I originally intended to write this post to see if I could get any good suggestions on office space in Houston. However, in the last couple of days an opportunity has come up for me to look in to. Here are the problems with our office right now:

• Too small at 500 sq. feet
• Definitely not enough room for the growth we are experiencing
• Bad building management
• Poorly segmented space (100 square feet is hallway)

I had been looking for a larger “office” space before this opportunity for “industrial” space has come available. It just so happens my main printer was looking for some more room too. We are going to look at the warehouse next week and it is going to be about 3000 square feet. I will take about 1000 square feet of that for offices and then use the rest for inventory. I will post pictures when I can get them.

Just when I go and write up a nice post about you, you start acting all different to me?? It looks like Original Signal has changed their home page in an attempt to look like the other 300 million Digg clones. It has the (beta) sign attached to it and who knows….I may end up liking it. I guess I will give it a little more time to see if it grows on me.

Right now I am battling the decision of proprietary vs. open source. There is a definite need for You Design It to go to the next level by implementing a Content Management System. Here is my disclaimer first though - I am not an expert on the subject of “Proprietary vs. Open Source”. I can just write about how it relates to our situation.

There are a few factors that we are considering before implementing a CMS, but here is why we are leaning to the open source option:

1. Which option has a better return on investment? The most important factor is the cost because we have to follow the ROI so closely. Typically open source is less expensive because the development has already been done but there is still a fee to implement. 9 times out of 10 this integration fee costs less than custom development. Depending on how well our system was built (less hard coding and more object-oriented) will determine the cost.
2. Does it fit our needs? We have decided on the Content Management System out of all of the open source options and it is really powerful. We have spec’ed it out to find that it more than covers our needs. Plus, since it is open source, we would get to benefit from the always increasing features and improvements as they are available. The flip side would be to go proprietary and just create what we need to accomplish our strategy. Any features thereafter would incur more costs as they are needed.
3. Can it work with our existing hardware? This is already going to be an obstacle that we will face because our current servers run Windows and the content managment system works best on Linux. I have had a continual problem with our servers anyway, so this will provide us with a good opportunity to migrate to a server farm with 24/7 support.
4. Does it scale for the future of our business? I eluded to the answer to this one in #2. Given the nature of open source, we should see some good extensions and improvements to the system that will allow us to grow. Most of these features are very competitive with what is hot in the market at the time they are created.
5. Which implementation is quicker? Undoubtedly plug-and-play is almost always faster. They are built for integration and most of the discovery process is already taken care of. Going custom in this case is kind of like re-inventing the wheel.

These are our most immediate general concerns. I am sure there are going to be a few more roadblocks regardless of the route we take. I will keep posting about our efforts on this subject……..

Yeah, that’s right. Get you some of this one. It can be found at Brian Oberkirch’s blog Like It Matters. It’s called Striders, Box Scores, and Blood Blisters.

My wife’s sister Gabrielle is in town and they have already started the party. Dinner was at Ra for some sushi and drinks. I had planned to go but I didn’t want to be confused for Hugh Hefner

It is part of my morning routine to see what is happening in the Web 2.0 space by going to Original Signal. It is a news aggregator that is categorized by subject and they take the feeds from some of the most popular sites. TechCrunch, 37Signals, Mashable and more are all sorted by recent post titles with a little ajax summary of each post during a cursor rollover.

I really want to know the amount of traffic that these types of sites drive to the popular blogs. It is kind of like the rich get richer or the popular get more popular when they attract aggregators.

I went to the informal Houston Refresh last night where our hometown star - Matt Mullenweg was hanging out. That guy is the founder of Wordpress and was recently voted one of the Top 50 Most Influential People on the Internet. Not bad for a young blood (I watched Dog the Bounty Hunter last night and I have been needing to use the term “Young Blood”).

The real story about last night is the amount of Houstonians who were there that are working on some cool apps and projects. Who needs the Bay Area?