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Nothing will make you more nervous than switching your entire business model to support a new technology :)  Particularly when that technology is ONLY supported by the Open Source community.  Regardless, it looks like we were right again – or at least not way off the beaten path.

Over a year ago, our team of super geniuses recommended we use Symfony/Doctrine as our MVC Framework & ORM.  They also recommended we switch to Drupal for our CMS platform.  After 3-6 months, we learned that Yahoo had been quietly using Symfony for their internal PHP app framework!!!  Now, we have more good news :)  Dries Buytaert had a good post letting us know that Yahoo is using Drupal to create some of their retail sites.  Check out Yahoo Research to see Drupal in action.

Chris “Silver” Smith offers up a great article – “Forget Black Friday! Are You Ready For Holiday Season’s Cyber Mondays?” regarding the onslaught of consumer madness when retailers do their best to extract as much creditworthiness from one’s wallet.

“Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers. But, for each Monday after Black Friday, consumer searches spike up on the internet and online retail websites enjoy their highest traffic and associated sales of the year. Search engine use is directly impacting businesses during this period, and companies which haven’t optimized their internet presence stand to lose out on some of the sales they could be getting if consumers could find them. This is true for online businesses as well as for brick-and-mortar stores.

Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can ’save’ their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage.  I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website.  I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.

Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with.  I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ – and many paid utilities thought the same :)  I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail.  Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”.  Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!

In the course of doing research for a client, I’m now experiencing what I’ve heard so many others complain about: Phone Prison. I used to believe that ‘phone prison’ was simply an older person’s way of saying that working through a phone system took too much effort. Now I realize that there really are Phone Prisons – systems designed to keep you locked out from actually talking to a person!!!

Jeff Cornwall, Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship teaches and mentors a class of entrepreneurship students.

Nicholas Holland, our CEO and President of CentreSource spoke to Jeff’s class and offered up words of wisdom. They include the proper time to start up a business and focusing on a proper sales strategy.

In a recent article about smartRay Network Inc. published in Fast Company, author Keith Hammonds beautifully describes the personal sacrifices that are required to build a company. We get to see the entrepreneurship spirit lived out here at CentreSource on a daily basis amongst our team.

At CentreSource, much of our web development utilizes the Drupal open source content management system. From custom websites to large scale corporate websites, Drupal offers many modules for flexibility, personalization, and customizable URLs that are search engine and end user friendly.

The technical definition of Drupal is:
Drupal is a web-based content management system. Text and pointers to other kinds of content are stored in a database, dynamically retrieved and composed, and presented to a user in response to a request sent via a web-browser.

CentreSource offers our congratulations to the open source Drupal community as Drupal Wins the Overall Open Source Content Managment System Award for 2007.

Those whippersnappers at Google never rest! Google is introducing a new Web standard called OpenSocial designed to allow developers to build Web-based social applications that has made Facebook such an engaging site for developers and users alike.

Over time, social networks will organically grow to encompass any defined community online: families, schools, churches, clubs, groups, and businesses. Now if we could only connect socially face to face away from the computer screen, only then will our social networks be much more rewarding with the richness of personal relationships.