CAT | Uncategorized
I stumbled across a nifty little module for nginx called ngx_postgres. It allows you to access a Postgres database directly through nginx and HTTP with little more than a configuration file that creates a REST mapping to your tables. Interesting idea so I thought I’d give it a spin and see if it could be useful, however there were a couple of “gotchas” in setting it up that I thought I’d document.
First adding modules to nginx requires recompiling nginx so you’ve got to get your hands a little dirty to get it going. I’m currently running Debian 6 in a hosted environment so I’ll give you the blow by blow based on my config.
(more…)
Just a quick tip to share since this was not as straightforward on Snow Leopard as I would have liked. I originally went to install psycopg2 on Snow Leopard and got the following error…
In file included from psycopg/psycopgmodule.c:32: ./psycopg/psycopg.h:31:22: error: libpq-fe.h: No such file or directory
include_dirs=/opt/local/include/postgresql91
library_dirs=/opt/local/lib/postgresql91
Originally published at OnCollabNet
Many a project has gone down in flames because they failed to take the time to really think through a communication plan that educated their stakeholders of the organizational value of their project. Communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your community. Without communicating your project or program’s benefits and successes, users and stakeholders alike won’t be aware of new offerings, program progress, or the goals and direction of your project.
“The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.”
–Sam Walton
The first step in any Communication Plan is identifying your stakeholders. This is a key step that is often overlooked. Many projects and programs focus only on keeping users informed about community news, however its important to look outside your active community members and find the stakeholders that are most important to your continued success. This may include management, partners, or even other projects and programs only tangentially related to yours. Putting together this list comes first and will help you not only identify key players but also will help you discover the correct communication channel to reach them.
I recently stumbled across a great post called Communities Manifesto by Stan Garfield that I highly recommend. In his post Mr. Garfield lays out 10 principals that define community and also has suggestions for helping them grow and mature.
What communities are not …
Two of his principals in particular caught my attention because I’m wrestling with how to explain the basics of community to a company that draws a distinction between where they are now and where they want to go, so these two really jumped out at me.
- Communities are not teams
- Communities are not websites
These two principles nicely articulate what a community is not and sometimes that’s more helpful and descriptive than trying to state exactly what they are. Communities are NOT some nebulous team to manage or a website to maintain, communities are people.
An article posted recently by Glyn Moody in ComputerWorldUK announced that email was dying. It’s an interesting assertion (which is why it shows up on my Interesting page), but one that I don’t agree with. Email is still going strong as far as I can tell. I get upwards of 100+ email a day with fewer than 1 junk message on average making it past my filters. And I don’t even classify myself as a power email user! Some people I know get at least double that volume and spend half their workday reading and responding to email. Again, this doesn’t sound like email is dying. What it does sound like is that email is broken or better yet our email habits are broken.
Email in most corporate environments has degenerated into a CYA system that sucks volumes of time and offers less and less value in the face of competition like IM or Facebook. In the golden age of handwritten notes writers tended to craft very thoughtful (more…)
