Hi Guys

I have been following this thread for a little while now, and can see the interest growing for a solution that will cover multiple concerns both from a technical perspective and security. I might have a solution that will address many of these concerns, plus many more that have not even been addressed yet. My background is with enterprise applications, and one my investments is in a web based ERP system, which I believe can solve many of the scalability and security concerns that you have brought up. I am happy to contribute, and address this growing need for a solution.

If you guys are interested, please contact me and let's try to setup a time to discuss more details. I am happy to do a quick demo to show how things would work.

Cheers
Carlo

:
: You're doing good work!

: I think you'll have a massive rush at first, then it will
: slow down.

: Now this gives us a problem. Jeff has the numbers for my
: watches, but if I enter them too we now have duplicate entries.
: Which will almost certainly have slight differences. And a lot
: of your initial entries will be duplicated too. I'll come back
: to this.

: My initial idea was to use it to assimilate the various
: sources of data, sort them into order and then use that as input
: to Knackhq. But this is not adequate for general public input.
: Technically Knackhq is a "Content Management System"
: (CMS). There are many available, some come free with web-hosting
: packages. A good one will have a proper database behind it and
: give the owner/manager access to the database's functions to
: order the data.

: For another project I have just added a CMS to my own
: web/mail domain, and I am looking guiltily at the book on
: running this CMS that has been on my desk for two weeks still
: unopened. Give me a week or two and I'll know if the one I'm
: using is up to the job, I do know it has MySQL behind it and
: that I get in there with a screwdriver (virtual). I also know
: that I can split the data into public, restricted and private.
:

: I can also host a mailing-list so that technical traffic
: about this project could be kept off the normal forum.
:

: Now, duplicates. Some databases come with facilities to
: de-dupe the data, but as anyone who gets junk-mail duplicated
: under slightly different names knows they're not perfect.
: However in this case we're
: not dealing with many millions of names and addresses, more like a
: couple of thousand actual records. It's not a big task to write
: a program that will sift through that and I can do that if it's
: needed.

: Going to a fancier CMS should also bring better input
: checking, I've noticed a few glitches in the entries to Knackhq
: already (for example a serial number should be a number and not
: have alphabet characters).

: They might also use the data hosted there for other
: purposes. Not saying they do, but that's what Google, Facebook
: & so on do!
:

: Backup early, backup often. Backup as text not in any
: binary or proprietary format. Text compresses beautifully so
: don't fret about space.

: I call that expensive. It's 6 times what I pay for web
: hosting, email, CMS, database, mailing lists -- from an outfit
: who have a good reputation for customer support and are not
: bottom-feeders in the ISP business. The difference is that I
: have to learn the detailed setup of
: the CMS, Knack make it easier. However most of my working life
: since 1973 I had to learn new software from the programmers
: while they were writing it and then explain it to the
: documentation people later, so I'm used to operating like this
: ;-)

: A few more things to consider:

: If we going to aggregate the data and it takes several
: people to do it, how do we maintain the confidentiality of the
: data? Particularly when it was made available to Jeff with
: restrictions. Will the people who did that accept that Peter and
: I, for example, are trustworthy? There are only two people
: who even may be reading this who have met me in person. I
: used to herd BOFHs, so I am more paranoid about data security
: than you can imagine if you don't have that background.

: This is not going to be just a resource for collectors: it'll
: help scammers and thieves too. Let's not make their work easier.
: One thing that's occurred to me is to clearly watermark all
: photos. That's a piece of cake to do in bulk on a desktop
: computer, might need some extra software installed to do it for
: internet input.

: More will occur to me as soon as I hit "Post" ;-/
:

: Mike