn't know that...).

We looked around for an alternative and the Secretary-Treasurer of the company mentioned he came across a free Open Source product called Metadot (figures the beancounter would discover a free solution that blows Microsoft SharePoint, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo all out of the water).

I did not have high hopes and expectations for the "free" solution until I drove down that first demo highway and never looked back. Flexible, easy to use, powerful, variety of tools, ease in branding and look and feel, scalable and FUN.

With SharePoint your creative side never got a workout because everything went in the same spot on every page. With MetaPoint, heck, you didn't even have to put the same stuff on the same page, you could put it way over there if you wanted to. you could cut it out and put it on the other side, or make a psuedo copy of it and stick it over there. It was unlike anything I had ever worked with before.

So, here we are, some 8 years later, and I still feel that the product I worked with oh so long ago is best in it's class, by far. Sure, there were a couple of years where it got a little fat, a little lazy being on that unemployment line, while it's masters fell in love with some gal named Ruby.

Now, however, with this release of the 7.0 MetaPoint CMS, its almost like the old days where we would run together through the meadow, enjoying picnic lunches, each others company, and carefree summer days...

Okay, getting carried away. Point is we are back, MetaPoint CMS 7.0 just hit the street, and those of you stuck on the old Metadot, a simple upgrade to your servers and all of you Portal Maniacs are back in business!