On the roughly one-year anniversary of this apparently WAAAY overly ambitious Web site, I am trying to figure out the reason for the parts that are really not working well at all. Specifically: The Network "problem solving forum" has turned out to be anything but, because almost no activity takes place on this bulletin board.

The ICCFA Network used to be hosted on Yahoo Groups and there was a solid bloc of 25 people who regularly posted questions and answers. Twenty-five out of a total member base of probably 10,000 people is, we must admit, a lesser proportion, and Yahoo was a pain for me to deal with; so it seemed logical that getting everyone onto a locally managed Web site in larger numbers would result in a better Network. And ostensibly it seemed to be poised to succeed because we got a lot of folks to sign on. Right now The Network has over 250 members.

But hardly anyone ever participates, and when someone posts a question there are few responses - and nary a "discussion" takes place.

Now, if you peruse the gamut of online forums in this industry, you will see they constitute a pretty depressing array of social venues. The typical bulletin board has few messages, many being very old, and one or two people providing the majority of interactions (with at least one of the two working for the organization hosting the forum). Our experience with The Network is not singular.

Yet outside our industry online forums can be extremely active places for discussion and problem solving. I personally frequent several that have thousands of participants, where any question is likely to receive a huge number of responses. In theory, the concept can work. So far no one I know of has cracked the code on making it work in our industry.

Therefore I just sent out a call to the 250+ members of The Network to tell me why they don't use it, and I asked them to be completely honest. What is the point of failing if you can't learn from the experience? I have some ideas about why we have failed so far, including the technical aspects of this Web site and the possibility we are providing a solution in search of a problem - think "social networking" technology in our industry as a hammer in search of a nail. But I could well be wrong, and since I am the guy who set this up that is probably a safe bet.

I have received a whole lot of responses just in the half hour since I sent out the request for comments, and so far the gist is: Whoa! this will not be a simple fix, and in fact the project now has my head swimming. Well, if you are going to fail, what's the point of being one foot underwater when you could be 20 fathoms - and indeed this failure now has the mark of "epic" all over it.

I will be sure to let everyone know if I find a way back to the surface.

UPDATE - Feb. 9, 2010: Thanks to everyone who has e-mailed feedback so far. We will be dramatically reconfiguring the interactive elements of this site. Stay tuned.

Writing A Blog Post

(New, simplified method!)

1) After logging in with your username and password, click the "Write a blog post" link in the top menu.

2) Write a title in the "Title" box.

3) OPTIONAL: Choose a "Category" if one fits. These are not very comprehesive and we probably need more. You can do it or ignore it.

4) OPTIONAL: Write a "Tag" or multiple tags if you wish, in a list of words separated by commas. This offers the opportunity for more free style categorization. There are multiple places in the site where you can find "tag clouds" users can click on to find information on various topics. They can also be incorporated into blog posts like this: cemetery. You can see how it brings up blog posts, articles, and profiles tagged with that word.

5) In the "Body" box, write your blog post. You write it just like you'd write in most computer programs. For the majority of blog posts I've written. I just write what I want to write in this box, then click "Submit" at the bottom of the page, and am done with it.

IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND AND DO THE ABOVE FIVE STEPS, YOU DO NOT NEED TO LEARN OR DO ANYTHING MORE. CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE NOW A BLOGGER. YOUR BLOG POSTS WILL SHOW UP IN THE CAFE, BLOG CORNER AND IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL BLOG LIST WHICH WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED AT www.iccfa.com/blogs/your-name-here

6) Now, if you want to get a little fancy, you can also add basic text effects, links to stuff on the Internet, and image (photos, drawings) to your blog post, using the controls at the top of the "Body" box.

Text effects: Highlight the text that you want to add an effect to, then click on the effect control above. For instance, to make this text bold, I typed the text, then highlighted it, then clicked on the "B" button above. Same deal for italics. If you are some kind of renaissance man or woman, you can create slick looking bulleted or numbered lists. And by using the handy "Format" selections you can easily make your blog post completely unreadable if you don't understand how pre-format options work (the thing to remember is that some of these format both the text you've highlighted, and the lines above and below that text). I would avoid these until you understand how they work.

Links: If you want to create text links to other stuff on the Internet, you highlight the text you've typed and then use the "chain link" button at the top of the box and write or paste in a Web address. For instance, first I type the words: funny thing I found on the Internet. Then in another window I copied the URL from the top of the blog post I was reading (I put my cursor up there, to highlight it, then "Edit-Copy" from the browser control at top left), then came back here and highlighted the words and clicked the "chain link" button, and pasted in the URL ("Edit-Paste", or SHIFT + INSERT keys). Voila, a link. Do this a few times and you will see how pretty soon you can do it really quickly without even thinking about it.

Images: Please only submit images smaller that 600 x 600 and 72 dpi. (If you don't know what this means, you probably should not be submitting images or you will only get a frustrating series of error messages and reprimands from the system.)

-Put your cursor where you want the image to appear.

-Click on the "Image Assist" control at the top of the "Body" box - it is the control on the far right.

