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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Mon, 15 Jul 2013

Igloo -- a 'hosted' intranet/social/collaboration platform

I actually clicked on an ad.

It was a sponsorship on John Gruber's Daring Fireball for Igloo, which offers Intranet-style collaboration and social tools for business of all sizes.

It's a way to share things and collaborate in the social style of Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive and more -- without the messiness of trying to do this in any kind of private or semi-private way on a wide-open social network.

Here's Igloo's less-than-50-word description:

Igloo is a modern intranet. It helps you work better with other people by keeping your content and conversations in one place. (It's also hosted and managed, so you can focus on your work, not your IT budget)

I know little more beyond what's on the page linked above, but I do know that for small businesses it's free for up to 10 users, and per user after that.

In terms of apps, here's what the Kitchener, Canada-based Igloo says about itself:

Every digital workplace includes team spaces; file sharing and document storage; activity streams; unlimited blogs, microblogs, forums, calendars and wikis; member directories and profiles.

Once you start really scaling up in terms of users, it gets expensive, but if you build your business around these tools, it might be worth it -- and per employee per month for this kind of functionality doesn't seem like much. If it delivers.

Have you heard about Igloo, or used it? Let me know.