We have started a Refatoring of the code base for Crowd Fusion.  This version of the Code is barely 6 months old but was prototypical from its birth.  Ryan is taking the lead and being sensitive to the core principles, our Element Controllers are restrictive, but allow future extensibility without conflict, and need to remain intact.   While working through some of the framework design flow were discussing a great post about 'professional PHP developers' and I thought about a missing component to this.   A professional PHP developer has undergone numerous refactors, and they'll be able to talk about the pitfalls.

Great programmers are never happy with what they wrote yesterday.  So I'm trying to come up with a formula about when you should refactor and if you can tell the quality of a coder based on their desire to start over.   Using myself as the measuring stick (great coders are also very egotistical) we are 6 months into design and the code base needs an overhaul that will take 2 1/2 weeks.  So there it is.. if the your dev team is itching to rebuild your code base and the time it will take is more than 1/10 the age of the code, you've either got really crappy code or you need a new team. 

There are tons of great resources to help you know when to refactor and the pitfalls to avoid scattered across the web.  The question should never be if you should take a fresh look at your systems, the question is when.  If you aren't spending atleast 10% of your teams hours cleaning up your Objects, reducing redundant code and cleaning up design flow life you will come to a point that new development is nearly impossible without adversly affecting the rest of the system.  Every hour of new dev will come at the cost of 10 hours of debugging.  Spend 10% of your time now to avoid it being 90% or your time later.  If you are getting pressure from the suits, have them call me .. I've made this mistake before I'll explain to them the consequences.

In this post 9/11 world it is an extraordinary day that a ruling comes out in favor of an individuals privacy.  I'm not advocating anonymous Trolling of forums or wikis.  Quality forums are based on strong communities who should be given the technology and tools to police themselves.  If we find that website owners are responsible to give away the id (or IP) of any user whose posts anyone finds questionable the burden will be too great for forum owners. 

Ryan started working with us full-time at Crowd Fusion this month and we are ecstatic to have him.  Hiring him was a triumph that is seems many other NYC Startups are having trouble with.  Nate Westhimer posted about his trouble finding php developers and Allen at Centernetworks picked up the story.  I'm drawn into this conversation because of my recent history of being an advocate of the virtual workforce and that Nate being an internet entrepreneur is caught up with old world workplace notions.

We have been able to find tremendous talent available if you broaden your search scope.  Virtual working is something an employer has to get used to.  It requires constant contact -- It requires an IM session that is always on.  It requires a huge leap of faith that the person on the other end is working on the project you are paying him for.

Dealing with remote contractors will tax your management to the very bone.  I'm drawn out of my comfort zone setting up for our next round of projects, for example:

1. I have to setup individual secure work environments that have no interactions with

• Main Code Base
• Production Databases
• Other Users environments

2. Specifications, Documentation and Email Communications have to be as detailed as possible

3. Scheduling calls and work sessions has to be flexible to accommodate weekends, evenings and lunch hours.

As an employer I'm glad so many other employer's don't get it, or don't want to put in the extra effort, our overhead stays low, we can pick our workforce from the best in the world, and we can focus on having challenging projects to do. 

Another Milestone accomplished yesterday on Crowd Fusion, the permissions system was put live in production.  The fundamentals of the permissions system are similar to many others that you'll find on the web.

• Members authenticate through a signin form.
• Members belong to Teams (a.k.a Groups).
• Content (pages, news, photos) can be limited to one or many teams.

The tagging system and our tag widget makes the tasks of adding the groups to the content and filtering the content powerfully dynamic and simple to learn.  

The underlying structure of Crowd Fusion is definitely out of prototype, through alpha and solidly Beta.  Brian and I spent last Thursday going over the Elements of Crowd Fusion and the Inbound and Outbound linking structure connecting each element to one another.   Needless to say it answered some nagging questions about the interplay between things like media and news and allowed me to 'finalize' how galleries and project pages will be handled on this site.

An example of this inter-connectivity is when you go to an individual project page like Crowd Fusion you get a synopsis and a list of what I'm writing in regards to that project. These are much more defined relationships than simple tags.  Within the CMS you have the ability to specify these relationships to the individual content that you are working with and configure the output to your liking.

Galleries are similar to project pages but instead of linking writing to pages you are linking media.  In the case of Fall FIshing with Rob, the media are photos.   Having media as a separate element that is linked  into content allows for the creation of different viewing methods very simple with our templating language.

• /galleries/ gives a list of galleries with thumbnails.
• /gallery/fall-fishing-plum-gut-with-rob/ shows the gallery information larger photos.
• /media/2008/01/28/early-morning-with-rob/  is a permalink for each media item.

Comments are an element to themselves and can be linked to any other element.  So a complete comment thread could be left on a gallery or on the individual media item.  For my pages I'd rather not have comments on the galleries, so I left it out of the template.

Its the deep cold of January and cabin fever is setting in.  Now is the time to be planning a trip to the Dry Tortugas and searching Ebay for deals on Lures and Hardware.  Of course setting aside $5 a day for fueling up the boat this summer isn't a bad idea either.   Nothing beats being prepared when fishing - all salt water sport fish in the North East are migratory so the time of year is the first important factor.

Sometimes Bass and Blues come into the Peconic Bay in April.  2007 had a bit of a cold spring that kept the bay empty.  Easter was the coldest Egg Hunt on Record (according to oral history - spread by those thinking that hot air would somehow thaw the chill). 

Itching to engage the water at some level I donned my waiters and grabbed my clam rake and spent about 30 minutes lowering my core body temperature in pursuit of hard shells.  The chill of the water and the long winter without shellfish made those clams the sweetest of the season.  Check out the pictures of me chilled to bone in my April 2007 Gallery.

