Energy

Previously we learned why a custom web site is not a car. But it is a lot like a building.

"Make me a building. How much is it going to cost?"

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.

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

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.

Last weekend I had the good fortune of being able to attend TEDxRainer. The event could best be summed up in one word:

Passion.

Short answer: it depends.
We still do most of our projects in Drupal 6, mainly because it's been around a few years, and modules we use on many sites are not yet stable for Drupal 7 (and some are still a ways off).

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.
Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?