Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Jan 24
Introducing a new software platform that offers improved Chapter management functionality and much more
On 31 January, 2019, we will be launching our new association management software (AMS) that will offer many new capabilities to Internet Society members and Chapters.
During the roll-out of the new platform, the current AMS will be offline for several days (details below).
Internet Society members will be familiar with our current AMS if you have ever clicked on the “Member Login” link in the upper right corner of this web page. You also used the AMS if you logged into our Connect member forums or took an online course using our Inforum system. Chapter leaders have become very familiar with our AMS over the years, as it is the way they have interacted with their members and performed administrative functions for the Chapter.
Due to some functional limitations with the current AMS, we are replacing the system with a new AMS that will provide:
- A more modern system with enhanced functionality and user interface
- Core chapter management functionality to meet long-standing requirements/requests of our chapters
- Improved global/regional performance, particularly in low-bandwidth environments, through the use of a content delivery network (CDN)
- Events management capabilities
- Complete server and software management by the vendor – consistent and timely updates/upgrades to both servers and product code base
- Improved data security and overall system security with enterprise-class data centres
We are very excited by the capabilities and how this new AMS will enable both our staff and our Chapters to be better able to communicate effectively with our members. This will help us all speak globally with a stronger voice, as well as enable you to deliver the services locally you need to in order to achieve your objectives.
In order to make this migration happen successfully, we will take our current AMS offline for several days. The downtime will begin at 22:00 UTC on Friday, 25 January and may extend to 22:00 UTC on Friday, 1 February.
During this time, our member portals will not be accessible.
The sites affected are:
- Internet Society Member and Chapter Portal (https://portal.isoc.org/)
- Connect Member Portal (https://connect.internetsociety.org/)
- Internet Society e-learning system Inforum (https://inforum.internetsociety.org/)
All of our other websites will continue their normal operations.
The downtime will have the following impacts:
- People will not be able to join as new members.
- Current members will not be able to update their information or join chapters or SIGs.
- Members will not be able to login to Connect and access forums or the Connect event calendar.
- Chapters using Connect for communication will not be able to send messages to their chapter members.
- Members will not be able to participate in any of the self-paced online courses offered through Inforum.
- We will not be able to accept any individual donations.
We want to minimize the downtime and hope that we will be able to bring the new system online before the 31 January launch date. As soon as we do, members will be able to resume these activities.
If you have further questions, please reach out to the transition team at amshelp@isoc.org
We look forward to providing you with a new and improved system serving our members and Chapters.
The post Introducing a new software platform that offers improved Chapter management functionality and much more appeared first on Internet Society.
Jan 07
Who Played a Major Role in Advancing the Internet? Nominations Open for 2019 Internet Hall of Fame (Featured Blog)
Do you know someone who has played a major role in the development and advancement of the Internet? Now is the time to recognize their contribution. Nominate them for the 2019 Internet Hall of Fame. With more than 100 inductees, the Internet Hall of Fame celebrates Internet pioneers and innovators who have pushed the boundaries to bring the Internet to life and make it an essential resource for billions of people today. More...
Jan 07
Who Played a Major Role in Advancing the Internet? Nominations Open for 2019 Internet Hall of Fame (Featured Blog)
Do you know someone who has played a major role in the development and advancement of the Internet? Now is the time to recognize their contribution. Nominate them for the 2019 Internet Hall of Fame. With more than 100 inductees, the Internet Hall of Fame celebrates Internet pioneers and innovators who have pushed the boundaries to bring the Internet to life and make it an essential resource for billions of people today. More...
Jan 01
TDYR 359 – My 3 Words for 2019
As I have for the past 10 years, I started off the year talking about my "3 words" for 2019 - the areas in which I intend to focus. You can read more here: https://www.danyork.com/2019/01/my-3-words-for-2019.html
Jan 01
My 3 Words for 2019
As I have now done every year since 2010 (see past years), here are three words that I aspire to be the "themes" of my activity this year.
