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Campaign Seeds moves our services to the cloud!

Posted 1 year 6 months ago by Campaign Seeds

Many of our clients experience sporadic levels of traffic and sudden peaks in usage when their campaign hits prime time. If a candidate is interviewed on television, or if an advertising campaign blows up, it is possible and quite common for unprepared websites to be rendered unusable. A "down" website could cost a client thousands of generated leads, and in turn hundreds of thousands in lost revenue from donations or future sales. We have seen it happen before, it is not pretty.

To avoid this problem, developers in the past were required to forecast peak periods and request that clients finance an expensive system that could handle spikes. These servers would sit unused however when traffic slowed, burdening the client with unneeded hosting expenses.

Cloud Computing to the rescue

With cloud computing, hosting companies lace together a huge network of servers that interact with each-other to prevent outages. The cloud is set up so you only pay for the data that is used and when traffic does increase, resources are scaled instantly, so your site NEVER goes down. You never have to call the hosting company, set up a new server, or enter into any contract with a new organization. This is a huge bonus to organizations who can't predict traffic from one day to the next, which are most of our clients.

The power of Rackspace

After painstaking research, trial, and error, Campaign Seeds has chosen the Rackspace cloud as it's server of choice. In addition to Web site hosting, Rackspace offers a range of storage networks, computing parallels, and CDN (contend delivery network) services from global data centers, all on a pay-as-you-go basis. Because of the spectrum service model, Rackspace serves millions of websites of all sizes, ranging from individuals who may spend as little as $20 per month, to multinational corporations and governments who can dish out over $100,000/month for top-of-the-line service.

Get in contact with Campaign Seeds and let's get your organization on a managed cloud server!

Robert Caracaus's picture

Local development and version control makes maintaining your website cheaper.

Posted 1 year 7 months ago by Robert Caracaus

After your website is built, maintenance and upgrades are almost always required to maintain growth, streamline usability, add new features, or update static information. There are two main workflow methods that developers can use to make updates to your website. One method uses your remote (live) server as a laboratory and require the site to be taken down for maintenance or temporarily destroyed by live development. The other method makes changes to a separate set of local files on the developer's computer and ports those updates over when they have been properly tested. The updates are released in versions, that way changes can be reverted if there are problems. Developing locally alongside a version-controlled workflow is not only safer, more efficient, and more secure, but it is faster.

Why do developers still use remote connections to develop?

Most experienced back-end developers use a localhost to develop complicated software. Front-end developers traditionally used a remote connection to upload simple graphics and changes to cascading style sheets to the live website or a testing server. The reason stems from the fact that Macintosh and especially Windows operating systems do not make setting up a local development environment as easy as using an FTP program to remotely connect to a server. Version control software is often bulky and the lightweight options like "git" have no solid graphical user interface. Many developers just don't see the value in setting up their workflow in a structured way and opt for the simpler method. The trouble is that the simpler method is slower and is less reliable and will cost the client money undoubtedly.

Request for your website to be version controlled.

Version control software allows developers to sync their local files to your website, this way they have a copy of your website on their computer. Having a local copy is advantageous because developers can make changes to a local version of your website rather than altering or destroying a live website or having to shut the website down for maintenance. Developers make changes to live websites more often then their clients would like, risking total destruction in some cases.

If something happens to your website, a version controlled code-base can be reverted back to a working point in time. Developing locally is also much faster and you will get more bang for your hourly buck. Save yourself a headache and request that your developer uses version control and develops locally.

Campaign Seeds and Git

Developers at Campaign Seeds use Git repositories for all of our new clients. Git is the version-control software used at Drupal.org to manage and fork all of their modules and core development.

 

Robert Caracaus's picture

Facebook. Reborn.

Posted 1 year 8 months ago by Robert Caracaus

Facebook used to be cool, but over the last few years they have lost much of the emotional zing that propelled them to 750,000,000 users. People aren't excited when they use Facebook, many deem it more of a necessity than something they love and enjoy. Tomorrow, all of that will change.

