Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

At a recent conference, I spoke with some people who reminded me (unintentionally, perhaps) that it's all too easy to criticise, especially in the blogosphere, and that reviews should be balanced with a degree of fairness where possible. It's just easier to dash of a harshly critical review when you're angry with a company or a service, but harder to make that effort to publish glowing praise when the service performs adequately.

This is an overview of my work with Drupal's Mailhandler module, designed to allow content creation on a Drupal (or CivicSpace)site via email. If we combine this functionality with a mailing list address that's authorized to post content, we have the first steps towards an integrated forum and mailing list system (the next stage would be to develop a system that automatically emails any created content to the mailing list address).

I've been thinking and tinkering with solutions to achieve true forums / listserv integration for a long time now, along with many other techies working to network large groups of people. The idea is that an online forum (or bulletin board) could coexist with a listserv (a traditional mailing list), transparently integrated.

So you're an individual about to start a site, or a small business or nonprofit with a very tiny budget for website development. You've found a volunteer or an affordable professional to handle the development work, and now you're looking to find a place to host your site. How do you find the right company?

HostPC is an organization I started working with about three years ago, when the Nirman website's hosting company started to spiral. It's always rough on clients when a website hosting company dies...this one was no exception, with many of us left with no warning as the company went under, left with nonfunctional sites while the dishonest crooks did a runner with our money.