2XL Networks

MilwaukeeDevHouse1 was a success, with some of us sticking around until 6AM. People worked on various projects, or just socialized with other geeks. So we're doing it again.

Our friends at Fresh Coast Ventures are taking the lead on this one, which is happening Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 6PM at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

We may be there filming for an upcoming project we are working on... but more on that later.

And of course, the big question is: What will you work on?

We're all set for MilwaukeeDevHouse1, which will take place Friday March 14th, 2008 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

MilwaukeeDevHouse aims to be the premier regularly scheduled hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere.

If you’re a coder, designer, or just someone who enjoys software and technology development, MilwaukeeDevHouse was made for you...

MilwaukeeDevHouse is intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have some fun, learn new things, and meet new people.

More info is available at Web414. We hope to see you there!

We're in the planning stages for MilwaukeeDevHouse.

It's modeled after SuperHappyDevHouse.

And at some point, there will be a nice site for milwaukeedevhouse.org

Stay tuned!

DrupalCampWisconsin is happening soon! Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We’ll be running from 10AM to 10PM and dealing with all things Drupal.

Recently a client of ours was looking for a shopping cart solution, and after trying to find a decent PHP/MySQL application that actually worked, we ended up choosing Übercart, which is a collection of modules that run within Drupal. (Both Übercart and Drupal are open source.)

So far it's been a positive experience. Being familiar with Drupal helps quite a bit, and if you are starting from ground zero as far as Drupal knowledge and Übercart knowledge, you've got some work ahead of you. Even with a good familiarity of Drupal, Übercart has a great deal of configuration options, which is good when you want a powerful solution, but can make it difficult to get up and running quickly.

I often need to look at other hosting services for our clients, it's true - I'll freely admit that what we offer does not fit the needs of everyone - but I so often see the same thing, companies tend to present themselves exactly as they think their customers (or potential customers) want to see them. Typically this will involved showing glowing servers, or racks of servers, or a person standing in front of servers (I guess this illustrates that at least one person works at the company, and it's not just made up of machines.)

Now, I like servers too, I use a lot of servers, but I also like trees. Maybe we should have some photos of trees on the site?

There, I like that... But what does it mean? Hmmm, well... I guess it means we are human, and we like trees. Sometimes we leave our desks and go outside for a hike. Sure, 90% of the time we sit in front of computers, babysitting them and making sure everything is alright for our clients, but we do other things too. We make mistakes, but we fix them. We're humans, not machines, and we hope that's the sort of company you want to deal with.

About six months ago we started a project to use Drupal as a client extranet site. Now we're at the point where it actually seems to be working.

It took a careful selection of modules and configuration to get what we were after, but I think we may be ready for testing outside of our small group. I'll be contacting a few people about this, and when we think it's ready, we will provide a tutorial on how we set it up.

Drupal is definitely a powerful platform, and we're enjoying working with it.

Server problems don't make anyone happy. We recently had a few problems with our mail and database server which required a bit of downtime. Less than 1/2 a day. Still, this is too much. The goal is always 100% uptime. 99% seems like a good number, and honestly 99% uptime is not that hard. We can do better.

When things go right, customers typically don't notice, because they expect things to go right all the time. When things go wrong, people notice. The best you can do is try your best to get things working again, skip sleep if necessary, and make the customers happy.

(For those people who keep shouting "Email is dead!" I have news for you... it is definitely alive, and mission critical.)

We're excited to be involved in BarCampMilwaukee2 taking place in the Fall of 2007. 2XL Networks was a sponsor of Milwaukee's first BarCamp in 2006, which was probably the first "un-conference" in the Milwaukee area.

More details will follow, but if you're interested in finding out what BarCamp is all about, take a look at BarCamp.org or the Wikipedia entry on BarCamp.