-Click the "Upload" button. Give the image a title, anything will do, this is mainly for your own reference. You can ignore categories and tags - I do - but if you are into that kind of organizing please knock yourself out.

-Use the "Browse" button to find the image file on your computer.

-Click "Submit" button at the bottom.

-In the "Properties" window which will next appear, you can write a caption for your image in the "Description" box if you want, and you can control whether the image appears as a tiny "thumbnail" that people have to click on to see the full image, or as a "Preview" which is a moderate sized version. I always use "Preview".

-You can try different "Alignment" settings but at the end of the day, please only use "left". Because of the way the Web works, there are all sorts of bad things that can happen to your blog post if you try to get too fancy with the formatting simply because html is not a word processing program. Nobody really cares if your post looks like a layout from Vogue, just show the pictures in a vertical line.

-Click the "Insert" button and there you are, an image in your blog post.

-To add more images just do the above over and over.

-Always remember to put your cursor where you want the image to appear before using Image Assist. It is not that easy to move them around after they've been placed; again, because the Web is not a word processing program. If you do need to move one it's usually better to just delete it and re-add it to your post. This is really easy because when you delete the image, and then click on "Image Assist" you will see your image is already there in your personal gallery so you do not need to browse for it again. (And you can add the same image to multiple blog posts and Forum posts if you want, although at the moment I can't envision a rationale for doing so).

[There is another little image control up there, the little yellow graphic with what looks like a mountain. Do not click on it, do not attempt to use it, as it is evil and is only there to tempt you, test you and ultimately ruin your day and possibly life.]

7) Don't mess with "Input Format" because, if you needed to read this document, you really do not want to change input formats. I only change them for very specific and uncommon purposes. It's a button that could be useful for real techie people to do interesting things with, but frankly those people could probably find way better uses of their time than submitting custom coded documents at this Web site - like meeting a new friend at the local bookshop, or watching the latest Clint Eastwood film.

8) "File Attachment" can be useful if you have a PDF document, Word document or Excel file you want people to be able to download by clicking on a link on your blog post. It's extremely easy to use and automatically puts a link at the bottom of your post. Cool feature if you need it. If you try to upload anything huge you will get in trouble.

9) HANDY TIP: You can write your blog posts in another program and simply copy and paste them into the blog "Body" box. Many times, this feature is absolutely amazing because it allows you to do all your interesting formatting stuff in, say, MS Word, and have it replicated pretty closely here in the blog writing function. Sometime it does not work exactly, but it has surprised me many times alread. You still have to use the process described in step 7 above to get images uploaded, though. This practice has the added benefit of letting you have a second copy of the blog post saved on your hard drive. If, for instance, you spend an hour writing a post, and accidentally navigate off the page to check the weather or bid on a rototiller blade, you could lose your work. This I can tell you from experience, is a very, very sad thing, which can make you melancholy enough to throw your computer out a window. So first writing drafts in another program is definitely a blogging best practice.

If I've missed anything feel free to point it out and I will add to this document. Now start blogging, you blogger, you.

We now have an "Industry Blogroll" posted in the sidebar at the Cafe and Blog Corner. I think it's a useful resource and encourage everyone to take a look at what is being done in this arena. It's the beginnings of a blogroll, anyway, because some google searching revealed that there are not a lot of industry-related blogs out there, at least that google is reporting in the top ten or so pages.

That's good news and bad news. It's bad news because industry members are missing an opportunity to tell their story in a medium that has become influential. The lapse is more troubling in its opportunity cost: There are more and more people reporting all sorts of personal stories on blogs and forums, and some of those stories may be defining this industry or even your company for people searching the Internet for information about death-related service providers. If you are not telling your story, someone else might be.

It's like if a disgruntled traveler writes a compelling tract about a bad experience at a Holiday Inn in a particular town, and if you are searching for information on accommodations guess which hotel you probably would steer clear of if there were no alternative information available?

Good news: The field is wide open, largely free of competition, ripe for harvest. If a consumer is looking for frank information from service providers in your area, chances are there are not too many.

The value of a blog is it offers an opportunity for you to part the corporate veil, to allow potential customers a view inside at the mindset of the people running your company. You can jettison the corporate-speak required by your marketing communications and talk about the true-to-life aspects which everyone knows are a part of every business: Such as, "we had a problem today and here's how we fixed it; boy we will never let that happen again" or "what happened today reminds me of why I am in this business."

The customers you will be serving in the future ... heck, this also applies 100 percent to the association business: The customers we will be serving in the future will be less and less influenced by our "official" proclamations about our companies. They are looking for credible references, such as other customers (tripadvisor is one of the best examples), but to the extent they will listen to us talk about ourselves, a blog is the best avenue open to most of us. (An active community forum might be even better, but that is tough to pull off and a topic for another day).

And again, there are not a lot of them out there. Start a blog for your cremation service, cemetery or funeral home, give it a title that includes your company name, funeral, cemetery or cremation services, and make your city/state info readily available in a subtitle, and update it regularly, and you will be near the top of search engine listings for your area. Tell about what your company is doing, what your personnel are doing, and - assuming you are truly committed to your work - talk about your life in relation to the business.

