2. obin Hastings
formation Technology
oordinator – Missouri River
egional Library
astingsr@mrrl.org
bin.hastings@gmail.com
tp://www.rhastings.net
ides:
l Images from Nasa.Gov or created by me
Made up slide – but true in general More work than time, staff or money (never met a tech who described themselves as underworked or overpaid) Today: Cloud-based tools to make you more productive and tips for keeping your hardware running without running you ragged
Evaluate all the things – do an environmental scan, know what hardware, software, staff you have in place before starting a new IT project. Tech plans – some have details of environment Spiceworks – closed source, free, handy for monitoring, trouble tickets and environmental inventory Network capacity – what can you support out of your building? Know what you do in-house, what can be done outsourced, what needs to stay with you
Many definitions, many uses of the term Can you pinpoint where your data lives (server? Data farm? State? Country?)? No? That’s the cloud Cloud (or web) scale – easily expandable, use (and pay for) only what you need (no excess computing power going to waste in your server room)
File Management (image and code storage) – Dropbox, box.net Dropbox – 2GB free, more space costs (eg 50GB is 10.00 a month per account) has “Teams” accounts ($800 for 5 members) that makes collaboration easier. Individual accounts have public folders for sharing, private folders Box – 5-50GB free, Business account $15/user/month, more sharing features
HTML-Kit (chami.com), Codeanywhere.net (code editor in browser with integrated FTP client – includes mobile apps), WYSIWYG developers? Pretty much out of luck – Dreamweaver rocks, is pricey.
Drupal Gardens, Wordpress.com, Bitnami.org and Amazon Web Services
BitNami WebPack provides a pre-configured, ready to run bundle of the most popular open source web applications: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. It includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin and required dependencies. It can currently be deployed as an AMI to the Amazon cloud . BitNami WebPack is distributed for free under the Apache 2.0 license.
Mailing Lists – NAGW, Web4Lib, Drupal support, etc. Google Conferences
There are no panaceas – no easy answers. If you use the tools I’ve given you today, you will have to decide what, exactly, you will give up in return. Even free tools cost in terms of time to learn and implement (Good and Cheap, not fast) and picking something that is fast to learn and cheap can limit the “good” part of that triangle.
