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Results. Return On Investment. Value. How do you measure these things in a website? There's one thing you can easily measure -- cost. Or at least the amount you actually spend to build and maintain a site. The others are far more troublesome to measure.

Not 4 hours after posting my most recent blog stressing the importance of setting up systems with disaster recovery in mind, fate stepped up and thwacked me. "Oh yeah, think you're so resilient?

If there's one thing that's constant in the web world, it's change.

If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?

If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.

If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.

At Freelock we're in the midst of building dashboards for ourselves and for customers, to really dial in our process and let us know where to focus our improvements.

A couple weeks ago NPR's Planet Money and This American Life had some really great episodes about the broken patent system. These are great stories for people who don't understand why patents are a problem, but they overlooked a couple of crucial points.

Before doing any changes to your web site, the first thing to figure out are your goals. As a web development shop, we focus on building web sites that create measurable value for our customers, aligned with their goals.
Some common goals:

Yesterday Drupal.org got hacked, and potentially all the password hashes on the site fell into malicious hands.

Hey, that's not what I was thinking!

That's a very common complaint customers have with developers, when they receive the result of weeks or months of hard work. And it indicates a failure of planning.

Apparently Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), the founder of Tesla Motors, wants to bypass auto dealerships, and has gone to the Texas legislature for special exemptions to allow him to sell his cars directly to consumers.