People are skeptical of our advertising messages. They are more interested in what we as people are doing in our jobs, and how that might relate to using our companies' services.

There is a void of credible information about most of the companies in our industry. A blog is an easy first step you can take to begin to fill it.

Soon I'll do a post on corporate blogs from other industries so you can see how it can work, as well as more about the mechanics of setting one up. In the meantime, if you are interested in the subject, feel free to contact me via the contact form with any questions you may have.

The long-sought replacement for Yahoo groups, for our Network discussion forum, is at hand.

The key elements are:
1) a forum where you can go create posts, read all the posts and comment
2) ability to subscribe to e-mail notifications of new posts at different intervals, and
3) ability to respond and send comments to the forum by email without actually having to visit the Web site

Making this work, all three components, has been something of a holy grail for Web site managers for years. There have long been listservs, but they don't have a searchable, archival forum. There have long been forums which will send notifications, but they don't allow you to simply reply by e-mail. To get all this you had to go through Yahoo or someone like Yahoo or Google, or spend a lot of money for such a program. Well, I think we are close to having one, thanks to the magic of Drupal - if we can just isolate the few components we need from the dozens and dozens which are bombarding us through the magic of Drupal.

Don't get me wrong: Yahoo was wonderful for us at the time. It just had this incredibly annoying tic whereby some people had membership problems and it limited participation in The Network. People would call me asking for help getting on or getting back on and often the best I could tell them was "try opening a new Yahoo account" which is never an attractive prospect.

Having it hosted on our site means there is a single sign-up and authentication, no need to remember multiple identities, and if there is a problem we can go right to the root of it and fix it and get our people signed in.

Frankly, I never understood why Yahoo made accessing their product such a "techie" endeavor. It's a great product once you are signed in but it's a constant adventure as to whether you will be. I for instance have not been able to send messages to The Network for years and I was supposedly the "owner" of the group. So out of ICCFA's thousands of members with e-mail we maxed out at around 130 on The Network with no more than a handful participating - probably because many had been, like me, stripped of their email privileges.

I saw a great Web presentation last year where the guy was explaining the ascendance of Google: He showed a screenshot of the yahoo.com front page, and then the google.com front page, and asked "which one would you feel more comfortable using to search for information?"

There is a lesson there. Currently I have to admit the new iccfa.com is annoyingly complicated for users - not very Google-like - but we are striving for, and getting closer to, simplicity throughout this construction phase. It is getting simpler with each passing day.

Soon, we will have a fairly straightforward set of "documentation" pages showing exactly how to do whatever you are inclined to do here, in particular how to participate in The Network. To all of our Yahoo veterans: I apologize for the delay in replicating that here, but it's not far off. We now have 1) the forum, 2) subscription and 3) posting by email, but the latter two are still a tad clunky. Streamlining is the current task.

The data files for the various Directories lookups are finally completed - ugh, that took longer than expected. Luckily I have figured out a workflow in Excel which has saved me from some of the disasters I've managed in the past when some misplaced "copy and paste" action or erratic finger twitch would accidentally undo several hours of work. Here's how it works:

Do something significant in Excel, then save the file under a new name. Repeat until either the job is finished or your head crashes into the keyboard. When you get done, you will have a slew of files like companies.xls, companies_1.xls, companies_2.xls and so on, most of which can then be deleted if you are REALLY sure you are done with that iteration.

Next will be to check if the online payment configuration has magically started to work, or if the Dream Team as done anything with it. Then, to finally set up the online store and online meeting registration.

Also next will be to fix all the various missing content pieces and consequently keep old Bozo the Error Page clown from popping up on your screen all the time.

Also next (criminy, this a lot of "nexts") is to get some documentation written for using the various functions here, so the vast majority of our visitors will no longer log in, scratch their heads, and go away.

Then of course there is the mountain of content to continue to upload, including many more videos. That section will not really be useful until there is a critical mass of different topics (and eras) so most visitors here will find at least a few things that interest them.

Speaking of interest, I hope all you bookworm types spend some time browsing the Reading Room. Right now it is still a little hamstrung by the critical mass issue referenced above, but it is beginning to become something pretty cool, especially for those into industry history or, really, American history.

More than that, though, the Reading Room is beginning to reveal some fascinating stuff because of the topical tag feature. Click on the modern cemetery tag, for instance, and you begin to get a sense of the vision that has in some sense driven this organization for 120 years. And it's not just about cemeteries, but the industry as a whole. Obviously Hubert Eaton's address at the 1929 convention is near the top of the list for historical significance, but there is more than that if you browse the pieces going back to 1893. Much more is coming - loading and tagging those are also a bit time-consuming but I am a history buff so it's a labor of love ... well, technically it's a labor of caffeine and cabernet and love. But mostly love.

Sorry for the lateness in getting any good documentation for what to actually do at this Web site. I assure you it is, like everything else, coming very soon.

Last major things left are:

Database Updates - populating the database with companies and associations to fill out the "Directories" section. I will be massaging data all day tomorrow and possibly throughout the week. By Friday, I hope, all lookups will be working. This includes Web Expo, Find a Provider and Association Pipeline.

