the Packawhallop blog

Nov 11

Packawhallop's FileTrunk & SWW Yacht Design

Stephens, Waring and White Yacht Design are now using Packawhallop’s new software product called FileTrunk. It is a web files utility allowing the client to set up both public and private pages with file sharing. They can easily login, create a category to organize new files on the public downloads page or set up a private link to send/manage/correspond with clients of their own. Manual organization, titles, captions and unique url’s are all part of the FileTrunk utility. In SWW’s case they use it to share pdf Newsletters, Press Releases and Drawings of new Yachts in design on their Public downloads page. Then they use it to set up private client pages for downloading invoices, new project specs and proprietary information.

If you’re interested in finding out more about FileTrunk contact us via our web site!

Aug 06

The Sanford Police Department hosts its web site with Packawhallop

The Sanford (Maine) Police Department has picked Packawhallop as its provider of web hosting for www.SanfordPD.com.

This was done as part of an upgrade to the Department’s web site by Gordon Holman of SlickFish Studios (and Packawhallop co-owner). The web site now features a robust content management system (CMS for techies) for news and events, RSS/social networking tools to get the word out about SPD, and a (growing!) photo gallery.

Gordon brought the site’s web site design and overall information architecture up to contemporary standards and best practices. Jim Cradock (Yellahoose principal and Packawhallop co-owner) provided some web development muscle by adding the photo caller, CMS and RSS feeds.

Hello, Sanford PD!

Boscawen Conservation Commission chooses Webfiles

The Boscawen Conservation Commission is the newest user of Packawhallop’s Webfiles product. Webfiles makes it easy to distribute documents in an attractive and user friendly way on any web site.

Based in Boscawen, New Hampshire, the Commission is dedicated to the protection of ”the natural features of our town and to preserve the economic viability of open space and to encourage and promote the conservation of our cultural and historical resources for current and future citizens of Boscawen.”

Thanks, BCC!

Nine Point Publishing choose Packawhallop for hosting

Nine Point Publishing of Bridgton, Maine has chosen Packawhallop for its web and email hosting. Nine Point makes fine and limited edition books. The web site presents information about their books, and it provides event registration tools events at the sister business, EFG Books.

Welcome aboard, Nine Point Publishing!

Jun 28

Webfiles in the Shop

For parts of July and August Packawhallop will be in the shop rearchitecting and reprogramming our first product, Webfiles.

Webfiles is a brain-dead easy to use tool to list files in a folder. Apache, the great open source web server software, will do this… but not so prettily. That’s a problem for the web designers, who spend a lot of time crafting great looking web sites, and that’s a problem for users, who understandably get a bit confused when they move from a nice looking, well laid out page to a spare directory index. mod_autoindex does a better job, but there’s a lack of control there too.

Why not use FTP? Well, you’d be surprised at how many users don’t “get” FTP. That’s not a problem with users - that’s a problem with the tech. We’re all using HTTP these days versus Gopher, afterwall.

Webfiles does some other things too - there’s a Perl, Python and a PHP version, so it’s basically web-server agnostic; there’s a password-protection feature; there are pretty, built in icons so that, for example, an MS Word file looks like a MS Word icon. All of this stuff is important. But we’re getting ready to do better.

Planned features and our goals for version 2.0 - modest:

1. Rewrite the Perl, PHP and Python versions.
2. Web-based interface for adding and managing files. Version 1.0 requires that the administrator use FTP to build the files to be listed.
3. Simple templating system - up to the Packawhallop design shop.
4. An iPhone interface.
5. Administrivia: Whether to open source it, which changes the business model for Packwhallop in part from a company building and selling software to a company building software and selling services to set up, maintain and enhance that software. TBD.

That’s it. Stay tuned. Great things are on the way!

Oh, existing users of Webfiles will get a free upgrade when the new version’s done.

Jun 19

Packawhallop Uses Social Networking Tools, Part 3

Simple, focused, direct solutions are usually the best. Not surprisigingly Packawhallop internally are a UNIX shop (Mac OS X, Debian and CentOS). That said setting up a system to cache our content from social networking tools was simple. Here’s how we do it:

1. A simple Perl script runs in cron and periodically imports data from the online services. Usually these are RSS feeds. Almost all require a rudimentary knowledge of curl.
2. If data are new or updated it goes into the cache. If not, then forget about it. We already know about the data because we’ve got it.
3. A simple PHP script on the Packawhallop site queries the database and draws the cached data on the page you’re viewing.

Simple!

