Campaign Kickstart

A new trend in website tools is the “blog engine,” and its cousin the CMS, or Content Management System. Since it’s easier to post to a blog than it is to write a webpage yourself, these are prebuilt websites that let you add new articles and sections.

You probably already know the guts of most webpages today just contain information about the look and layout of a page, plus directions on where to find the content in the database. All the words that you’re reading – THESE WORDS – were pulled out of the database when the CMS parsed the webpage and rendered what displays in your browser.

Perhaps the most compelling feature of the CMS is that it is built around the idea of multiple users, each with their own login. Letting anyone work on the website at any time churns out a lot of productivity from your staff and volunteers.

However, the CMS built website may come at a cost: Your pages may end up looking like a blog if you don’t spend the time to customize it; I stripped the blog fat from this site and customized the sidebar with an index in about 15 minutes using b2evolution Drupal Mephisto.

You may also grow frustrated with the blog software’s limitations and peculiarities. For instance Movable Type has an annoying habit of renaming urls when you open a 2nd edit or change an article’s Title.

Some hosting companies offer a pre-insalled CMS which is extra convenient, but limits your options and makes it hard to clean the slate.

Movable Type – commercial – $$$$
pMachine – $99
Word Press- The most popular CMS
Drupal – One of the easiest to work with
Mambo Server
Joomla! – An offshoot of Mambo, many components are interchangeable
b2evolution – Designed for multiple blogs
Scoop – Requires Unix root to install
Nucleus
Geeklog
PHP-Nuke
phpwcms
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
Typo3
Xoops

Ruby on Rails CMS

Blog Services
Soapblox

• When I was customizing this site, the first couple of CMS I tried made it easy for me to turn off comments, etc., with a checkbox in the admin pages. There were a lot of admin options. With this site you’re reading currently, I had to edit the design templates to do the same thing, which took a whole 5 minutes with just some understanding of html & Ruby. However the convenience I lost in the first task was gained when I was able to customize the sidebar with an index and easy-to-read link urls. Most old-school CMS would have a plugin for “node words” or something similar, or if not it could be a daunting excursion in plugin building for that brand of blog.

I like Mephisto because it keeps article version history and is so uncluttered there isn’t a single option I didn’t understand at first glance.

These days you don’t need your own dedicated webserver since there are a bunch of companies that offer full service hosting for just a few dollars per month. Some of the features you can get for under $9.99 / month web hosting:

• SQL/MySQL
• PHP, Perl & CGI
• FTP
• Shell access
• Logfile access
• Frontpage extensions
• Web mail
• Custom error pages
• Subdomains
• Redirects
• Monthly data transfer up to 1 terabyte
• Movable Type license
• SSL key & certificates available
• Site stats
• IP Deny
• RoR (Ruby on Rails)

You WILL want to READ the Terms of Service for your liabilities. For example, some hosts charge as much as $500 to investigate a SPAM complaint from your domain. Protect yourself.

Of primary importance to me is the rate at which I can broadcast emails from my website. The industry standard seems to be about 400 emails-per-hour (E.P.H.), but your demands may surpass what’s allowed. I had been reasonably happy with www.1and1.com until I tried to run an email broadcast and exceeded my server usage. They will scan processes and shut them down if they pose too great a load. Unfortunately I never exceeded what they had put in writing as acceptable limits, so I ended up getting a refund for my webspace. I still like 1and1 and use them for DNS and my email accounts for only $5.95 a year.

Although I’ve attempted to verify the following information, to my surprise some companies don’t really offer all the services they say they do ( <—this host doesn’t really offer ssh, RoR, or 5,000 email accounts; hasn’t since 2004).

Here’s a list of hosting companies who offer SQL/MySQL databases at the very minimum

www.globat.com 3,000 Emails Per Hour (E.P.H.) with the “Bulk Email Agreement.” www.homestead.com 36,000 E.P.H. (MX Server from 9pm-4am PST, w/ advance notice)
www.aplus.net 1,000 E.P.H
www.apollohosting.com 400 E.P.H.
www.siteground.com 400 E.P.H.
www.hostmonster.com
www.dreamhost.com
www.ipowerweb.net
www.totalchoicehosting.com
www.aventurehost.com
www.enhancedhost.com
www.realwebhost.net
www.odsol.com
www.anhosting.com
www.midphase.com
www.bluehost.com
www.2mhost.com* See Note
www.micfo.com
www.glowhost.com
www.godaddy.com Owned by Bob Parsons google Bob Parsons

A BIG list of Hosts who provide Ruby on Rails

* 2mhost.com is one of a few who offer Movable Type licenses. I can’t recommend Movable Type as a blog engine, but if you have to migrate an existing Movable Type website you should know that 2mhost does not allow server-side mailer scripts like mailman, or phplist.

Email administration has the potential to be a huge headache. Beyond just the setup and configuration, there is a large responsibility to ensure delivery by providing redundancy in case of a failure. And then there’s a matter of security as hackers just LOVE an open mail relay. For all these reasons I wholeheartedly recommend using a 3rd party for email accounts even if you are running your own private website server.

If you have DNS and a website setup with a host, you probably also have between 50-500 email accounts to go with it. By all means, USE THEM! Nothing looks as unprofessional as someone who is using their home email address for campaign correspondence. Just use your webhost’s configuration panel to add the email addresses and set passwords.

If yours is a small campaign with mostly part-time staff, it’s convenient to forward each email address to their regular address.

For example, if I was working on the doeforcongress campaign, I’d setup an email account for jason@doeforcongress.com, and then I’d set that email address to forward to jason@campaignkickstart.com. This way my contact information looks official and checking the extra email account is no added inconvenience to me.

The first step toward establishing an online presence is to register a domain name (i.e. johndoeforcongress.com).

A domain name (a.k.a. DNS entry) is like a phone book listing, it pairs a name with a number, in this case the number is the website’s IP address.

The process is simple – you can use a registration service like Network Solutions, or register through your web host who often provide a free domain with each webspace. If you register with your web host, that’s usually all you need to do to set up.

If you are using different services for the website and DNS, you’ll want to “point” the DNS entry to the webserver. That’s the essence of DNS in a nutshell.

You can -and should – register extra domains (misspellings, variations, etc.) and “forward” them to the primary domain.

Generally, it’s easiest to register your domain name with the same company who is hosting your website, but there are good reasons to keep control of your DNS registration separate from your webspace.

One reason is for a layer of protection from unsolicited SPAM email complaints. SPAM complaints are taken very seriously, and this has the potential to shut down your website; if your website is hosted by the same company that handles your domain administration, you could be shut out indefinitely. Therefore, you may want to consider using a separate DNS registrar.

As an added precaution, you could set up one of your alias domains just to handle your broadcast emails. I.e. John Doe may want to protect his official domain and email accounts @johndoeforcongress.com by using a throwaway domain for his broadcast emails. So when he sends out 10,000 emails he’ll use a return address of john@doe2006election.com. Now if someone complains, the only domain to suffer will be doe2006election.com which was only being used for one specific purpose.

A nice feature offered nowadays is private domain registration (that means your name, address, and phone number won’t be publicly available), and many domain registration services offer private registration at no added cost.