Store and Meeting Registration - payment processing is theoretically working but needs to be tested. Once it is, have mercy on the mariner we will be configuring anything but the kitchen sink to be payable online.

"Events" - everything in the industry should be visible on our calendar.

And some other various content sections. These are filling up quickly.

Today/Tonight I am just working on posting more of the bottomless archive of Articles for the Reading Room. This is niche, boutique material, but in total I think it is pretty cool. Once we have a critical mass of content up it will be, I hope, at least a little bit interesting for everyone. I love that the most recent article from 1892 on "Roads" has a subsection on "Hitching Posts."

iccfa.com e-mail is now working, thank goodness. For anyone who has sent a message since 1:00 am Tuesday, our apologies for the tardiness in replying. It appears no e-mails were lost, however it will take some time to send replies. Sorry for the inconvenience.

And for all you people who are google searching for a solution to your Plesk 9 e-mail problems, the following is my attempt to give back ....

Parallels Plesk 9 does not play nicely with qmail, so you need to switch to Postfix. When we changed our MX record to use the mail server on our Softlayer server, all incoming mail functionality stopped. We could download existing mail from the server in Outlook (using port 110) but no new mail was being received.

The fix was described thusly by Softlayer tech support:

"The qmail SMTP service was not running in the server due to Plesk upgrade. We have corrected this issue by changing the mail service to Postfix. Now SMTP and POP are working fine in the server."

We are still not able to connect to the SMTP server from Outlook. Outlook can find the server on port 80, but we get a "the specified server was found but there was no response from the server" error when trying to send a test message. I will update this blog post when that solution is found.

The image you should have for the process of developing this Web site is of a magnificent leviathan of an object coming gradually into view, and NOT a man standing at a leaking dike with 22 holes too far apart for his fingers and toes to reach.

Good news: syndication is now working! You can subscribe to much of the content here by clicking on one of the little orange icons. The News Page, Blog Corner, individual Blogs and the Forums all have separate feeds, and there is also a side-wide feed that assembles a motley assortment of content (think I need to configure that to make it useful). Now that I know how it works I will probably configure some custom feeds in the future, and we still need to make feeds work for comments so someone can subscribe to a single discussion thread. And when I get a chance I will write up some documentation for anyone who does not know what to do with a "feed." But those are projects for another day because ...

Bad news: iccfa.com e-mail is still broken! This has nothing to do with the Web site but is a result of moving our e-mail hosting from godaddy.com to this server - something we had to do in order to allow the server to send e-mails to ICCFA addresses. Which is sort of important.

The hosting company is working on it, however it has dragged out because they wanted to allow time for the DNS record for our mail (MX record) to "propagate." So we lost about 12 hours of any work getting done, and any e-mail being sent to us going instead to the equivalent of "Santa Claus, North Pole."

Last time we went though a major e-mail change was about seven years ago and it was inconvenient while the MX record was in limbo. Today, it is more like catastrophic. It would be much less of a problem to have our phones go down for two days than it is to lose e-mail - about the opposite of the situation seven years ago.

Hey everyone if you have been having problems getting a response from emails sent to "iccfa.com" addresses we are close to resolving the issue. It had to do with the domain name on the new server and all sorts of techie stuff neither you nor I want to delve into this morning.

It also may have been related to the problem whereby some people cannot get into the Consumer Resource Guide while others can.

We plugged new data into certain boxes, pressed "go" and tossed a bucketfull of chicken bones, patchouli leaves and lime jello into the wind, so we should be good to go in a few hours.

[File under Dawn Of A New Era]

Another big chunk of content is now online - the ICCFA Model Guidelines. Not exactly new material but it was not so easy to find on the old Web site so this is more akin to an archeological discovery than a Pulitzer-prize moment. Published a little over 10 years ago, these documents were the result of a large amount of work by our Government and Legal Affairs Committee, and if you peruse them you will see they offer a valuable set of outlines for new legislative initiatives. Not to mention, a fine statement of best practices for our industry.

The old Web site ... ah, yes, the oooold Web site. I sense now it's been deceased for over a week I am finally gaining sufficient distance to refer to it with ironic tenderness, much like you'd talk about that good old mutt dog Blue you had as a kid, the one who ate your favorite baseball mitt, infested the house with fleas, ransacked your project the day before the Science Fair and threw up on your date's prom dress. That old Web site brought so much ... emotion to our lives over the years.

Poor little fella never really had a chance, though. Born in 1996, during the infancy of the World Wide Web, and we had no money to bring it into the modern age, so we just kept tacking stuff on - sort of like one of those bungalows you see around Southern California, the little three-room jobbers they keep adding to and adding to until it looks like a Lego house that grows from 1000 to 5000 sq ft with the aid of wood blocks, play doh and an erector set.

Yes, old icfa.org was an ongoing kludge, glommed with bits and pieces of new technology but never revamped, disjointed yet obliquely attractive like something by Duchamp - the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Programmers, Even - a masterwork of accretion which amazingly defied common sense and gravity to remain standing for over 12 years. Even we on the staff had trouble finding stuff. And as far as making sitewide changes .... brrr! what a nightmare. But also full of wonderful surprises as we periodically found content that no one remembered was there.

