Finally have the time to look for a new home

As I mentioned in Not my permanent home I wanted to look around a bit before committing to a CMS.  I tend to see blogger as a great place to throw things together in a fast and temporary way, but if I want to make this blog into something really great, I want to move it to my own server. 

Here's the thing, though--I'm a perfectionist.  And a nerd.  Combined, it's a lethal combination.

So tonight I got sidetracked (which, btw, reminds me of Kevin Macdonell's excellent blog post "There's no such thing as wasted time"), and instead of putting together something for my research summary on the donor management tool we've been working on, I found myself pouring through a report from Idealware called Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone.

Yeah, I'm a real party animal in the off season.

Anyway, it seems as though I'll read a bit about WordPress and be sold on it...then I get swayed to Joomla, and then Drupal starts looking good.  I can feel this tingling sensation of perfectionism kicking in, and I know from experience that I could lose hours or days just combing through reviews, and available add-ins, and...well...overthinking things.

My solution to this is that I've saved the Idealware report, I'll download WordPress first, and test drive a set up.  I'll ask a couple people I know if they're happy with what they use.  But for tonight, I'm tossing this all up here on my blogger account and saving it as evidence of the journey.  It'll all still be right here when I want it, and it'll wait.

MS Access Security for Sensitive Data

This week was a fairly quiet workload; we mainly just touched up some security issues in the database project.  Seeing as though this database houses some extremely sensitive data regarding abused women, it's paramount that the information is secure.  Unfortunately, MS Access' built in security features leave much to be desired.

For instance, did you know that just using an input mask for a password field doesn't stop you from just removing the mask to reveal the text?  We clearly need to do more research about how to modify user permissions.