IT Elf: “Santa, you have 3 billion unread emails”

Santa: “Can you print them out for me?”

Who knew Santa was an attorney?

You’ve probably noticed the weekly “links” post that gets dropped into the feed and picked up in other places like Facebook and Twitter on Sundays. If you’re interested in seeing those same links, only in real time when I add them individually instead of in the weekly wrap up, you have myriad choices to do that as well. They start out on my Diigo account, then through the magic of If This Then That, they go out on both my Twitter, and the Facebook page for this site.

If you’re following either of those, you’ll see the links as they get added, give or take 10-15 minutes. You’ll also see various other things I share as I come across them in those channels, that aren’t necessarily showing up here on the blog.

Speaking of the Facebook page, for what seems like years now, I’ve been feeding the blog posts to both the Facebook page, and my own Facebook profile. I’m toying with the idea of stopping that, and only linking to select posts on my own profile, letting the page be the place to follow the blog in it’s entirety on Facebook. This way my friends and family don’t have to see every new post. Any thoughts on that type of change? Would you “like” the page to see the blog posts on Facebook, or are you already getting them elsewhere and don’t care where I post them on Facebook?

I’m also toying with a few other ideas, but not ready to commit to them just yet, and trying to figure out how a Google+ page fits in here as well. I’m trying to use it more, both my own profile and the pages, but that lack of automated import is hard to get over!

I’ll be sure to keep ya’ll posted!

This being the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, it’s a good chance to take a step back and remind yourself all that you have to be thankful for. I’m not going to bore you with a list of all the things I’m thankful for, but this year, with all the changes that have gone on, this is especially poignant. It can be difficult to pick up and make major changes in your life or career. As exciting of an adventure as this has been, I also know it’s been difficult to start over in a new place, leaving behind many of the friends and family that I depended on.

Luckily, it’s 2011, and staying in touch with friends all over the place has never been easier. Luckier still, the people I count among my closest friends are more than willing to stay in touch even if it is electronically, for now.

The Internet, and social networking tools in particular, have really changed the dynamic when it comes to making big changes. Yes, I miss the people I used to spend time with more often, but they are still part of my life, and maybe now that we’re settled in, they can even come explore this new area too. Technology allows us to maintain relationships that would have required so much work before. It also allows me to build new relationships and connect with people regardless of physical location. I know a great many people through my websites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and have come to consider them friends, even though we’ve never met. I’ve learned from them, shared with them, laughed with them, and even disagreed with them sometimes, all online. We truly live in an amazing time.

It may not be the easiest of times, and god knows it’s difficult to keep up with all of the changes that are constantly being thrown at us every day, but we are capable of doing things that were nothing more than dreams just 15-20 years ago. There’s certainly something to be said for being thankful for that!

So, I hope you all enjoy a great holiday, and never take for granted the people in your life, whether they be right there to celebrate with you, or miles away. Either way, it’s easy to let them know how important they are to you.

The other day, my wife was driving us down the road and we happened to be behind a guy driving a truck with a website URL on the back of it. It was an interesting business name, and we were guessing what it was when I decided to pull out my iPhone and find out. I was met with a blank website, which led me to assume it was Flash-based, and therefore inaccessible to anyone using an iPhone. (Which seems an odd decision, given the listing of the site somewhere you would be much more likely to use a mobile device to look up, but whatever…)

Now that Adobe is completely ending development for mobile Flash, the situation I foind myself in will soon be common to Android and Windows Mobile devices as well.

So, all you photographers, musicians, and graphic artists with cool looking Flash-based sites may want to consider moving to HTML5 or some other format, or live with limiting your site’s exposure to people who are more and more viewing internet-based information from mobile devices. Seems to me that you would want to make your site as accessible as possible in order to increase the number of folks who see it, especially if you’re doing any advertising of it offline. (Business cards, brochures, signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, etc.) You want folks to see the site when they are thinking about it, instead of having to go home and get another computer.

By the way, I did go home and look at the site, it was a recording and graphic design studio. I’m not a marketing expert, but I can’t help but wonder how much of their target audience uses iOS devices quite frequently.

Thanks to some fellow Friends in Tech members, I learned over the weekend that Box.net is giving away upgrades to 50GB of storage if you download their iOS app and log in to the service.

Now, there are some limitations to the Box.net service, as laid out over on the Mac Screencast Guy, but 50GB of free storage is still 50Gb of free storage, right?

You never know when that might come in handy.

Recently, I came across a mention of a site that parses your Twitter feed, and tries to locate the popular links being shared by the people you follow. It’s called Strawberry Jam, and, as of right now, it’s still in beta. (I do have a couple of invites, leave a comment if you’re inclined to check it out.)

It’s a nice little service for those days when you really don’t have time to follow along on Twitter much, but you still want to see what sort of links are being shared among your connections. The service, upon login, will grab a list of both the most popular links being shared, as well as the most recent links, show you who shared them, and allow you to mouse over their avatar to see what, exactly, they tweeted about it.

All in all, a pretty useful bit of technology!

If you subscribe to the RSS feed here you may have noticed that the daily “links” posts haven’t been happening. There’s actually a reason for that. A while back, when Yahoo announced they were dropping Delicious, I went in search of an alternative. I starting using Diigo to save my links as I was perusing Google Reader, or checking links shared on Twitter. Diigo, it turned out, had a nice feature that allowed me to bookmark something there, and it would sycn up with Delicious, allowing me to continue using the Feedburner feature that lets me drop those posts into the RSS feed without having them take up all the space on the homepage of the site.