Facebook is planning a revolutionary launch of new features that are top-secret and will be unveiled at Facebook's F8 developer conference tomorrow. The developers who have seen the changes are very enthusiastic. The timing of their launch was coordinated to rival Facebook's top competition, Google. The search engine giant launched Google+ yesterday and is prominently advertising the scaled-down social network to the 91,000,000 people who use their homepage every day. Facebook released some of their features in conjunction with Google's launch.

Over the past three days, Facebook has upgraded:

  • Friend Lists: Friends List lets you share content with specific groups of your closest friends (Google Circles anyone?).
  • Real-time Activity Ticker: Lets you know when your friends are doing something when they do it, prompting immediate conversations when activity catches your eye (and letting you know which friends use Facebook WAY to much).
  • Subscribe button: Lets you pretty much "follow" someone's public messages.. without necessarily adding them as a friend. 
What the web is suggesting might be the "Top Secret" implementations:
  • Share what you are listening to, share documents, etc.
  • New profile redisign that keeps users on website. E-commerce integration.
  • "Read," "Listen," and "Watched"  in addition to the "Like" button.
  • A Netflix-like service.
  • New features that let users put retro filters on images.
  • A new IPAD interface.

Apparently social networking will be reborn. I will comment on the new features tomorrow, become a Facebook fan and you will get my update.

 

Robert Caracaus's picture

Welcome to CampaignSeeds.com

Posted 1 year 8 months ago by Robert Caracaus

The Campaign Seeds team has officially launched our portfolio, services, and blog to the public. The site has a lot of content. Much of it was written by developers, not English majors. The content has yet to be edited by professionals. We were eager to get the site up and have launched knowing everything was not perfect. Please report any errors, bugs, or problems to [email protected] and we will fix them ASAP.

Anthony Astolfi's picture

Disqus and Drupal

Posted 1 year 8 months ago by Anthony Astolfi

Disqus a commenting service that allows users to sign in using multiple-platforms. The service provides every moderation setting you could possibly need conveniently located on Disqus.com in an administration area. Disqus supports integration with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. The immediate benefits of Disqus of Drupal's core comment module are as follows:

  • The initial CSS theming looks better to that of Drupal's system comment.css styles.
  • Drupal can be themed easily because the elements are not loaded via an Iframe but use Javascript.
  • Disqus 2.0 allows users to backup comment posts on their own database, this means that search engine optimization (SEO) is not affected negatively by loading comments in from another source.
  • Disqus works with views in most cases.

A negative feature of the Disqus commenting module may be in some advanced sorting or Views setups that may not be able to manipulate outsourced comments as effectively as comments hosted on a Drupal database. The biggest problem with Disqus rests in advanced Drupal setups that have large amounts of users already registered via a Drupal mechanism and need comments to be correlated with those users. These setups however often miss out if they are not connecting with Facebook. I wonder if there is a way to combine all three functionalities?

Robert Caracaus's picture

Drupal, Non-Profits, and Political Campaigns

Posted 1 year 11 months ago by Robert Caracaus

When it comes to building a cause-oriented website, your website needs social functionality embedded in it's core. Drupal is one of the best CMS options for creating a robust, flexible, and rapidly developed website for your supporters. If you are running a local campaign, a smaller organization, or a simple commentary blog then we highly recommend a simple Wordpress install to get you started. But if you expect your cause to grow, you need scalability and nothing scales as well as Drupal.

  • Drupal has built-in caching tools that allow our developers to easily pinpoint high traffic problem areas.
  • CCK, Views, Organic Groups (OG), Profile 2, and other modules allows a Drupal website to make customized user tools and displays for campaigns that have special requirements.
  • Often cause-oriented websites have well defined target audiences. Drupal allows for the display of custom content based on promotional variables, and when used in conjunction with tracking software, your website becomes a laboratory of innovation in which you are constantly learning the ideological trends supporters.
Robert Caracaus's picture

New Discovery: Mindmeister

Posted 1 year 11 months ago by Robert Caracaus

Mindmeister is a great free tool for project leads to plan out the general outline of a website, there are other more comprehensive programs that offer advanced mapping, but we like MindMeister because it lets our customers collaborate with our development team free of charge when it comes to the initial structure of their campaign.

Do you know of any other mind-mapping tools that are better than MindMeister? Let us know!

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