business

Our site hasn't changed very much over the last 4 years, but the business has changed a lot. The biggest change was the (uneventful and long overdue) upgrade to Drupal 6 a few months ago.

During the last week or so the site has been updated and refocused. The major changes include:

• The home page focuses on our main services
• The services section has been updated to reflect the services we currently offer
• Added a projects section to showcase the contributions we have made to various projects over the last decade
• The footer has been rethought and now provides links to key parts of the site and relevant off site links
• Implemented the custom breadcrumbs modules to improve navigation within the site
• Updated service links module to provide a more diverse selection of social networking links, including identi.ca with a patch
• Offloaded some RSS feeds onto feedburner, through the drupal contrib module

This also signals our return to regular blogging. There are a few posts in the pipeline. There should be a good mix of drupal and sys admin posts in the coming weeks.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Back in the late 90s there was a range of free website hosting options - geocities, angelfire and tripod are the big 3 I remember straight off the top of my head. The business model was pretty simple, you got a free site, albeit with a pretty crappy url, and the host got to inject ads into the page. The first "site" ever I ever built was hosted by tripod and is still up, I have forgotten the login details so it hasn't been updated for 11 years.

Of the 3 stars of this business model, angelfire and tripod are still offering an ad supported version along with ad free, fee for service upgrades, but geocities is dead. Today, the business model has evolved, you can get a free but ad supported blogs (see Blogger.com or wordpress.com), email services (see gMail, Yahoo or Microsoft) or project hosting (see sourceforge, xp-dev or CodePlex) along with many other online services. For personal stuff I think this is fine, and the same goes for small not for profit organisations. On the other hand if you run a business and want to appear professional, profitable and "up with technology", then you don't want your email address to be acme234789@hotmail.com, or your website to be acme-inc.freehostingco.com. It could be worse, you could be using an email address or hosting supplied by your ISP such as sxcsteve@bigpond.com and myisp.com.au/acme-inc. In the case of email, you can use google apps for domains and still look professional.

It is different if you are solely providing free (as in beer) content, such as video, news or a professional blog. This is a clear business model, fund free content via advertising, it has been used by print news, radio and television for decades. I also think it is fine for community based free/open source software projects to use it to get some additional revenue. It is different if you are a profit making business.

Not only does running ads on your site look unprofessional, you could be promoting the competition. Google targets their ads based on the content of the page. For example if you are a small shop and you have a page listing the types of products you offer, Google is likely to serve up ads on that page for those products. Do you really want an ad from a competitor showing up with "Cheap [item], free next day delivery"? How many high volume paying customers will you lose for that extra few dollars a month in Ad Sense revenue?

I find it more shocking on large corporate sites. Yes, they attract a lot of eye balls, but I pay my phone company enough money and they make large enough profits, that I shouldn't have to be subjected to ads on their corporate home page. It makes them look cheap. The same goes for smaller businesses.

In the case of a business blog, it should be part of your business website. If people find your blog and they like what they see, they are likely to click around your site to find out more about you. If you have your blog on blogger they are only likely to find other blog posts, and if you have a link to your business website, they will probably stop clicking once they hit your business site as it is completely different from your blog. If on the other hand it's all nicely integrated, your readers are able to move from your blog posts to your business content seamlessly - and so are more likely to become a customer, rather than another bounced visitor.

What are your options? Many hosts offer one click installers for setting up drupal, wordpress or other content management systems. With a bit of help from an online tutorial or 2 you should be able to get drupal up and running with a basic site and a theme from contrib. Sure it will look a bit cheap, but no worse than something on blogger. If you were to host it with dreamhost it is going to cost you around 120USD/130AUD for one year. Even if you have to pay someone to help you setup your CMS site, it will probably cost you less than 500USD in the first year for a basic setup. A basic setup will allow your business to project a professional image to the world. Add a professionally designed custom theme and site build for another 1850USD/2000AUD or so and you are set for a few years. Of course you will spend more if you want some to help with designing your information architecture, help with SEO, produce or proof content or suggest images etc. The investment is likely to pay for itself over that time in increased sales.

Financially the last 12 months has been pretty good for DHC. What financial crisis? This has come at quite a cost.

Once again I have ended up having an extended period of time away from home for business. Today is day 37, country number 5. I am sitting in a hotel room on the evening of my only day off this week wondering why am I doing this. I have a family, friends, clients and a life back in Australia.

Others have blogged about hitting the travel wall - for me it kicks in after about 2 weeks and I keep fighting it until I get home. This year I have been away for 103 of 311 days - that doesn't include the days spent in Melbourne or visiting family. I really understand what Dries meant in a recent tweet.

I am starting to realise humans aren't designed to work like this.

Sure there is a lot of stuff that can be done via email, irc, chat or on the phone. All of the technology in the world can't replace face to face meetings. Just as technology can't provide the opportunity to exchange a funny story or joke in the corridor, it certainly can't make up for just wanting to be at home.

I know a few developers like myself who have ideas kicking around in the back of their mind most of the time, then it clicks - bang solution! This background noise is a blessing and curse. It never goes down too well when I am suppose to be spending time with the family, but while pushing one of the kids on the swing the answer to a problem from yesterday comes to me, ring the client to discuss the solution and make sure they are happy with it - damn junior has fallen over while I was distracted.