Here on the new site, we can pretty much manipulate and reframe all of our content however we want, because the content and presentation are truly separate. If the aliens land tomorrow, we can adopt a Pleiades color scheme to welcome our new overlords. If T. Boone Pickens decides to purchase the entire death care industry, we can put windmills and natural gas logos on every page. We can redo our menus with a few keystrokes and bring any content right to the surface. It's going to be much, much easier to manage than ol' Blue.

Another late-night progress report (is there any other kind?)

If you click on the links in the blue band above you will see that now most of them actually lead to something more informative than Bozo the Reprimanding Clown. This is a good thing.

The few that are empty I am not so copacetic about because they are each looking pretty labor intensive. So the work goes on.

The next critical priority is to get payment processing working so people can pay for stuff on the site. I finally got our SSL certificate validated, so payment authorization should only be a step away. Then, meeting registrations, dues payments and product purchases will be functional online.

On Wednesday we will upload a current database of members to make all the "Directories" look-ups work properly. Ongoing will be the population of the ICCFA Store with product and price information. Also ongoing will be the development of explanatory pages for Advertising and Services/Products.

Estimated time of delivery for the above is, oh... In the future. Why so vague? Mainly because the text or "verbiage" still needs to be developed for the remaining ICCFA promotional pages, and the technical aspects need to be figured out for other portions.

Please stay tuned because more is coming online.

The Music License link is now working here.

Still just the same old fashioned PDF file you have to print, complete manually and send back by fax or mail, but it's better than carrier pigeon.

We are rapidly approaching the capability to have true online registration and payment, like everything else it is taking longer than usual. Today I finally got the Secure Socket certificate installed which is the first step in taking online payments again...

The site is now live in that iccfa.com no longer points to the old server, may it rest in peace, although there is obviously still some patching up and fine-tuning to do. Some of the features like the Consumer Resource Guide could not be made to work until we switched the domain name to the new server, and e-mail notifications for the same reason. But this is in effect a 4-day weekend and traffic on the site will be relatively low so it is a good time to have this "messy" phase.

Tinkering with the design will continue for approximately the next few years, thus the style sheet will remain a work in progress. For this roll out stage I want to keep it as simple as possible until all of our content is functional, then we can pretty it up some more.

Moving the domain name also whacked our e-mail for going on 24 hours now. This was inevitable - another reason to make the change on a holiday. If you have sent messages to any iccfa.com e-mail addresses and have not gotten a response, it could be the message is floating in the ether somewhere. I believe the Internet fairies will try to deliver for a few days, however, before returning to sender.

Most all of the Cafe sections are working as they're supposed to, which was the priority. The official ICCFA "brochure-ware" sections are still being filled in; for now this is just cutting and pasting from the old site, and should be completed in a day or two.

There are something like 300 articles waiting to be posted to the Reading Room, and LOTS more coming after that. I just need the requisite time, energy and motivation to get them up there.

Speaking of methamphetamines, it turns out I would have needed about a bakers dozen if I was actually going to do any "blogging" of the Wide World of Sales Conference, and considering how I have grown quite fond of living outside the prison walls that was not going to happen. It was a great Conference, probably our best ever, but quite exhausting. We watched a couple episodes of Lost each night before crashing, and I was barely able to stay awake for that. And every year it seems to take a day longer to recover, so I was not able to get to it this weekend either ...

Next weekend, after a lot of the Web site stuff is fixed, I plan to do a recap with photos, and soon will also have a small sample on video. The closing session by Gary O'Sullivan and David Shipper was the stuff of legends; if the video came out halfway decent I think that is the one I will post.

...and there was much celebration.

Here it is, all new and improved. Should be pretty user-friendly, all things considered. It takes a fair amount of technical savvy to even dip your toe into editing a full-featured Wiki like Wikipedia, but here was have trimmed down the number of options to try and keep it somewhat user-friendly, or at least not overly user-terrifying.

The wiki is going to be a little haywire for part of today because I need to try changing some stuff around, the plan being that it will function like a normal wiki when this process is completed. I will provide an update later today.

It's time to just come right out and say it: Internet Explorer is for the birds and no one should use it for general Web browsing.

I have to use it for exactly three purposes: Checking my Chase health savings account Web site which only works in IE; working on the backup server for this Web site, where the virtual private network stupidly requires IE; and testing everything we are doing on this Web site - after determining it works in FireFox, what sort of contortions we have to go through to make it work with IE for the benefit of all the poor saps out there who are still using it.

Everyone should switch to Firefox right now if you have not done so already. If you are reading this on IE, your conscience should compel you to click that link right now and download Firefox for free.

The reason for this rant is we just upgraded a critical piece of software called Panels which controls the layout of some of the pages, and lo and behold the Screening Room - one of the trickier designs - is FUBAR in Internet Explorer. In the long run the change to Panels will be for the better because it will help us customize the Groups pages, but in the short run I want to pay Paul Elvig to go over to Redmond and deliver Bill Gates a stern tongue lashing.