You'll note that these are really quite similar to my 3 words for 2018 - and in truth I think 2019 is really a continuation of everything in 2018 that was left undone with the severe disruption and chaos of both: 1) uprooting our family to move to Vermont; and 2) the unwelcome guest of colon cancer. I am SO ready to put a period at the end of the sentence of 2018 … and move on to what will be hopefully better chapters within 2019!
HEALTH
Last year I said that my health needed to be a focus - and the colonoscopy was part of that… but with all that insanity, there is much still left to do. I’m sadly now almost back up to the unhealthy weight I was in 2010. The dental issues that were there a year ago continue to be with me. And now we need to find all new doctors, dentists, vision centers, etc. It’s got to be a priority - as we do only have one body. And I’d like to be around for a while!
VOICE
2018 was a year when I continued to struggle with writing consistently. It’s so easy to NOT write or produce other kinds of content because…. work responsibilities, family logistics, the time suck of social media… and… and… and… there’s a million reasons. Toward the end of the year I started to write more, but it was in part to get myself back in the regular practice of creating content.
In 2019 I’d like to not only write more, but also find a bit more of the stronger “voice” I used to have in my writing and speaking. I want to be a stronger and more vocal voice for an open Internet - and for an Internet that works for us rather than for mega-corporations, platforms and governments. My challenge is to carve out the time to do the writing and the research and to speak and more.
FRIENDSHIPS
As I wrote last year, I'm finding that I'm communicating with a large number of people, but not necessarily connecting with people on a deeper level. This has certainly been highlighted with our move to Vermont. Beyond just “connections”, I’m looking at 2019 as a time to truly spend more time with friends - and for investing the time to develop new friendships in this beautiful part of the world to which we have moved. Nurturing friendships, both new and old, does definitely take time and energy - and I intend for it to be a priority this year.
That's what I am thinking about for this year... what about you?
P.S. Another life goal for this year - I want to be able to go into a Tim Hortons in Quebec and order a meal entirely en Francais! I’ve been dabbling in learning more French over the past years, but this year I want to be able to at least go in and order a double chocolate donut, a sandwich and a tea! ;-) Particularly since we are winding up in Quebec a good bit for curling and other travel.
P.P.S. And yeah, if I’m serious about “health”, I shouldn’t be ordering double chocolate donuts, right? But hey, every once in a while is okay, right?
An audio version of this post (with more commentary) is available on SoundCloud:
Dec 10
"Hipster Ipsum" may be my new favorite Lorem Ipsum generator
I may have just found my new favorite "Lorem ipsum" text generator - HIPSTER IPSUM!
https://hipsum.co/
For the longest time, my choice when I just needed some columns to fill in with filler text[1] was Bacon Ipsum, which is always fun. The companion to that is of course Veggie Ipsum
But now I think I may indeed use "hipster ipsum". I mean... I just smile when I read through the text. :-)
P.S. I noticed in searching today that there is a WordPress plugin (of course!) called "AnyIpsum" that lets you create your own lorem impsum generator.
[1] Why do I need filler text? When I'm working on a web design, it is often helpful to have some text in the columns and text blocks so that you can see what they look like with text in them. You can of course read more about the history of "Lorem ipsum" on Wikipedia.
Dec 08
Watch: the 2018 "State of the Word" from WordCamp US
Tonight in Nashville, Matt Mullenweg delivered his "State of the Word" presentation at WordCamp US. Not being there in person, I watched the live stream. The recorded stream has about 28 minutes of various quotes that were displayed. Matt starts at shortly after the 28-minute mark:
He shows some very cool ways that Gutenberg can work. Starting at around 54 minutes, Matt moves into showing what the next phases of Gutenberg will be. In a "Phase 2" during 2019, more of the admin interface will be moved into blocks. Phase 3 (2020 at the earliest) will be about collaboration, multiuser editing and workflows. Phase 4 (later) will be about having an official multilingual interface.