If I was a thrill seeker this would have to the be ultimate rush.  Thanks Ryan for turning me on to the video.

In December the fledgling Crowd Fusion Team met in Philadelphia for 3 days of coding, colaberation and consumption.  Below is the group enjoying the Feast of Seven Fishes with the author of EZ Street  Robert Tinnell.   Alex Hilman gracious let us live in Independents Hall conference room.  For the first time at Crowdfusion design, process, and development began to gel into a solid product offering.  We met our old buddy Mike Propst in Philadelphia, he joined us for dinner, and gave us some great design feedback.

Alex is running what is quickly becoming a model co-working space that makes Philadelphia a very attractive gathering point for small virtual work forces on the east coast.   We will definitely be revisiting Philadelphia in the coming year.

Clockwise Top Left to Bottom Left: Brian Alvey, Ryan Scheuermann, Mike Propst, Craig Wood, Judith Meskill, and Robert Tinnell

Is history repeating itself?  Will another Clinton take down the entrenched republican oligarchy? Listening to George W. discuss his White House Stimulus initative I was saddened that the canned speach was too little too late and directed more against his political opponents than for the embattled middle class. 

I feel like Steve Jobs was is giving away computers like ginsu knives, and I'm not referencing him deciding to sell Air.   I was just surfing the Apple Refurbished store and I saw the neatest thing, if you bought a Mac after Oct 1st 2007 and it didn't come with OSX 10.5 you are entitled to a copy for $9.95.   I looked back through my records and saw that I had bought this MBP for $1500 on Oct 9th.  This deal keeps getting better and better.

I also just went to upgrade my meager 1 Gig of Ram with a 2 Gig chip ($70), and found that the 1 Gig was a single chip not two 512s as I had expected.   If anyone has any horror stories of why I shouldn't upgrade to Leopard let me know.

Growing up in the farm belt in upstate New York, you would often hear the farmers discussing the January Thaw.  A seemingly predictable week of warm weather in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th week of January that would snap the winter doldrums, fling open the windows and get everyone thinking about Spring.  Many farmers would fire up their tractors hook-up the disc with the notion of getting the back 40 ready for planting.   More often than not all they would accomplish is showing of their machinery in a great parade of tractors, each one bigger than the next -- chained to the previous one -- and stuck in the mud.

On Long Island you can't call it a 'Thaw' but their does seem to be a smattering of nice weather when I get to go outside and start cleaning up the lawn and garden beds.  Today I got outside and raked leaves until my arms ached.  It was a wonderful time but I refuse to get lured in to thinking that Spring is around the corner.

A search on Google yields 450K results for 'Blogging Excuses'.  Obviously you have the common ones, "The Dog ate my Keyboard", "I was hit by a bus", and the ever popular variety of zombie attacks.   I don't have any excuses and frankly don't owe my mom or the other two of you readers any.

So I have a new look, it is a variation of the sample site that we just finished for CrowdFusion.  The speed of changing templates was everything Brian and I dreamed it would be.  Adding content shouldn't be a chore anymore -- and my blog will stop breaking everytime we add additional weapons to our publishing arsenal.

You'll notice two themes now on my blog Reading and Writing, 'Rythmatic is not around the corner, you can put down your number 2 pencils.  This post is an example of writing, the Reading is the stuff I've filtered out of the news feeds that I follow, I'm proud to say our news reader is now better than Google Reader and completely integrated with the platform.

More great stuff coming soon. Also if you are a Virtually Enabled Developer looking to join our team send us your resume.

It isn't 1968. You have to speak the language of the current generation.

Often building a better mouse trap is the best kind of innovation.  In these days of Foolish Facebook Evaluations and VC money tripping over each other to find the next hot internet platform it makes sense to remember that Altavista was an early winner in the Search Engine space and Friendster is widely attributed as the creator of Social Networking -- where are these brands now?

As Brian and I are starting to promote CrowdFusion the question comes up a lot, "What is unique about your Internet Web Publishing Platform?".   Everyone wants you to condense your product down to an elevator pitch.  I can't --  we are building a better mouse trap -- we have revolutionary concepts -- but they need to be seen within the context of the overall product. 

Why does the internet community have such a short attention span?  Is it just a product of it entering its teen years or being dominated by twenty somethings?  The New York Tech Meetup, The Demo Conference, and Techcrunch 40 are examples of the distilling of brilliantly comlex internet applications into 'one hit wonders'.   Are they reacting to the true demands of the internet consumer or are they prolonging the notion that the internet is one long stream of memes and celebrity gossip?

So I've been anxiously awaiting today to see how much worse the AOL situation can get. It's almost like knowing that a train derailment is going to happen and going to the place of the disaster to see it first hand.   Everyone I worked with made it through -- funny I think they'd all be happy to take the severance at this point.   I wonder if the guy in Asset Management who I'm supposed to send my laptop back to is still there.

Today I got a replacement Mac Book Pro, and I was expecting to spend the next two days moving all my software and files from one Mac to the other, archiving them and ftping bit by bit.  To my surprise I powered up the new MBP and it said connect your old Mac with a Firewire Cable to transfer files.  Three clicks later and the two machines start a 2 hours communication that ended in 95% of my system being mirrored.  Even xampp moved over.  I think of myself as a power user so I'm not surprised Mysql and X11 didn't transfer, there was one glitch with Quicktime that made Adium keep crashing, I reinstall of Quicktime fixed that.

I cannot recommend anything more strongly if you rely on a Laptop for your lively hood get rid of the VAIO you love so dearly, use your overpriced Thinkpad as a paper weight and join the evolution of computing.