This past weekend, my colleague and friend Sandy Smith participated in Election Hackathon 2012 (read his take of the hackathon). We built our first public Musketeers.me product, Candidata.me. This was my first hackathon, and it was exciting and exhausting to bring something to life in little more than 24 hours.

Matthew at DogStar describes his PM toolbox today, The Project Management Tool Box | Opensource, Nonprofits, and Web 2.0.  It's a detailed and well organized list, and I think reflects a very practical approach. The first thing that strikes me, is the overwhelming amount of tools available to the would-be PM.  Certainly, there is no lack of tools out there.

You would think something named "Domain Name Registration" would be boring service that the overwhelming majority of Internet users need not think about. However, GoDaddy thinks that may not be good for business, and their latest media blitz has caused me to rethink how I spend my money. I must confess I tolerated their titillating super bowl ads, mostly because I was too lazy to switch, I thought the process would be tedious and cumbersome (boy was I wrong, more on that further down).

Google can now render labels hierarchically.  I've been using a naming convention to get labels to sort the way I want, but this will further declutter my labels list.  You have to go to the Google Labs tab in settings to enable it for your account.

Will we see more organizations outsourcing email services? Having run my own personal mail server for a few years, I'd be quite wary of purchasing and operating your own mail servers. Yes, if you own your mail servers, you can make them as secure and redudant as you want if price is no limit. But there's always a budget, and it will always not be enough to provide the uptime, redundancy, and backups that someone like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft can provide.

Dear Mail Server Admins,

I hardly ever check the spam folder you gave me, what makes you think I'm going to read a daily quarantine message for false positives?  E-mail is broken, but I don't know of any way to really fix it.

Thank You.

Google Calendar has launched if you want to check it out. There is also an overview of the features available. Will this be a compelling calendaring solution? After looking it over and checking out the website, I think it might be for me. I've setup DAV on apache before so that I can have a portable read/write calendar available online but it hasn't become critical for me.

Bizarre. My self-signed SSL certificate I use to access my email using IMAP over SLL expired last week. The real significance is that we've been on this server for one year now. Compared to how painful working on the old Redhat 7.2 install we had back then, working with a Debian system has been a breeze.

There are a bunch of reasons why you might decide that running your own mail server is something you want to do. You have a lot of free time and enjoy spending a lot of time at the command line reading howto guides and installation manuals. Hopefully, you know you are running a mail server and don't have a Windows machine that's been turned into a spam zombie.