Packawhallop - Simply powerful web products

Hi there. Packawhallop is a web products & hosting business in Portland, Maine. Gordon Holman (Slickfish Studios) and Jim Cradock (Yellahoose) are the creative, experienced, and technically savvy crew behind Packawhallop. Products include Meta, built to help make your site more searchable, and FileTrunk, designed to help share documents both publicly and privately on your site.

News & Press. Tweets. Feeds. Friends.

show hide Great Puffin for fun
02.02.10

[web hosting]

Great Puffin Realty is a home buyer’s resource here in Maine. Daniel Mainwaring is the owner and although experienced in the industry he’s just opened his doors as Great Puffin Realty. Dan is an extremely patient and knowledgeable authority when it comes to buying a home. After all he sold Gordon his first house!

The site is hosted by Packawhallop and logo & web design by Packawhallop partner SlickFish Studios.

www.greatpuffin.com
show hide Packawhallop's FileTrunk & SWW Yacht Design
11.11.09

Stephens, Waring and White Yacht Design are now using Packawhallop’s new software product called FileTrunk. It is a web files utility allowing the client to set up both public and private pages with file sharing. They can easily login, create a category to organize new files on the public downloads page or set up a private link to send/manage/correspond with clients of their own. Manual organization, titles, captions and unique url’s are all part of the FileTrunk utility. In SWW’s case they use it to share pdf Newsletters, Press Releases and Drawings of new Yachts in design on their Public downloads page. Then they use it to set up private client pages for downloading invoices, new project specs and proprietary information.

If you’re interested in finding out more about FileTrunk contact us via our web site!
show hide The Sanford Police Department hosts its web site with Packawhallop
08.06.09

The Sanford (Maine) Police Department has picked Packawhallop as its provider of web hosting for www.SanfordPD.com.

This was done as part of an upgrade to the Department’s web site by Gordon Holman of SlickFish Studios (and Packawhallop co-owner). The web site now features a robust content management system (CMS for techies) for news and events, RSS/social networking tools to get the word out about SPD, and a (growing!) photo gallery.

Gordon brought the site’s web site design and overall information architecture up to contemporary standards and best practices. Jim Cradock (Yellahoose principal and Packawhallop co-owner) provided some web development muscle by adding the photo caller, CMS and RSS feeds.

Hello, Sanford PD!
show hide Boscawen Conservation Commission chooses Webfiles
08.06.09

The Boscawen Conservation Commission is the newest user of Packawhallop’s Webfiles product. Webfiles makes it easy to distribute documents in an attractive and user friendly way on any web site.

Based in Boscawen, New Hampshire, the Commission is dedicated to the protection of ”the natural features of our town and to preserve the economic viability of open space and to encourage and promote the conservation of our cultural and historical resources for current and future citizens of Boscawen.”

Thanks, BCC!
show hide Nine Point Publishing choose Packawhallop for hosting
08.06.09

Nine Point Publishing of Bridgton, Maine has chosen Packawhallop for its web and email hosting. Nine Point makes fine and limited edition books. The web site presents information about their books, and it provides event registration tools events at the sister business, EFG Books.

Welcome aboard, Nine Point Publishing!
show hide Webfiles in the Shop
06.28.09
For parts of July and August Packawhallop will be in the shop rearchitecting and reprogramming our first product, Webfiles.

Webfiles is a brain-dead easy to use tool to list files in a folder. Apache, the great open source web server software, will do this… but not so prettily. That’s a problem for the web designers, who spend a lot of time crafting great looking web sites, and that’s a problem for users, who understandably get a bit confused when they move from a nice looking, well laid out page to a spare directory index. mod_autoindex does a better job, but there’s a lack of control there too.

Why not use FTP? Well, you’d be surprised at how many users don’t “get” FTP. That’s not a problem with users - that’s a problem with the tech. We’re all using HTTP these days versus Gopher, afterwall.

Webfiles does some other things too - there’s a Perl, Python and a PHP version, so it’s basically web-server agnostic; there’s a password-protection feature; there are pretty, built in icons so that, for example, an MS Word file looks like a MS Word icon. All of this stuff is important. But we’re getting ready to do better.

Planned features and our goals for version 2.0 - modest:
1. Rewrite the Perl, PHP and Python versions.
2. Web-based interface for adding and managing files. Version 1.0 requires that the administrator use FTP to build the files to be listed.
3. Simple templating system - up to the Packawhallop design shop.
4. An iPhone interface.
5. Administrivia: Whether to open source it, which changes the business model for Packwhallop in part from a company building and selling software to a company building software and selling services to set up, maintain and enhance that software. TBD.
That’s it. Stay tuned. Great things are on the way!