So that’s what I did, while the future of Delicious was in doubt, it worked as a temporary situation and bought me time to figure something else out.

Then, of course, Delicious got purchased, and was saved from the scrap heap. Great! What I was doing now with Diigo was still working, so no reason to change anything.

Last week, the new Delicious website rolled out, and the API that allowed Diigo to share my bookmarks with Delicious, went away. I’ve been saving bookmarks in Diigo, but they aren’t getting to Delicious, and thus aren’t being pushed to the blog. So, starting today, I’m back to using Delicious, and we shall see how this all works with their new version of the service. Hopefully I won’t have to spend too long getting things back the way I had before!

Anyone else using the new Delicious? Have any opinions on it?

So you want to have your own website and play around with different tools and technologies? Great, just don’t leave a project sitting too long, bad things happen.

Case in point, over on the Child Abuse Survivor site, I had created a sub-domain with it’s own WordPress Multi-User install (back when that was a separate version of WP), running Buddypress to act as a sort of community site. Over time the site saw some traffic, but eventually the community involvement started to fall off, around about the same time that I was changing jobs and moving,  so I really sort of stopped dedicating a bunch of time to it. Oh I left the community up, in case anyone wanted to continue to use it and communicate with each other, but I stopped checking in regularly.

That also means I stopped updating the WordPress install. A big no-no.

Sure enough, late last week, I noticed an issue with the RSS feeds on the main blog getting malformed text and becoming invalid. I didn’t see anything wrong on that WordPress install, but somehow the feeds weren’t publishing properly. A quick re-install of WP in place corrected the feeds issue, but I made a note to keep a closer eye on the feeds.

Sure enough, Monday evening, I saw the same problem with the feeds again. This time I decided this wasn’t a random occurrence, something was wrong. So I dug in to the site and the WordPress database to see if I could see what was causing this. As I dug around I came across a strange class.php file that had been dropped into the wp-content folder, and an .htaccess file that hadn’t been at that level of the install before, pointing to a random numeric php document in another folder, on the community site. Further digging led me to discover Google search results, mostly for pharmaceuticals, pointing to oddly named pages on my site.

Now my blog’s WordPress install was up to date, and there wasn’t any SQL injection into the database, but as I rolled over to the community WordPress install, boy what a mess. There were a number of malicious PHP files over there, and some SQL injected into the database. Since I haven’t updated that install in months, I assume it was compromised thanks to a known exploit that has since been fixed.

After nuking the community site completely, database included, and then cleaning the handful of PHP files running all over the rest of the site’s directories, it seems to be clean again, though Google hasn’t re-indexed things just yet so I’m still getting interesting search queries to say the least. (Sigh)

Those are two nights of my life I’m never getting back, thanks to leaving an old WP install laying around unused. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

I was tuned in to a webinar yesterday by the Cowen Group when one of the speakers talked about the need for a deep bench in Litigation Support. Being a sports fan, I instantly understood exactly what she was saying.

Her point was that the firm’s clients experience and expertise when it comes to e-discovery, is going to be all over the place. Some will be very sophisticated, and have well-defined processes that marry quite well with the firms internal processes. Others will be completely clueless, and whatever process they hack together may require a lot of flexibility in your internal processes. It’s important to have a staff with the capabilities to handle any and all of these situations. That means having people who can directly interface with clients, with the lawyers, and with the IT folks. It means having folks who can handle the back-end technology to take whatever it is a firm gets from a client,  opposing counsel, or a third party, and get it into a form that the firm’s attorneys can review.

Much like a sports team, having a deep bench doesn’t mean that you will win every game. It does mean that you’ll be better prepared to handle adversity, and uncommon situations, which will mean you’ll win more often than teams without that deep bench, though!

That got me thinking though, about all the time I spent in my career as the only IT guy, or the only Lit Support person in a firm, etc. Obviously, in that case, you aren’t talking about having a deep bench in terms of the number of staff members, but you still need a deep bench of knowledge and skills to reach in to from time to time. That means not only being adept with the technology, but with written and verbal communication skills, training skills, professionalism, critical thinking and many other skills.

The other thing you need is a deep bench of resources, be they reference materials, websites, blogs, peer networks, online social networks, etc. If you can’t have a deep bench of people, you’d better have a wealth of resources you can tap in to when you need them! That’s why blogging, and eventually social networking, have always appealed to me. I can’t know everything. I don’t have the time to research everything on my own. I can’t read every article about my field that is published. But I can be connected to people who become my deep bench. They are sharing information about ediscovery, technology, productivity, speaking tips, etc. and we’re all building our own knowledge and skills as we go along.

That sure beats not having anywhere to turn when you need some help from the bench!

Some interesting observations from a new survey focusing on IT and Social Network usage within larger businesses, but one bit in the article really jumped out at me.

End users gave many reasons for doing an end-run around their IT departments: IT is too slow, they have little confidence in the department’s problem-solving abilities, they felt more comfortable working with people they knew. (Emphasis added)

There are real risks to being nameless and faceless within your own organization, as we’ve discussed before. If you’re in an IT support role, one of those risks is end users hitting up their social networks for assistance, instead of you.

On the flip side of this, your end-users have options other than working directly within the IT framework. You may think they are doing things using the tools you’ve provided, and within the constraints you’ve put in place just because you don’t support other options. Don’t think for a second that savvy end users can’t work around that, and use the information available to them online for the support you won’t provide.

The world has changed, people can and will work around their IT departments if they have to, and how safe will job be if they feel the need to do so more and more frequently?