Yet again I’m on the move. Not from Montreal! But I have returned to the consulting life, and I’m very excited – my services are on the market again. One of the great side-benefits so far: spending the afternoon with Nadia out and about in the city (rather than behind some desk).
Wired News
is also covering the new SirCam virus/worm, as one would expect. It’s a very interesting issue considering that Mac OS X is now out in the world, and, as many have noted, Apple will soon be the largest volume Unix vendor in the world. Their rollout of OS X is happening in a very different context than earlier releases of consumer- and business-friendly operating systems, and it could be a huge opportunity for Apple. If they were to develop an open, fast, and highly professional security infrastructure I think a lot of people might sit up and take notice.
This is the most
severe warning of cracker/criminal activity related to ecommerce that I’ve ever seen: FBI Press Room – E-Commerce Vulnerabilities. Note that they specify that it was unpatched IIS servers they came through.
With any luck, this will be a positive result of the dot-com crash – the companies that survive will better understand the need for professional server management. I can’t imagine why consumers (if they knew they had been affected) couldn’t launch a (huge) class-action suit against the companies who chose to run servers without adequately staffing their IT departments to care for and feed them.
I’m in the midst of some
pretty big decisions – one involving starting up a consulting company with some colleagues, one involving moving to the other side of the table, figuratively speaking.
The latter brings up lots of questions though. People (designers, web developers) always complain about how clueless clients are. What if the client isn’t clueless? What if your client knows exactly what can and can’t be done, what the best approach would be, how much it should cost? What if you client has a long background in web design, web coding, content development for the web, and the like? What if I suggest that the code be done to (say) W3C standards – or at least pay attention to the current developments on that side of things?
Does that still look like a client you want to work for? Or is that still a nightmare client? I’d let you do your thing – but cut a corner, and I’ll see it. I’ll look at the code and expect it to be professionally done. Still a good client?
A fear I have is that although clueless clients are a horror, so might clued-in clients be to many web designers and web developers. Can you deal with someone who knows his stuff?
Tom makes a great
point today at plasticbag.org. I enjoy using Blogger, but as a point of principle it’s important to have a variety of tools available for content management.
Personally, I don’t think it’s viable to ever do a site, even a small site, without integrating a means to manage the writing (at least) without messing with the raw html files. I’ve done lots of small sites for people who haven’t made a big commitment to a web strategy – they just want a little website.
When I do a site like that I am available to make updates – but those sites have usually been done as a favour, for free. I don’t always have the time to maintain them fully. So I generally try and download most or all of the update responsibility for updates to my “client” – usually a friend or someone like that. And they always mess them up.
So for me, it’s really important that there are options available for content management, that the tools are being developed.
I’m starting to put this idea to the test today, when I (finally) have my first real meeting with the nice people at Santropol Roulant, for whom I’m putting together a small team to build a site as a donation. The idea is to do a well-designed, professional quality site for the organization – an important meals on wheels service here in Montreal. So we’re going to start to define the project today, and implicit in the project definition will be to include content management tools so they can “own” the daily management of their own site.