Internet Explorer is insecure - at least twice a year some major new fault is found by which hackers can take over your computer or read everything you are typing - and it just works so badly that it's amazing Firefox does not have the majority of the market yet (I think it is near 40% so far). But having IE built into the Windows operating system I guess is like having a box of chocolates on your desk. Impossible to over come the inclination to indulge without even thinking about it.

Firefox is so much more logical and works so much better that everyone who uses it sticks with it. You will too.

I'm going to get a Firefox promotional notice posted on this site somewhere prominently very soon. By the way, Safari (the browser that comes with Mac) seems to work very well on the site, next best after Firefox, although I even encourage Mac users to run Firefox in order to get the absolute best Web experience.

Switch to Firefox!

And so it begins.

After five months of planning and setup, and a solid month of kicking the tires with my beloved friend Judy, we are careening downhill toward the finish line like a toboggan on ice.

We are on the verge of going live, switching our various iccfa.com (and vestigial icfa.org) dns addresses to point to the new server. It is going to happen within days.

Because of how the Web works it is almost by definition necessary that a new Web site will have some broken parts when it first unveils. For instance, anything that has to do with secure transactions, like the Store or meeting registrations, won't happen until some time after iccfa.com points to this server, because we can't get a security certificate until "iccfa.com" points to this machine, and we can't setup our online merchant account interface until we have the certificate.

There are similar issues with things like automated e-mail notifications, which will slow down the implementation of the new Network. Also, the "Directories" link above points to sample "Directories" that will be greatly changed in the next week while we offload the absolutely most recent data from our database to the Web site.

Since we don't have a 24-hour bullpen of people working on the changeover, some parts are going to be delayed while either I or the Dream Team are getting our beauty sleep.

Thus the next few days will be thorny, like having a dinner party at your half-finished new house, but the construction continues apace and we absolutely must have some guests in, darn it all.

So now, we are ready to open the doors for the official insiders' preview.

Much of this Web site will be a lot like all other Web sites in that it will tell a lot of stuff about us, the proprietors, the ICCFA. We will take all the material about ourselves from the old site, dust it off, mark it for refurbishing, and post it right back up here on the new site. That is what is going to populate most of the links on the blue bar above which all say "Page not found" when you click on them. That stuff is cutting-and-pasting child's play.

But the real heart of the new iccfa.com will consist in the interactive aspects, encapsulated in the Cafe. Therefore that is the portion Judy and I have been working overtime to make workable for your average Tom, Dick and Harry. It's just about there, so Tom, Dick and Harry (and Paul and Mark and Gregg)... c'mon in!

When we open this up to the world, we want to have a semblance of a neighborhood already in place, conversations underway, stuff to read, so newcomers will get a sense of how it works and what it can be for them. Judy has been doing yeoman duty "seeding" the various sections and helping me find all the kinks, and now staff members Julie, Linda, and Bryan are involved. Now we are going to bring in some more ICCFA folks to contribute prior to going live. It's the dress rehearsal of the dress rehearsal.

This is a test for Linda's first blog.

Whilst the hamsters in their wheels scurry crazily in the background (I'm not calling JOE a hamster, just the people who are manipulating the code) I'm having fun writing entries for the Wiki and coming up with some topics for possible future forums. After over 30 years in the business I feel like I have at least a grasp on much of what we do. Part of the Wiki posts are just cut-and-pasted from the Consumer Resources section on the ICCFA site, but some of them I'm writing on my own. The nature of a Wiki is that it is interactive and updatable. So I hope my peers (that's you, gentle readers) will check it out and lend their expertise. Let's not do anything crazy like post that Kevin Bacon is dead, as recently happened to his entry in the official Wikipedia. I'm going to research some "urban legends" regarding death and related topics and see if I can find some fun stuff to shoot holes through. If you know of any, please share!!

I just happen to be "up early" this morning - a euphemism which I intend to employ assiduously in the future because it is so much more appropriate than "up late" on so many levels - and reviewing the content here in the nascent days of the new iccfa.com I realized that very little of it has been written by me lately.

It is officially January 3rd which is slightly disappointing considering my promise to have the site live on January 1, but we can just go ahead and file this among the long list of missed deadlines that has defined by life on this Earth.

This is going to be a busy weekend. The good thing is, we now have templates for all the major sections here. Click on the Cafe Resources link and you will see that they all actually point to something albeit much of it empty.

But the content is coming. I have on my laptop an archive of about 300 articles from the ICCFA library, representing a random sampling from the late 1800s to recently (and about 1/20 of what will eventually be available here), all scanned by my trusty assistant Elizabeth, who recently requested some time off to eat broken glass which she said would be a nice change from the scanning project. Hey if anyone knows a painless way to turn really old books into searchable text, do tell. Anyway, my job is to cut and paste a ton of these .rtf files into article pages, and then develop a sensible way to make them accessible to you, our visitors, via the Reading Room. There will be caffeine in my immediate future.

The Screening Room is done, such as it is. I think there are about 20 videos there, with over 100 more to come, but please don't hold your breath for those or the 400 or so audio files because that little media outpost represents the one totally completed sitting room in this mansion we are building which currently has numerous unfinished windows, holes in the floor boards, and exposed wiring: So while we'd love to get a lot more video there for you to enjoy, I ask you to just be grateful for one place you can go without fear of mice nesting in your coat pocket.