Oh, existing users of Webfiles will get a free upgrade when the new version’s done.
show hide Packawhallop Uses Social Networking Tools, Part 3
06.19.09
Simple, focused, direct solutions are usually the best. Not surprisigingly Packawhallop internally are a UNIX shop (Mac OS X, Debian and CentOS). That said setting up a system to cache our content from social networking tools was simple. Here’s how we do it:
1. A simple Perl script runs in cron and periodically imports data from the online services. Usually these are RSS feeds. Almost all require a rudimentary knowledge of curl.
2. If data are new or updated it goes into the cache. If not, then forget about it. We already know about the data because we’ve got it.
3. A simple PHP script on the Packawhallop site queries the database and draws the cached data on the page you’re viewing.
Simple!

Questions and answer session:
- Why use the social networking tools at all? Tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. are about networking. For a business - and Packawhallop isn’t Wal*Mart-sized - maximizing our communication and marketing efforts is kind of important. It’s the same for all our clients!
- Perl? Yes, Perl. Perl is excellent for backend processing - much better than PHP, which itself is excellent for rendering dynamic web pages. And when it comes it IT at Packawhallop our developers are multilingual.
- Isn’t Perl dead? Err, no. If you think so… you don’t know what you’re talking about.
- PostgreSQL? Yes. The cache a.k.a. database is written in it. PostgreSQL is an excellent open source software - one of a number of great open source databases softwares web developers nervous about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and MySQL might want to learn. Also, PostgreSQL’s mascot is a pachyderm, and at Packawhallop we’re understandably a little partial to pachyderms. (But we like dolphins as well!)
show hide Packawhallop Uses Social Networking Tools, Part 2
06.19.09
The reality of using online services for marketing and outreach, all these social networking tools, is sometimes the service will go offline. Often this downtime is for maintenance. Sometimes it’s “unplanned”, i.e. something breaks on the servers hosting the social networking tool or something breaks on the network between your web browser and the server or data center where the tool is hosted.

We thought about this when we designed the Packawhallop web site to use social networking tools for content management. And rather than just talk about the tools we do believe it’s good to use them ourselves, as an integral part of the business’ communication and outreach. It’s what we recommend to clients! While we’re excited about the tools we are pragmatic, and like most organizations with a web site we want to design our information systems in such a way that users don’t see blank pages - ever.

The solution: We designed a database management system to “cache” data from the online services we’re using: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook - there’ll be more. Cache is a technical word for, well, save in a database. The better services provide APIs to make getting data reasonably easy. And while some services send data we don’t really care about (for example, Twitter sends its 140 character tweet in the title and in the description namespaces), once we’ve got the data cached we can do what we want with it. Access to and control over our own content is important.

Another benefit the Packawhallop designers want me to point out: Flexibility of presentation (presentation = design): We can use social networking tools without in the end having a web site looking like a blog. How many web sites have you seen that look like WordPress templates? They are WordPress templates!

So, a number of reasons to use the online social networking tools and cache the data. Here’s how we do it:
1. A simple Perl script runs in cron and periodically imports data from the online services. Usually these are RSS feeds. Almost all require a rudimentary knowledge of curl.
2. If data are new or updated it goes into the cache. If not, then forget about it. We already know about the data because we’ve got it.
3. A simple PHP script on the Packawhallop site queries the database and draws the cached data on the page you’re viewing.
Easy!

Questions:
- Why use the social networking tools at all? Tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. are about networking. For a business - and Packawhallop isn’t Wal*Mart-sized - maximizing our communication and marketing efforts is kind of important. It’s the same for all our clients!
- Perl? Yes, Perl. Perl is excellent for backend processing - much better than PHP, which itself is excellent for rendering dynamic web pages. And at Packawhallop we’re multilingual.
- Isn’t Perl dead? Err, no. If you think so you don’t know what you’re talking about.
- PostgreSQL? Yes. The cache a.k.a. database is written in it. PostgreSQL is an excellent open source software - one of a number of great open source databases softwares web developers nervous about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and MySQL might want to learn. Also, PostgreSQL’s mascot is a pachyderm, and at Packawhallop we’re understandably a little partial to pachyderms. (But we like dolphins as well!)
show hide Packawhallop Uses Social Networking Tools, Part 1
06.13.09
After a couple revisions of the Packawhallop web site (www.packawhallop.com) Gordon and I decided to manage all the content we could using social networking tools, like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. The question: Why?

