I recently received a spam email with MY address as the sender. I'm thinking that for every poor schmuck who gets their email address stolen, there are potentially millions of spam messages being sent out.

That would make it spam².

I long since turned all my spam filters on and for the most part spam is not an issue, but if I am being turned into a spammer, albiet without my knowledge, that really makes me want to know who is behind it.

Here's a good place to start looking: http://www.spamhaus.org/Rokso/

It is unlikely any amount of blogging will make a difference, but I have to just say something.

Calculate the total time and effort being spent on blocking, filtering and otherwise avoiding spam divided by the 300-400 spam operators responsible for 80% of worldwide spam.

It becomes evident that each one of these slimeballs wastes the collective time of millions of people a day. Typically these slimeballs send out over 10 million emails per day. If it takes only one second to delete a spam message (we know it takes longer), that equals over 300 working days of total effort. Each day each one of these slimeballs consumes a years worth of collective working lifespan. I think the best punishment for spammers is to use this equation to give them the exact same time in prison for each day of operation.

For the last two months I have been missing out on a lot of fun to overhaul code dating back almost three years. With a code base of over 150,000 lines, it has been quite a task, but finally there is light up ahead and I look forward to releasing a new stable version this spring. The new version eradicates outdated designs to embrace best-of-the-web techology like prototype and scriptaculous, jsquery, a complete model-view-controller approach, utilization of PHP5+ OOP features, and lots of fun little plugins to the improve design flexibility.

Funny or sad as it may be, new features seem light years ahead of where we were, but the web development arms race makes keeping pace is the best you can hope for. Most if this will be need to be reworked soon enough.

In deciding what the best content manager is for your organization, there are currently over 900 to choose from based on the current list at cmsmatrix.org.

How to choose?

Since some of these systems are abandoned or not well supported, they will not be worthwhile. You should really do a knock check to see if anyone is home before parking your car. If it is a commercial cms, send an email and seeing if you get a timely response. If it is an open source project, check when the last forum posting was made. 1 year old most recent postings are a grave marker.

Now all you have left is several hundred active projects to look at ... almost there.

You will need to match your requirements with the system that is closest to matching them. License requirements are a big issue if you need to modify code. This is often the case if your organization has online applications that need to be integrated.

This quickest way to determine compatibility with your requirements is to look for a demo. If no demo is available, you can look for screenshots or tutorials - anything that helps you quickly get a gut feel for the system you are looking at.

Open source applications can be downloaded and installed, sometimes with little technical expertise. Try before you buy is rarely available for commercial cms systems, but if you can talk to a sales rep, you can ask for a walkthru demo to discuss your requirements in context to what is actually on the screen.

Once you have narrowed your choices down to a dozen or so, a programmer can be useful in determining the final best fit for you organizations based on existing databases, applications and staff skill sets. This will help you to grow your site without having to restructure your organization around it.

Finally, you have a cms and you're pretty much married to it, so take great care in making your decision.

I am always aware that what I may be working on is available for free, or some paltry amount such as $19.95 from some obscure company in Poland. Software that costs anything less a days work is basically commodified. I try to avoid working on anything I can just buy for my clients outright, or at least buy to modify if the license allows it.

Here's where I end up having problems.

If it takes me 5 days to build a fairly simple but stable customized application, I have to bill for 5 days work, however, if I find a really cool application for $49.95 and install it, the client starts to assume that they should also get a really cool custom application for about the same price. We as programmers walk a fine line between providing value software solutions and getting treated like thiefs for charging a working days wage. The important thing is to explain this to clients so they understand that in providing custom solutions, you have their best interests at heart, but can't live on 2 rupees a day.