So with the arrival of Drupal 6 a while ago and some projects both in my personal endeavors and at work involving Drupal, I decided it was time to move this site over to Drupal. There are still some kinks I am working out, but all of the content from my "blog" has been moved here. The options for Drupal 6 themes are smaller, but I think I have a good start here.

If you haven't heard of Drupal, you probably don't deal much with web development. Drupal is the rising star in the open source field with an ever-growing installed base as a very powerful content management system (CMS). Drupal is a website content management system that really allows you to rapidly create a prototype for your innovative web idea. How does it do that? A very active community with hundreds of modules for about every functionality you can imagine.

A couple years ago, my wife and I had an idea for a website community centered around women who play games - computer games, board games, card games, role-playing games, etc. We kind of had an idea for what we wanted the site to do, but we were not really certain of all the details. In the course of investigating the CMS options out there, I came across a product I had not encountered before in Drupal.

After installing Drupal, we would often have conversations like this:

"What do you think about having users vote on whether content appears on the home page?"
"Sounds great. Let me check the Drupal site for a module."
"Hey, there's a module for that, and I just spent five minutes downloading and installing it."
"Wow, I just took a bit of time to play with it a bit, and that does exactly what we want."

The same conversation happened for a user points system, for personal messaging, for blog support, and on and on. The bulk of the work ended up being in design with configuration tweaking somewhat less time. In other words, we were able to focus on the capabilities we wanted and quickly try out existing modules to see if they met our needs.

Out of the box, Drupal supports a lot of different things, and it really lets you build a website quickly and easily. If your website is primarily static content, you can spend your time working on the content. If your website is primarily functionality, you can spend your time searching the community for modules or writing your own. Being written in PHP with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database (though the latter might have some issues in some modules), it is a pretty standard open source development environment. Unlike a lot of commercial products out there, that means Drupal can get you up and running really quickly while providing limitless capabilities to customize the functionality your site provides. As a tool, Drupal both enables rapid prototype development for innovative ideas without forcing you to start over when you decide to take the next step.

Just in case you aren't sold yet on at least looking into Drupal for developing your new site, maybe you'll be sold by the fact that some very busy and popular sites use it for their content management system.

• Popular Science
• Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
• MTV UK
• The Onion

William Oncken, Jr. and Donald Wass wrote an article several years ago for Harvard Business Review about time management called "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey." As you can imagine, Oncken and Wass use a metaphor of monkeys to approach the issue of time management. Before getting into the specifics, everyone realizes that you can not really manage time. We can manage how we use our time, but there are not any ways to increase the amount of time, move time around, or buy more of it (though we'd certainly like to buy some once in a while). Time management though is really more about priority management and delegation.

Monkeys are a metaphor for the initiative on tasks and responsibilities. A user's printer problem is a monkey. Setting up new user accounts for the staff members is a monkey. Taking a look at the server logs to troubleshoot the backup software is a monkey. Monkeys live on people's back like you would normally expect, and they can be exchanged and moved around from person to person. So how do you manage the monkeys to be sure things are getting done? Oncken and Wass proposed five rules for managing monkeys.

Rule #1: Monkeys should be fed or shot.
While you should absolutely not micromanage, it's important to check in with your people to make sure they are feeding their monkeys with the appropriate attention. If a monkey is not getting attention, it will eventually get angry and demand more attention than if it were addressed immediately. At the same time, it occasionally becomes necessary to shoot a monkey because it is no longer important or required. If you have a monkey that's been sitting around for weeks, maybe it would be better to just remove it as a to-do and move on.

Rule #2: The monkey population should be kept below the maximum number that the manager has time to feed.
Your people will only work on the number of monkeys that they have time to do. A monkey that has been well-maintained should only take five to fifteen minutes of care to continue good maintenance. If your people have too many monkeys, that means you are going to have too many monkeys to care for and feed, too. It is important to know the team and yourself so that no one becomes overloaded. Otherwise, the monkeys will get to be overwhelming. You have seen those Career Builder ads, right?

Rule #3: Monkeys should be fed by appointment only.
If one of your reports walks into your office with a monkey, it is sometimes a good idea to send them away to schedule a time to come back. With the intellectual style of IT work, sometimes we just need a little more time on our own to figure out a problem. It might be a good idea though to feed the monkey a treat by giving the person a thought that might get them approaching the problem from a different angle by which they take care of the monkey themselves.

Rule #4: Monkeys should be fed face to face or by telephone, but not in writing.
If someone sends you an email about a monkey they are carrying that requires a response, who now has the monkey? That's right - you do! The monkey is on the back of the person who has to take the next step. If you are asked a question about someone else's monkey, you want to be careful that they don't get you to take the monkey for them. Even some phone calls can move a monkey to you so be careful how you talk. You want to help the person take care of their own monkey, not let them give the monkey to you.

Rule #5: Every monkey should be assigned next feeding time and a degree of initiative.
While not every monkey is going to be long term or require weeks of work, it is possible that a monkey is not a task that can be completed short term. In that case, you want to check in and feed the monkey once in a while on a regular basis. By assigning how much initiative is needed, you can also set the expectation for how much progress should be made before the next feeding. If you just check in to see how things are going, then maybe nothing will happen. If nothing happens, that could allow the monkey to jump onto the manager's back.

While these rules are a bit extreme when taken strictly, I think it is definitely important to think about who has the monkey on a task. It can become easy to just say you'll take care of something because you know exactly what needs to be done. But what's the impact of that new monkey on the rest of the monkeys you already have?

I. Introduction
There are many factors that can contribute to the effectiveness of an e-commerce system as well as the rate of adoption among site visitors. A web site is most often successful when it does a good job in each of five factors: download speed, navigation, content, interactivity, and responsiveness (Palmer 2002). All of these can be affected by an efficient and effective interface, and it for this reason that I am going to examine some of the major interface technologies available and their impact on these five factors. The specific technologies that I will examine are basic HTML, Java, Flash, and Ajax. My experience with web interfaces began in 1995 when the first popular web site that was not available on an edu domain was by a small company called Yahoo. During the last eleven years, I have worked with a variety of web technologies on both the client side and the server side. Throughout this paper, I have included personal professional experience in relation to web application development as well as their impact on web users in addition to supporting the major points with separate research resources.

This was a paper I wrote about Ajax for one of my Master's classes. While it is not necessarily timely for most web developers, it may be of interest to IT managers and others not as closely connected to the web development field.

For the last couple years, the view of the web has been undergoing a change. Web applications that involve filling out forms, clicking submit, and getting a result are changing to behave more like desktop applications. Many active users of the web have experienced web sites like Google's maps and photo-sharing web site Flickr to see something newer, more dynamic, and more responsive. These web sites use a new web programming paradigm called AJAX.