Two reasons:
1. Social networking is really useful for making connections. For Packawhallop, as a hosting and software products developer, that’s particularly compelling: We do want to get the word out about the great things we’re doing, and we want to share the great things our customers, friends, colleagues and even peers are doing too. But, although we’re growing soon, Packawhallop right now is a two person shop. Social networking maximizes our marketing and outreach efforts.
2. Social networking tools rely on centralized data management systems. Sure, most (the better tools) have API’s for data aggregation, but Twitter.com is serving Tweets, Tumblr.com is serving blogs, Facebook.com is serving networkings, etc. Centralizing the database means there’s a single point-of-failure. If Twitter.com goes offline so do your tweets. So, Gordon and I wanted to use Packawhallop as a guinea pig to see how robust these tools really are.
Stay tuned for the follow up blogs to this entry: Part 2 weighs enthusiasm (hey, it’s ours too!) for shiny new tools with anxiety about reliability and control; Part 3 discusses architecture and implementation. Hey, it’s one thing to say you use x tool. It’s another to actually use it - in your own web site!

show hide Sanford Police Department
http://www.sanfordpd.com/

Packawhallop owners Gordon Holman and Jim Cradock provided key web hosting guidance and added a number of value added features to what is a fairly technologically forward thinking web site: RSS feeds, AJAX powered photo galleries, web-administrative site for news featuring a WYSIWYG editor. And Packawhallop is pleased to announce it will be hosting Sanford PD in August 2009.
show hide Nine Point Publishing
http://www.ninepointpublishing.com/

Nine Point Publishing is a Maine- and Nova Scotia-based publisher of limited edition fine edition books. SlickFish Studios built the web site - stay tuned for an update coming soon! - and Packawhallop hosts it as of July 2009.
show hide exăgoMD
http://www.exagomd.com/

exăgoMD is a health care advisory, focused on improving physician leadership effectiveness. Gordon Holman at SlickFish Studios worked with Stephen Blattner, MD, MBA, to design the site and Dr. Blattner's Health Care Leadership Blog: http://www.healthcareleadershipblog.com/. exăgoMD and the Health Care Leadership Blog are hosted by Packawhallop.
show hide Eclipse Media Group
http://www.eclipsemediagroup.net/

Eclipse Media Group a full-service niche public relations firm specializing in the distinctive needs of companies in the physical security market. Gordon Holman / SlickFish Studios designed the site with enabling tools to allow Eclipse to manage their own press releases - no-brainer for a PR firm. Packawhallop hosts the site, email, database and all content.
show hide Sam Allen Photography
http://www.samallenphotography.com/

Sam Allen Photography makes fine dog portraits. Based in Portland, Maine you do need to check out the portfolio section of the web site. Great pictures! Gordon Holman and SlickFish Studios designed the site. Packawhallop hosts it.
show hide Arielle Blattner
http://www.arielleblattner.com/

Print, web, brand, multimedia design and fine art photgraphy and painting: Arielle Blattner is a Packwhallop hosting customer. Check out the portfolios.
show hide Salt Institute for Documentary Studies
http://www.salt.edu/

Salt is a place where professionals from a variety of disciplines work together to promote and advance the field of documentary studies. Gordon Holman / SlickFish Studios and Jim Cradock / Yellahoose built the Salt web site, relaunched in Fall 2008 using customer design and development and a few Packawhallop products (Blueprint). Jim and Gordon continue to work with Salt to build on their great content and their great web site.
show hide Porter Drywall
http://www.porterdrywall.com/

Packawhallop hosting customer Porter Drywall is a professional drywall company servicing commercial and residential clients throughout the State of Maine. It the only company in Maine able to provide 100% employee based labor (no 1099's / independent subcontractors) for the entire spectrum of the trade. Gordon Holman / SlickFish Studios designed the great looking site enabling Porter Drywall to showcase its diverse work.
show hide Lakes of Maine
http://www.lakesofmaine.org/

Coming soon (and we're very excited about this site): LakesofMaine.org delivers valuable information, including depth and water quality, about Maine lakes and ponds to homeowners, town managers, researchers and students. The site's being developed by the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at the Univertsity of Maine. Jim Cradock and Yellahoose are IT project leads. Packawhallop will host the web site and data. Stay tuned!
show hide Nordic Heritage Center
http://www.nordicheritagecenter.org/

The Nordic Heritage Center promotes healthy outdoor recreation and economic vitality in Central Aroostook County by providing first-class facilities and programs to area residents, athletes, and visitors. NHC are a Packwhallop hosting customer, and Gordon Holman and SlickFish Studios manage their web site design needs.
show hide Yellahoose
http://www.yellahoose.com/

