Ever since social media and social networks have gone mainstream, our digital lives have become complicated. There are a number of social media management tools already out on the market that aim to give users the tools they need to better mange, filter, and prioritize the content they read from their favorite blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Almost all these tools fall short of their intended goals and why I'm always on the lookout for something better to come along. 

I just finished reading Dave Scalera’s post on the Acquia blog “Open Source lies: Confessions of a former Commercial CMS Salesperson” and it got me thinking about the Open Source vs. Proprietary thing.

I know, here we go again

What I’ve come to realize is that it doesn’t matter what’s better. It matters what people believe is better.

I had the privileged of reviewing Liferay Portal for CMS-Connected's "In the Spotlight" segment. This is the first time, I've done a show with new co-host Butch Stearns. The end result is what I think is a great question and answer review of Liferay's products followed by Scott Liewehr's analyst perspective of Liferay the company. In the show, I talked about Liferay Portal and Liferay Social Office. I also had a chance to briefly mention Liferay Sync.

The month of August starts out with a bang for WordPress fans. We knew given Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word speech that it was only a matter of time when WordPress 3.6 would be released. Starting yesterday afternoon, site administrators such as my wife (it runs in the family) were quickly greeted with a notification that the WordPress update is available.

Yesterday's launch gives WordPress sites the availability of a new blog-centric theme (Twenty Thirteen), "bullet-proof" autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.

The Joomla! project recently released a new version of their flagship content management system, Joomla 3.1.4. This is a maintenance release with no security fixes. While most of the updates are technical and will likely only be of interest to developers and site maintainers, there are also a few user interface tweaks here and there. For example, this version will now show the Joomla username in the administrative area.

Specific feature enhancements for Joomla 3.1.4 include the following:

A couple years ago, my wife and I took advantage of the post-housing bubble low interest rates and upgraded to a larger home. We came across a pre-owned house built in 2006 that came with the price, size, and style that just screamed to us "buy me".  As a family, we carefully reviewed our finances and listed our pros and cons before making the purchase. My wife and I were excited to finally have a bathroom connected to the master bedroom. Our then young son was excited that he finally had a family room that offered him fun and adventure. Secretly though, what sold me on the house had nothing to do with these things. What impressed me most was that this house had a network distribution panel.