Skytop Integration

Hey, I got an article published on the web.  Now I’m sure I’ll become famous!

Funny thing — if you look at the news, everything is doom-and-gloom.  Layoffs.  Rising unemployment.  Everyone looking for a handout, er, bailout.

But as I’m going around talking to people (not companies), I’m hearing nothing but optimism.  Folks are being careful, sure, but they’re also starting their own companies.  Some of their ideas are wacky, but a lot of them are really good.  I think a lot of people are seeing grand opportunities in today’s upheaval, and I’m with them.

The way I look at it, a 7% unemployment rate means a 93% employment rate.  People are still out there, buying pizzas, getting haircuts and downloading songs.  There’s got to be an opportunity in there somewhere.

Yesterday I worked through the first and second chapters of Using Drupal.  So far, it’s a pretty good book — Drupal can do the things that I would have expected it to do, but I should not need to buy a book to learn how to do them.  I’m also trying to figure out how all the through-the-web (TTW) configuration gets developed in one environment, tested in another, and moved to production, but I’m willing to take baby steps for right now.

Yesterday I got SugarCRM set up, and I also got it linked into the Google Apps arrangement. (I’m continually amazed at what you can do for free [1] anymore.)  So today I will be sending out emails to lots of folks to let them know that I’m available.  And with any time I have left over, I will start working through the Drupal books that were recommended to me.

[1] Where “free” means you’re paying for the setup/configuration, not the software.

Today’s task is to get my SugarCRM instance up and running in the way that I want it.  This is not only going to help me organize my marketing for 2009, it’s also going to cause me to learn some more about Sugar, which I seem to remember liking the last time I used it.  Then I’m going to start adding all those contacts that I have into it, and start letting folks know that I have some bandwidth.

My existing client is taking most of their work in-house, so I’m searching for new and exciting things to do.  The first thing is to get this website back into shape.  If you’re here, I’ve settled on WordPress, which seems to do the things that I want out-of-the-box.  Some others that I examined and dropped were:

• Plone.  Just a beautiful CMS, but I have no hope of ever being able to adjust the theme, let alone add a new product to it.  My mind just doesn’t function the same way Zope does.  Perhaps someday someone will give me the missing nugget of information that I  need.
• Drupal , Mambo and Joomla.  I could install all of them, but I had trouble figuring out how to start putting content into them.  And when I did figure it out, I couldn’t get nice URLs to work, or how to get a WYSIWYG editor working.  (I know it’s all possible, I just could not figure it out in one hour or less.)
• I thought about trying to “roll my own” with Pylons and Genshi, but I need to get the marketing message out now, not six months from now