(And by the way, the "high bandwidth video" link just takes you to the same videos as the low bandwidth one. When our visitors are ready for high definition, we are poised to deliver, but for now we will spend some time acclimating our members to youtube-level quality, which is really pretty good.)

Judy Faaberg has been a true blessing as our first real tester and user at the site. It's like being asked to arrange doilies on the tables while workmen are still demolishing walls and jackhammering the floors, and Judy has been a real trooper through the rough-carpentry month of December. There is a custom-labeled bottle of cabernet headed in her direction when the dust has all finally settled.

A big step forward coming out of this weekend will be that everything here is arranged enough to get the ICCFA staff and leadership involved in the Web site. We will need to gently steer them away from the live wires and pitfalls, but I am pretty confident the framework is in place to get the real expertise of the association into this project. I can't tell you how enthused I am for that to happen.

Right now the major online interaction we provide is through the Yahoo group "ICCFA Network." It's been ok, a good solution for this stage of the association's evolution the past few years.

An undeniable fact is that many people in our industry still do not spend a great deal of time sitting at their computers seeking interaction. Of the ICCFA database of members, we still only have e-mail addresses for about half despite asking constantly for almost 10 years on just about every form we send. So it has made sense to use a free service like Yahoo for our networking e-mail "listserv." As most of you who have bothered to read this far into my blog post probably know, quite a few really great attempted online ventures in our industry since 1996 have tanked because of lack of participation.

The ICCFA leadership is of the opinion that this trend is changing, and consequently they authorized spending a little bit of money to put this association modestly close to the leading edge of nonprofit social networking. (OK, "modestly" means about 7 years behind the cutting edge, but in today's economy a nice sitting room is preferable to a wallet-shredding auditorium.) Our goal over the short term will be to make this site presentable, and encourage more participation from members who might not be totally up to speed on what all you can do online.

"Visit the Cafe once a day" will be the catchphrase. With the talent pool and overall great people we have in this association, I personally think the time is right that this really could work.

And good that we waited for this time! ACA-ICFA-ICCFA has been approached for innumerable online ventures over the years, many during the period when literally every American's Internet access was through dial-up. This has been on our radar since I got my first "icfa.org" e-mail address in 1996. We were seen as the cutting-edge association well over a decade ago. Most of these proposals were from really, really smart people who were way ahead of their time, and while it sucks that their projects did not pan out, our responsibility as an association is to be exceedingly careful with our members' dues payments. I remember 11 years ago sitting at a table with reps from an Internet start-up company pitching a comprehensive new online venture for ICFA to invest in, and one of our most savvy Board Members leaned over and asked: "Aren't you just chasing ghosts?" My first reaction was, "Man, that is cold." But it was 100 percent accurate. This association would have lost a fortune getting involved in a major online endeavor in 1998, because our industry simply was not there yet.

Now, I think it is not so much a matter of whether our industry "is there," but the basic realization that society is quickly getting there. Cable-Telephone-Internet packaging is now ubiquitous. You don't buy one without at least considering the three, and with competition almost everywhere it means almost everyone is poised for affordable broadband. Much as I have hated them, I have to say hand it to Verizon because they are pushing the old telecommunications monopoly model to the breaking point. In my neighborhood right now, I get to choose between DirectTV, Verizon and Comcast for TV, and between the latter two for TV, Internet and phone.

What this tells me is, the former 50% of ICCFA members with Internet is going to ramp up in a big way in the next couple years. They will be buying it as part of a package at their homes and businesses. And if many of them are suddenly online, maybe the Cafe will become one of their regular places to visit. It is worth consuming a lot of caffeine to try and make that happen, if you ask me.

This is a test of the image uploading which for some absolutely annoying reason will not work correctly. I think it may be one of the modules we are using so let's try it the old fashioned way, just by sticking the image right here with HTML code:

This is a scene from the off hours of the Death Care Management Council meeting in early October.

A meeting at which, I might add, I did the first public presentation about the new ICCFA Web site, and where I noted joshingly the goal was to have the site operational by November 1, "which means it probably will deliver by Christmas! Har har har!" The joke being all this tech stuff takes much longer than it is supposed to.

Well, now it IS almost Christmas and I am no longer laughing. The project began with a list of features we wanted to implement, and a general list of tools with which to do so. The problem has turned out to be some of the tools are not playing together nicely as far as I can tell.

I think the strategy now has to be to focus in on the few things that are working perfectly, get them rolled out, and then add the other stuff in as we put the puzzle pieces together. By January 2 life is going to become so busy for us right up until the Convention in April that there will be limited time to devote to the site. Time to trim our expectations and pursue that which is attainable.

It is about 12:45 am, November 23, 2008. The reason I am giving that information is because I can't figure out how to get it to display with the blog post itself, i.e the way it works on every other blog in the known universe.