The background noise also has another significant downside, it is very hard to shut off. I find alcohol works pretty well at giving me some "mental space", while also being legal and readily available. The downside is the harder I work the more I need that mental space and so drink more. Earlier today, I found a site which claims to guestimate how much alcohol you would have to consume in 3 hours before you were dead, I tweeted my results, I thought it was amusing. The other thing I came across was a blog post from Stephan Hermann (aka @ubuntuworker on identi.ca) on his fight with alcohol. Stephan's post was a timely reminder of how things can slide.

Most of us in IT want to see the system delivered, the product shipped, the customer happy, and most of us will put 120% into making that happen. When it is all done, we go for a beer or 10. Just about every IT shop I have worked for had beers on a Friday night, after a project was delivered or sometimes just when we came up with a lame excuse.

I don't think many people outside of the IT industry understand how stressful it can be and drinking, or other substance (ab)use, is considered an acceptable way of dealing with that stress.

Earlier this year I was in Beijing and some client data was lost due to a mix up (mostly caused by me not being able to read Chinese and someone else's lack of English). I felt awful. Around the same time a guy working for Foxconn a new iPhone prototype threw himself out of the office after being accused of stealing one of the units. This was an extreme case but I so felt for the guy, he was just doing his job, something stuffs up and he feels powerless.

There are many more stories I could link to and discuss, but I won't.

In Australia and other places there is a lot of talk about making work environments more family friendly. Sadly I don't see that happening in our industry. I see the opposite. The global financial crisis is used by some to make their staff work harder and longer for less money. As a contractor I get to set a price and run the meter, but I find myself saying yes to projects or demands that I should not be accepting.

When I return to Australia I plan to give my liver a break, spend more time with my family and develop strategies for "switching off" more often. Life is too short to be a slave to work. I can't continue to work like this claiming I am building a future for my children when I am undermining my own future, and so theirs. Time to deal with my issues, make a plan and be successful, like another Dave.

Sorry for the rant but I felt that this all needed to be said.

I am writing this post with a strong sense of sadness. At the same time I feel that I have no other option. I am walking away from phpGroupWare.

Before I walk out the door, lets go for a trip down memory lane. Insert tacky music wavy lines down the screen and bad hair styles from here on in.

I think the first time I heard Linux mentioned was in 1996/97. In 1999 I had my first experience with Linux, through an anarchist friend, I was very curious, but didn't have much of an opportunity to play with it.

In 2000, over a few months I started to play with Linux and GNOME dual booting my machine. I could never really make it do what I wanted, but I persisted. The first version of Linux I bought was Macmillan Linux 6.5 - I still have it in a cupboard somewhere. I then moved on to Red Hat 6.2.

In 2001 Julie's work was sick of waiting for their shared calendar solution. I was contracted to install it. They had an NT4 box running Lotus Notes, which no one wanted to touch - including me. I found phpGW by searching (probably "yahooing") for "open source groupwise". I would later discover I had embarked on an epic journey. I knew of open source, but I didn't know a lot about it. PHP seemed pretty cool, as did phpGroupWare. I recommned they get a new server - a good one, dual PIII-800s, RAID-1 and Linux, it cost over $3000. I learnt a lot on that box including basic Linux sysadmin, compiling stuff from source and what happens when you forget to update lilo. Today that server lies idle in a cupboard in my office.

Very quickly I became involved in the phpGroupWare commununity. By 2002 I considered myself active and later that year I was promoted to release manager. By 2003 I had landed my first overseas gig indirectly through phpGroupware. By now I felt very strongly that I was a free software developer. 2004 saw the EGroupware.Org fork, or as I still like to refer to it, the EGO fork. This did considerable damage to the project and sucked a lot of life out of it.

Since then the project has done some cool things, but struggled to get a release of trunk for over 5 years. There are some really smart people around the project, but none of us seem focused to shipping a product, and I think we all have different ideas of what that product should be. I have met many awesome people over the years, include the Paris conference in 2006.

It is now late 2009, I have 2 kids and a growing business. PHP 5.3 is out and we are still trying to port to PHP5. There are many solid application frameworks around - my personal favourites are Zend and Drupal. Both of these projects have large developer bases, active communities, clear development processes and documentation, phpGroupWare fails on each count.

The project has exposed me to so many great people and ideas. These things will stay with me for the rest of my life.

If anyone is to take over phpGroupWare, my first suggestion would be to start over. Clearly define a purpose for the project, define a target market, build a product which fits that purpose and appeals to that market. Such an approach will involve a significant investment of resrources. I just can't commit any resources to the project at this time. If things change I may come back one day, but now things feel too far gone.

As much as I hate to say this, I think phpGroupWare is a dead project. I feel that it is time for me to move on. I will make myself available to assist with any handover or shut down of the project.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to making phpGroupWare such a great project over the years. It was fun while it lasted.

After a visit to the accountant today, I decided to switch from a sole trader to a company structure. There are many benefits to my business structuring things this way. For my clients it will be business as usual, just a change to the letterhead and bank account details. For me, it involve more bookkeeping, which may not necessarily be a bad thing

Getting the company up and running took 10 minutes on website, and a small payment to the business which set it up for me - too easy. Getting a new ABN and other stuff done with the tax office was a waste of an hour, if I had more time I would blog about it. At the end of the process a got a "your session has expired" message. Hopefully a real person at the ATO will be more useful tomorrow.

Now I have a few things to arrange/update over the next few days. Hopefully I can get it all sorted before I head off to Europe.