I went to a training session last night on the new National Standards and one of the things that hit me today is how much information that is of interest to the community at large, is not communicated well to the community. And part of that it seems is the old “which came first the chicken or the egg? question.

Here’s my thought. The Board of trustees in their role of governance create the school charter, a strategic plan and school policy documents. These are documents made available to the wider school community for review and feedback. However a couple of comments that I’ve heard for quite some time is that nobody in the community ever looks at these documents. So why is no one looking at them?

Like me until I became a board member most parents seem to, 1) Not  know the documents existed and 2)Not know they could look at them and make comment.

So who’s fault is that? Is it the Boards and the principles for not making it clear that they could look at them? Or is it parents for not asking about them in the first place? Does that sound like a Chicken and Egg question to you?

Maybe there could be some middle ground, perhaps using the schools web sites to give an indication to parents what is there for them to look at in regards to documents may help. Perhaps some parents could care a little bit more to find out about the information.

I’m so often talking to people about websites, website development and how it can help them. And every so often I run into people who say to me “we’d love to develop some web technology, but we have people on staff who won’t utilize it, so we won’t bother”.

I find this whole attitude annoying.  When I started in software engineering I was hardcoding all the HTML and Styling and such, over the years technologist have looked at improving and improving this situation, we now have Systems like Wordpress and Joomla, which even a kid can use to develop a website, heck I know at school the kids are using online blog software to develop their literacy and writing skills.

What gets me is no matter how much we simplify our ability to create communication technologies, someone out their is still frightened that if they touch the power on button their computer will go “BOOM”

The biggest annoyance that comes from the simplification of the Technology is  that now we get too much information that is more hype than value, because some people think that Exploiting a google hack and selling that for $29 is a good way to make money.

Recently I was elected onto the Board of trustees for my Daughters School. I decided to run after a couple of parents asked me to run. My reasoning for running was the hope that as a board member I could help the school even more then the many little tasks I volunteered to do around the school anyway.

To me it was a bit of a surprise that for 5 positions on the board, we had 6 people running for it. Out of a school with 400 kids 6 parents were running, and of those 6, 4 of them were already board members. Wow, two things went through my head at that point:

1 It wasn’t going to be hard to get on the board, and

2. Don’t any other parents care to be on the board of trustees and help the school?

I’ve now been through some training on being a board member (invaluable), and I like the philosophy around the board of trustees. The jobs on it aren’t hard. I think one of the biggest skills a board member should have is a sense of caring about their kids education. If you are a parent and you care about your child’s education look at being a member of your school board. Any extra skills you bring will help the School no end.

And what does a dozen nights out of your busy life really cost you?

In this dream, the Devil had won.

All the nasty things in this world had finally pushed the whole balance over to the devil. All the religious leaders were dead, and the churches converted themselves to worship the devil instead of God. The world turned into a mass of uncaring and selfish people.

The only message from god was that unless the whole world prayed to God then the world would end in a couple of weeks. Those faithful no matter what could not come up with a way to make the whole world pray to god, even for a split second. They prayed to god to help save the world from this disaster although they put little hope in God stopping the end of the world.

The weeks passed. The world believed that God was bluffing, he wouldn’t destroy the world. The date of the world destruction came and the world just partied. The minute of the destruction came and everyone looked up to the sky and said.

“Holy Sh….”

And the world was saved.

I’ve been a cub leader now for almost 3 years. It’s been a wonderful and fulfilling experience, in most cases….

One of the reasons I joined was for my daughter and I to do something together, this was great for both of us. But as I gained in experience, it would seem that scouting behind the scenes is not always just about the kids.

I think for me one of the areas that I thought as a leader would be great was to gain experience through the leadership training, and I’ve done a number of courses on this luckily. However I looked at the Scouting website and find that after 3 years in scouts I should be well trained. Well it seems that I must be missing something as I’ve never gotten above the lowest level of training. I brought this up with my group leader, and I found out that it would seem that not many leaders are being trained well now, as in very little training is taking place in any zone for leaders to improve. For me I’m grateful of the training I’ve gotten.

So for a group that prides itself on training it’s leaders, is this really true that the scout society doesn’t put a  focus on training their leaders anymore as a key value to scouting?

When I left the company I was a developing for. I got asked to develop for some people a couple of websites. I knew in the 90’s when I started developing I learnt raw HTML so I tended to think of building the sites in that way. It was a great way of building them I had complete control over the look and feel and content etc. However the sites became relatively fixed and in today’s world changing content on a weekly if not daily basis is important these sites were not effective.

