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By Martin Taylor
There is a new information services company on Orcas: OrcasDigerati.com. It is run by a 13-year resident of Orcas that a lot of you may know: Martin Taylor. Many of you will know Martin as a professional photographer and that is indeed one of his passions which he is actively involved in. But for 25 years Martin has also been working at one of his other passions as a computer engineer. Martin has done custom computer chip design to network design, software programming, web design and many things besides.
Martin calls OrcasDigerati.com an “Information Services Company” because it offers more than simple web pages. He can craft you an attractive and effective company or personal web site consistent with a new or existing brand. But more often than not more is expected of a web site these days.
Martin Taylor
A web site can be an eCommerce site, a for profit or non profit business front end or back end service provider, an application, a newspaper or magazine, a school, a news group and bulletin board, a mailing list and much more. It usually offers a variety of services which implements the needs of a business, non profit, family or individual.
A very common project these days includes a WordPress based blog/CMS. WordPress is a set of scripts and a back end database that supports web sites where the content can easily be created and modified by non programmers. The typical sequence is for the site to be designed and established by a developer like OrcasDigerati.com then handed off to their customer who can then do the majority of the day to day content creation themselves. Different users can be assigned roles and permissions based on their needs and capabilities so they can collaborate. A lot of digital newspapers run on sites like that. Also a lot of eCommerce sites us a similar structure. It is a very powerful concept enabling more people to directly contribute to the ‘blogosphere’ which is much more than a collection of blogs. WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) specifically designed for blogs but it is more often used as a more general purpose CMS which may or may not include blogging. There are many other packages based on scripts and databases which implement blogs or more general purpose CMS systems.
But that is just the beginning a network based information system can implement almost anything mostly limited by your imagination. There are usually several if not many ways to implement an application. One of the hard parts is figuring out something close to the most efficient way to do it. New tools are created literally every day so just staying current on what is out there is tough.
OrcasDigerati.com can take on projects like those described above and more. They can build networked information systems from specification through custom hardware, system and network implementations, custom software to web sites and web applications. They have a lot of experience with UNIX like systems such as Linux, Sun and Apple Mac OS X systems both in desktop systems, servers and embedded systems. OrcasDigerati.com can take on projects world wide and does, but there is a special pleasure and synergy in working in the local community.
Technology, art and the Islands are along with rowing Martin’s passions these days and when they come together he loves it. He sees technology as an essential enabler for the world at large, but particularly for the Islands. The community needs ‘the Net’ more than the rest of the world to thrive despite it’s separateness. With the right application of technology Orcas and the San Juans can blossom as whole communities. Technology can help bring the right tourists, help them buy from the Islands before and after they go home and help the Islands thrive twelve months a year beyond the tourists. Non profit and for profit companies help the community by enabling a cash flow towards the Islands from the wider world and then re-spend it here as much as possible. The right technology can engage the world at large in the Islands community in ways that benefit the residents. That same technology can help the residents trade with each other.
Learn more about OrcasDigerati.com at their web site or contact Martin@OrcasDigerati.com or 360.298.2086. Even if you don’t have a current project in mind you can connect to Martin’s blog on things Orcas and tech.