Jim Cradock is co-owner of Packwhallop, and Yellahoose is the IT consulting (programming, project management, server sysadmin) business he runs from the heart of Portland, Maine's Arts District. Yellahoose's office is known amongst Packawhallopers as Packawhallop West.
show hide SlickFish Studios
http://www.slickfishstudios.com/

SlickFish Studios, LLC is a highly creative web design and flash animation studio located in the historic Old Port of Portland, Maine. SlickFish is owned and operated by Gordon Holman who also happens to be co-owner of Packawhallop. Both SlickFish and Packawhallop focus on making the W's a better looking/better functioning place to be.
show hide Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment
http://www.gulfofmaine.org/

The Council is a Packawhallop customer: It uses Webfiles to distribute documents to Councilors in the U.S. and Canada - only a web browser's required. Jim Cradock and Yellahoose provide information technology consulting (programming, web development, database and UNIX server administration and project management) services as well.
show hide Upper Merrimack River Local Advisory Committee
http://www.merrimackriver.org/

UMRLAC (pronounced UM-rah-lack by UMRLAC-ers) serves as the area's advisory board on its designation in the NH Rivers Management and Protection Program and conducts a variety of projects and programs in the upper Merrimack watershed. UMRLAC uses Packawhallop's Webfiles product to share the organization's internal and public documents.

Packawhallop: If you are looking to buy a home in 2010 here in Maine we recommend our hosting client Great Puffin Realty. Dan... http://bit.ly/clFBgN
02.02.10
Packawhallop: Check out the current showing in the gallery at EFG Books - really great stuff! (Packawhallop hosts EFG Books'... http://bit.ly/9UDEe7
01.31.10
Packawhallop: a screenshot of SlickFish Studios designed and Packawhallop hosted web site for Lynn Lurie's book called Corner of... http://bit.ly/4QnQwO
01.11.10
Packawhallop: Packawhallop web and emailing hosting customer EFG Books is looking for fans. Please consider visiting their... http://bit.ly/5Q01um
01.09.10
Packawhallop: Bingo Bango we have a custom URL. Thanks to all the fans!http://www.facebook.com/packawhallop http://bit.ly/64fE0n
01.06.10
Packawhallop: Gordon and Jim are ramping up Packawhallop's visibility in 2010. We are a small start up web products and hosting... http://bit.ly/7ubRYY
01.05.10
Packawhallop: Packawhallop's a hosting & web software development business owned by Jim Cradock & Gordon Holman. So, help Gordon... http://bit.ly/86fff4
01.05.10
Packawhallop: We're planning updates to the Packawhallop web site soon. Please check back & please help us by becoming a fan of our Facebook page. Thanks!
01.05.10
Packawhallop: Working on the new FileTrunk imagery. A full product overview will be included on the updated web site soon. Keep... http://bit.ly/4TiNBJ
01.03.10
Packawhallop: packawhallop is not (emphasis: NOT) caffeine-free http://bit.ly/6oWYbu
01.03.10
Packawhallop: Thanks to all the friends of Packawhallop so far! The rest of you (you know who you are) we need your support! http://bit.ly/6DBtsB
01.03.10
Packawhallop: Packawhallop is a maverick you betcha. http://bit.ly/6euVuL
01.03.10
Packawhallop: Packawhallop is wicked smaht bub. http://bit.ly/7ZzaSO
01.02.10
Packawhallop: I posted 3 photos on Facebook in the album "Hosting clients and work" http://bit.ly/8g8oUA
01.02.10
Packawhallop: A screenshot of Packawhallop hosting client Arielle Blattner's web site. http://bit.ly/7pUfY0
01.02.10
Packawhallop: needs fans. We're trying to up the *massive* presence we already have on Facebook and get to at least 25 fans in... http://bit.ly/6sTpyU
01.02.10
Packawhallop: thinks there should be a Packawhallop iphone app for mapping snowfall amounts within a certain radius surrounding... http://bit.ly/8sDGpm
01.02.10
Packawhallop: Jim Cradock of Yellahoose, Packawhallop's other owner, launched a new habitat restoration grant tracking software... http://bit.ly/4LRVaB
01.02.10
Packawhallop: Jim Cradock of Yellahoose, Packawhallop's other owner, launched a new habitat restoration grant tracking software... http://bit.ly/4Fyb9i
01.02.10
Packawhallop: Jim Cradock of Yellahoose, Packawhallop's other co-owner, launched a new habitat restoration grant tracking... http://bit.ly/53uHYu
01.02.10

408 fore street • portland, maine 04101
e: info@packawhallop.com
p: 207.253.5557