But that of course is a speck of dust on the highway relative to all of the other "issues" I am currently working through trying to get this Web site in presentable enough shape to actually invite some people over. And - this is the truly annoying part - the problems are not so much technical difficulties because the software, as far as I can tell, runs like a Ferrari, but rather my own inability to put the pieces together. It's like if your Dad throws you the keys and says "here you go, son, that Ferrari in the driveway is yours," and you come back in 15 minutes later and say "Dad, I just can't get my mind around that front door handle." That's how smart I feel right now.

Luckily for ICCFA, it is not all up to me. The truly technical aspects are being handled by a group of folks whom I have come to think of as the Dream Team. They work from a secure, undisclosed location which I am not at liberty to reveal ... but I can give the hint that it is nine time zones away from here and if you wanted to buy some curry you'd have plenty to choose from.

And if anybody is thinking of jumping on my case for "outsourcing" the work: After I decided that Drupal was the perfect platform for what I wanted to accomplish, the Dream Team was the first party who both a) answered my e-mail, and b) was ready to go to work in less than two months. All the others were here in the U.S. Let me say something to all of you who have children or grandchildren trying to figure out what to do for a living.

Three words: Social networking software. People who know how to make Drupal or Joomla or any of dozens of others run are in a position to basically choose who they want to work for. The demand for this kind of Web presence has exploded and like pitching in professional baseball, there simply is not enough talent to go around.

But we can thank our lucky stars we have the Dream Team.

Unfortunately, there is still a steep learning curve for the in-house portion of the software in order to get it all set up. For instance, we need to categorize everything, and the one rule they tell you is "Get it right at the beginning because it can be a huge mess if you change your mind later on." So we have all this different stuff we do (and since you are reading this in the distant future I can refer you to the Web site, because it will all be set up, but please cut me some slack because stuff might change in the meantime. Hmm, this is sort of like writing something for a time capsule, or a letter to my great, great grandchildren), like that which is listed in the blue bars at the top of this section. That all needs to be organized by category, then we also have to have categories or tags on the blog, in the forums, and in the archives. Trying to put all the pieces together in a manner which will bring minimal confusion later on is like ... well, it's like some really difficult task that after a while makes you want to just quit working on it and go write a blog post such as this one.

Hey, we need blog content so I can tell how it is going to appear, and also to keep a historical record of this dynamic period in the history of the association, the Joe Sitting Up All Night At The Dining Room Table Era, as it shall be known.

Anyway, there's the categories piece, the figuring out how the Screening Room and Reading Rooms are going to function piece, the trying to make the ICCFA Wiki work piece, and about ten other pieces that need to have decisions made so the Dream Team can do their magic. As luck would have it, on the ICCFA staff about the only person who is in a position to do this is your humble narrator, moi.

The downside of working your way up through the organizational chart with "Tech Guy" in your job description is it makes it easy not to hire another Tech Guy and use the money instead on hiring people who can do things the association members actually SEE. Nowadays, knock on wood, computers are so cheap and our network so reliable any other Tech Guy we had would spend most of his time playing Masters of Warcraft or stuffing envelopes for a hefty salary, so I don't regret not hiring him. But then when one of these little annoying tasks like building a new Web presence for the association comes along, it sort of reaches up and bites me. Well, that's why they call it work.

The thing about Drupal is, it is harder to set up than the others - it requires technical experience just to understand how it works - but once the pieces are all in place it will be no more difficult than Facebook to interact with, so for the key staff people who will be putting all the material on here going forward the learning curve will be pretty short and flat. The beauty of Drupal is it is inherently community-oriented. Its default behavior is everything I was looking for in a content management system; it met all of the criteria and the price - free - had a certain attraction as well. All the setup and programming are not free, of course, but those costs are going to be there no matter what. It is a fabulous platform and I hope you, probably one of our first real visitors to ICCFA.com, sitting and reading this in the future, can browse around this Web site and see what I mean. And I hope you are not one of my great grandchildren.

This is the first official post at the new ICCFA.com Web site. I am "welcoming" you, even though I know it will be weeks before anyone sees this because there are, er, a few loose ends to tie up before we go live.

But we need to have some text here to test how everything looks as we mess around with the formatting.

The new software we are using, Drupal, has about a billion moving parts which all need to be configured. On the plus side, we are not lacking for features.

This is a new communications vehicle for the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association. It will serve a variety of purposes, the most immediate of which will be to provide a simpler format for updating the Industry News listings.

Instead of going to the News Page each day, you will be able to come here to the Blog, where you can not only read the news but discuss it if you are so inclined.

Also, the "National/International" and "Opinion" news feeds from here on out will be of the self-serve variety: Simply peruse the lists for General News, Opinion, and Blogs, on the sidebars of the page, and visit the ones that interest you.

It may take a wee bit of adjustment to reading the news in the new format, and we appreciate you bearing with us as we bring the listings up to date.

The Blog will also provide a convenient way to distribute timely information about events that fall between the publishing cycles of the ICCFA Magazine and ICCFA Wireless newsletter. Time permitting, for instance, we should be able to provide coverage of next week's ICCFA Convention in Las Vegas.

We hope the ICCFA Blog is a useful service, and we invite your comments and suggestions.