Questions and answer session:

• Why use the social networking tools at all? Tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. are about networking. For a business - and Packawhallop isn’t Wal*Mart-sized - maximizing our communication and marketing efforts is kind of important. It’s the same for all our clients!
• Perl? Yes, Perl. Perl is excellent for backend processing - much better than PHP, which itself is excellent for rendering dynamic web pages. And when it comes it IT at Packawhallop our developers are multilingual.
• Isn’t Perl dead? Err, no. If you think so… you don’t know what you’re talking about.
• PostgreSQL? Yes. The cache a.k.a. database is written in it. PostgreSQL is an excellent open source software - one of a number of great open source databases softwares web developers nervous about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and MySQL might want to learn. Also, PostgreSQL’s mascot is a pachyderm, and at Packawhallop we’re understandably a little partial to pachyderms. (But we like dolphins as well!)

Packawhallop Uses Social Networking Tools, Part 2

The reality of using online services for marketing and outreach, all these social networking tools, is sometimes the service will go offline. Often this downtime is for maintenance. Sometimes it’s “unplanned”, i.e. something breaks on the servers hosting the social networking tool or something breaks on the network between your web browser and the server or data center where the tool is hosted.

We thought about this when we designed the Packawhallop web site to use social networking tools for content management. And rather than just talk about the tools we do believe it’s good to use them ourselves, as an integral part of the business’ communication and outreach. It’s what we recommend to clients! While we’re  excited about the tools we are pragmatic, and like most organizations with a web site we want to design our information systems in such a way that users don’t see blank pages - ever.

The solution: We designed a database management system to “cache” data from the online services we’re using: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook - there’ll be more. Cache is a technical word for, well, save in a database. The better services provide APIs to make getting data reasonably easy. And while some services send data we don’t really care about (for example, Twitter sends its 140 character tweet in the title and in the description namespaces), once we’ve got the data cached we can do what we want with it. Access to and control over our own content is important.

Another benefit the Packawhallop designers want me to point out: Flexibility of presentation (presentation = design): We can use social networking tools without in the end having a web site looking like a blog. How many web sites have you seen that look like WordPress templates? They are WordPress templates!

So, a number of reasons to use the online social networking tools and cache the data. Here’s how we do it:

1. A simple Perl script runs in cron and periodically imports data from the online services. Usually these are RSS feeds. Almost all require a rudimentary knowledge of curl.
2. If data are new or updated it goes into the cache. If not, then forget about it. We already know about the data because we’ve got it.
3. A simple PHP script on the Packawhallop site queries the database and draws the cached data on the page you’re viewing.

Easy!

Questions:

• Why use the social networking tools at all? Tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. are about networking. For a business - and Packawhallop isn’t Wal*Mart-sized - maximizing our communication and marketing efforts is kind of important. It’s the same for all our clients!
• Perl? Yes, Perl. Perl is excellent for backend processing - much better than PHP, which itself is excellent for rendering dynamic web pages. And at Packawhallop we’re multilingual.
• Isn’t Perl dead? Err, no. If you think so you don’t know what you’re talking about.
• PostgreSQL? Yes. The cache a.k.a. database is written in it. PostgreSQL is an excellent open source software - one of a number of great open source databases softwares web developers nervous about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and MySQL might want to learn. Also, PostgreSQL’s mascot is a pachyderm, and at Packawhallop we’re understandably a little partial to pachyderms. (But we like dolphins as well!)

Jun 13

Packawhallop Uses Social Networking Tools, Part 1

After a couple revisions of the Packawhallop web site (www.packawhallop.com) Gordon and I decided to manage all the content we could using social networking tools, like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. The question: Why?

Two reasons:

1. Social networking is really useful for making connections. For Packawhallop, as a hosting and software products developer, that’s particularly compelling: We do want to get the word out about the great things we’re doing, and we want to share the great things our customers, friends, colleagues and even peers are doing too. But, although we’re growing soon, Packawhallop right now is a two person shop. Social networking maximizes our marketing and outreach efforts.
2. Social networking tools rely on centralized data management systems. Sure, most (the better tools) have API’s for data aggregation, but Twitter.com is serving Tweets, Tumblr.com is serving blogs, Facebook.com is serving networkings, etc. Centralizing the database means there’s a single point-of-failure. If Twitter.com goes offline so do your tweets. So, Gordon and I wanted to use Packawhallop as a guinea pig to see how robust these tools really are.

Stay tuned for the follow up blogs to this entry: Part 2 weighs enthusiasm (hey, it’s ours too!) for shiny new tools with anxiety about reliability and control; Part 3 discusses architecture and implementation. Hey, it’s one thing to say you use x tool. It’s another to actually use it - in your own web site!