And then around the 1:12:00 mark, he mentions a fantastic statistic that over 57% of WordPress sites were using HTTPS (i.e. TLS):
Matt goes on with much more information about the WordPress community, more developements - and then finally concludes "The State of The Word" at around the 1:21:00 mark and moves into questions... of which there was about another 45 minutes of long discussions and questions.
Dec 07
Initial Thoughts on WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg
Yesterday (Dec 6, 2018) was TheBigDay when WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg block-based editor landed in all of our WordPress sites for upgrade. Some of the places to learn more about the launch include:
- WordPress 5.0 launch announcement (with videos)
- WordPress 5.0 Field Guide
- Gutenberg information
- Twenty Nineteen theme info
Changing the core editor over to Gutenberg was a massive effort over the past two years - and the launch this week was both an amazing accomplishment... and a very divisive event within the WordPress community.
I was very much hoping to be down in Nashville for WordCamp US this weekend, where parts of the community will be gathering. I expect it will be quite a passionate weekend! (Unfortunately some family medical issues kept me closer to home.)
I *really* like Gutenberg...
My initial reaction was... I really LIKE Gutenberg!
Now, I've been playing with it for much of the last year, and the more I work with it, the more I like it.
It really DOES enable more beautiful and powerful publishing with great ease.
I'm looking forward to doing even MORE with it and learning how far we can go with using Gutenberg.
... but it needs to work! :-(
However, after the upgrade to WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg editor didn't work on all my sites. For several of my sites, I had NO PROBLEM after the update. It "just worked." I was immediately able to go in and start editing with Gutenberg.
But on a couple of other sites, when I went in to edit an existing page or post - or to create a new one - I made all my changes and pressed the "Update" or "Publish" button and...
"Updating failed" in a big red bar across the top of the screen!
Amusingly to me, some searching on the web brought me back to a Github issue I had opened back in August 2017.
All I had to do to "fix" the issue was this:
- Go to Settings -> Permalinks, and change it from "Month and name" to "Day and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
- Change it from "Day and name" back to "Month and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
- Switch back to the tab where I was editing the post and had the error message. Pressed "Update" and.. ta da... the updating worked perfectly fine.
I had to do this on two different WordPress sites (both running on the same WordPress multisite server). Strangely, other sites on the multisite server were fine.
While the fix was easy, it concerns me that I had to do this and that I didn't really do anything. But somehow my act of changing the Permalink Settings did SOMETHING internally to make things work.
That concerns me.
Now, someone in that ticket or elsewhere suggested that this particular issue was NOT a Gutenberg issue, but rather an issue with the REST API, which Gutenberg uses.
Regardless, my point was that I couldn't use the editor to make changes on my site.
And beyond my own issue, I see many other Gutenberg issues piling up on Github. Now, yes, these may be initial launch pains for launching such a massive change.
But I do hope the team of developers can fix these in the 5.0.1 release that I'm sure will come quickly.
I really DO like the Gutenberg editor - and I look forward to seeing all we collectively can do with it!
P.S. This post was NOT written using Gutenberg because this Disruptive Conversations site is sadly still over on TypePad. I look forward to migrating it some day so that I can use Gutenberg!
Dec 06
Video I Found Useful: "Getting start with Docker"
Da ich in den letzten ein oder zwei Monaten mehr über Docker und Container erforschte, habe ich viele Videos auf YouTube gesehen. Eines der “Intro to Docker”, die mir sehr gut gefallen hat, war dieses von Brad Traversy:
Was ich nützlich fand, war, wie er das sehr praktische Beispiel der Einrichtung einer kleinen Website mit nginx verwendet. Sehr guter Anwendungsfall, einschließlich der Verwendung von Volumina, um Inhalte zu haben, die zwischen Containern wiederverwendet werden können. Er diskutiert auch, wie man DockerHub nutzt, um Ihr Containerbild anderen Systemen zugänglich zu machen.
Sein anschließendes Video über den Einsatz von Docker Compose war ebenfalls nützlich.