After trying to develop a few more sites with Content management in mind, I found that there were three free tools out there to handle the Management of content. Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. Now I haven’t use Drupal but I have use both Joomla and wordpress.

I found that both of them are excellent systems, both are easy to install on a website as they both have auto installers, both use mysql databases and often apache webserver, which are the common web hosting servers on the the net. So very positive for the people who are just starting out and have little technical knowledge of the web.

There are differences which makes them useful for different types of websites, although both can be used in any situation.

First I find Wordpress a great system for blogging and websites that the content is kept to simple pages. I don’t like it’s handling of advertising or customization. I’ve done a couple of sites with Wordpress (my blog and Roberta’s are just two of them) and found that often times people will build templates and forget to use the Dynamic sidebar functionality, or they will use it and force some other parts onto the sidebar that you don’t want, and so wading through php and css code can be annoying. So be careful of the templates you download for your site. It’s nice that it create categories and tags as part of your posts.

The biggest thing I think with wordpress is it’s great if your creating a blog, or creating websites with fairly static content and menus. Also find wordpress great for squeeze page websites (those websites that don’t require anything more then “Buy this now” type information like www.betterforbusiness.biz)

Joomla’s organization of information is far better then Wordpress. With the ability to put articles in sections are categories, and to create banners for clients. I created  budvietas.com and our ebook selling site keepitsimplethensimplify.com using Joomla. I found I liked Joomla’s ability to caegorize articles and create menus far better then wordpress. The thing with joomla is it ability to blog is weak, but that was never it’s intention to be blogging software. It also has a much better ability to customise where things appear in the theme, especailly if the theme is build with all the components of joomla in the php file (which like wordpress I have found some themes you can download lack components parts and you need a php person to add them in).

With Joomla I would be very  inclined to build a content rich site where articles, and a need for customization is required. Sites where content changes and you may need to identify menus differently or change banner advertising.

So my suggestion if your developing a site for your business I would go for Joomla. If you developing a squeeze page, or a blog go for Wordpress

I’ve been playing around with some sites for our company, and getting frustrated with the internet marketing side of the websites, namely keywords. Basically I love the fact that google and other search engines require keywords, I have no problem with that, the frustrating thing is that so many people are playing the Search engine optimization game that websites are starting to lose meaning. A while back I installed a Search Engine Optimization tool into my word press blog here. Nice tool, however it became frustrating to keep to the “rules” of Seo in it, and to keep to the idea I like to be conversational and light with my Reading.

I mean with this article I would have to mention “Keyword” and “Business” every paragraph to meet the rules to be top of the rating game.  Seems to me that we have a paradigm of marketing that requires us to shift away from our product and categorize that product down to a few keywords.

I’d have a problem with categorizing myself down to a few keywords and spieling over that over and over again. Why does the forces on the net want us to develop our sites that way?

Over the last couple of years when I started to freelance develop I got to meet many entrepreneurs. These guys are amazing, they have lots of ideas, lots of  spirit for making money and seem to able to sell Ice to Eskimos.

However it seems these guys don’t think about the cost of development, and the fact that time and money are required to develop a piece of software.

I remember having an entrepreneur approached me with a brilliant idea, he had the specs and everything in hand for the idea. His plan was to offer the product to his client for free and have the cost paid by another agency.  I looked at his specifications and seriously told him that it would cost him $40,000 to build and would take 6 months to develop. Strangely enough he went very quiet and at that point I think he realized his dream of an amazing product was not as easy as he thought.

My point is that entrepreneurs when you approach developers for work, come to us with a plan on how we’re going to get paid for our efforts. Good ideas are great but they don’t pay our bills and don’t get the work done if we don’t get proof that our time and effort is worth the investment

I’ve been around computers and software all my life. I’ve also seemed to be involved with business and business processes for most of my working career.

As a freelance developer I found it amazing how many business people considered software applications to be magic wands that a developer in days can create a solution to their business problem. Those business people often find that they are frustrated by the software not doing what they require, or that it’s taking too long to develop, or that the cost of it is higher then expected

As a business person. I found that too often applications were developed without looking at the problem the software app was to fix, or that the developers became hung up on the technology that they were working with, trying to use bleeding edge rather then making something that would work.

In this blog. I’m going to look at software I like to use, perhaps it’s software that helps people. I’ll comment on things that are related to projects and project management, perhaps to give perspective to how we can improve the processes around software development.