/scripts/suspendacct 'username'

If the cause of the usage spike is unknown, however, it won’t necessarily let you diagnose it.

My reason for is one of transparency so that they can be clued into the process of how we respond to site issues, etc. but my reason against would be whether they actually want to know that information or not.

In the interest of trying to develop their capacity to do this on their own, however, I think it’s pretty important to be tuned into as much of the process as possible. Thoughts?

Andrew started things off by discussing our hosting outreach efforts. Rather than randomly emailing people, we’ve decided to start focusing our efforts on who we think are the most likely candidates for a upgrade to WordPress. Related to Managed Hosting, Albert finally got rsync to start backing up sites on WebFaction which means that I will no longer have to do backups by hand. It was just another line to the backup script we already have running.

We had a bit of discussion about the theme design services that we offer because we actually have our first client that hopes to relaunch by the beginning of next term. There are a couple of concerns we have with trying to do a theme design over winter break. Most importantly, we’ll need regular and prompt feedback on the iterations of the design to launch on time. This may prove difficult over the holidays. Our goal is going to be to have the first iteration of the design done in the next three weeks, and then have a “working” theme ready for launch (in five weeks). Refinements to the design will be made in the couple of weeks after launch. If this timeline works out over the holidays, then five to six weeks in general will be a good amount of time for doing a normal theme design.

Albert brought up the Knight News Challenge as a potential source of funding for some of the project ideas we have. I intend to start working on an informal application for the Edit Flow Project. We’ve already done a significant amount of development on it, and intend to continue working on it, but the funding could potentially be for the functionality idea we have to make the pitching process open if the news organization so desires.

We’ve started using Highrise for contract management amongst the hosting and business teams with mostly good results. The contact and company management functionality is really cool, it helps us keep all of that information in one place, and the deals functionality works alright for our needs. It’s mostly useful for keeping track of the potential deals we have on the table. The tasks functionality, unfortunately, isn’t of any use because we’re already using Basecamp for that, but it would be very slick if Highrise integrated with Basecamp. Also, if we reliably bcc all of our email conversations into Highrise, it will be really useful months from now when we run into the question of “when did we talk to that client last?”

Greg and I recorded an epic College Media Lab last night with Sean Blanda and Christopher Wink about News Inkubator. Look for it on Wednesday.

Andrew started the conversation with a report on the new client outreach we started at the end of last week. We’ve sent direct emails to two newspapers thus far with only one indirect response. Taking this as a good-ish sign, we’re going to email five more potentials on Monday and see what the reaction is. Andrew has shared the letter outline with the team that we’re using to craft these emails. Hopefully if we refine this process over time, the outreach will bear some fruit.

Miles is finishing up a list of current clients that we think are good candidates for switching from version 1 hosting to Managed Hosting. We’ll want to start that process as soon as possible, ideally before he leaves the country on vacation. On Tuesday, Andrew and I will want to talk about this, the process for scoping out design and contract work, regular client workshops, the best way to contact all of our clients at once, and a better spreadsheet for managing launches and contact information.

Adam is going to have draft business cards done in the next few days for ACP/CMA. We talked a bit this afternoon about promotional materials and how they relate to our budget for the conference, and business cards, rack cards, and nice shirts for the team are high on the list of priorities. If we have the funds, we might also get stickers and CoPress T-shirts to hand out. We’ll need to make sure this is alright with the conference organizers before we sink money into it, however.

I finally finished drafting our strategic goals for 2009 last night (it took a week longer than I expected just because I became swamped with a few things). The point of this document is two-fold: provide a common vision for the team for fall 2009 as well as a set of criteria for us to judge the success of our efforts at the end of the year. I’m going to have the team leave comments on the document, then I’ll send it for comments from advisors, and then we’ll wrap all of that into a nice final document that will be published on this here blog thing.

This Week in CoPress is still going through its process of rebranding. Greg and Vanessa are going to work on finalizing the new name by Tuesday, and then we’ll produce appropriate bumps, logos, etc. for it. On the 27th, we’ll be recording an episode on Breaking News and Twitter, and two weeks after that will be one on the Duke Chronicle and maybe the Next Newsroom Project.

On the blog, we’re going to hopefully have a post on the relaunch of The Campanil, which now has a surprisingly fresh design from News Evolved, and a post from Max Cutler about Courant News and how it handled the traffic with the recent murder on campus. I think it would also be sweet to have a bit on how the CMS conceptually assisted the newsroom in their ability to cover the news, and what they might want from the CMS in the future.