Newsletter

Colleagues looking at a sheet of graphs and charts

Measuring Results with Analytics


August 2024

Hi,

At Freelock we're kicking off our long-anticipated "Vision" program, a series of newsletters, blog posts, and videos about website effectiveness. Before we get into the meat of things, we're setting the stage with the question, "How do we know if it worked?" And the answer is -- data.

So this month we're looking at a primary source of data, Website analytics.

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Locks

2017: The year of encryption


January 2017

Starting this month, Chrome users are going to start seeing a lot more sites flagged as insecure. Google is firmly on the technologist side of the encryption war, and it wants to make encryption something regular people care about. Why?

Not using encryption is like sending everything you visit/everything you do, scrawled upon postcards, with stops in all sorts of places, passing by people you would not want seeing everything.

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The Permanent Web


September 2016

[Update: a few days after I published this, Vector.im rebranded as Riot.im. It's the same project, just a new name...]

In 5,000 years, will anybody be able to read (or even access) things we put online today? Here at the dawn of the information age, we are creating the archetypes that have big implications, possibly for thousands of years. There's a bunch of recent science fiction stories that imagine various futures, written with the perspective of today's web, extrapolating where things might go as humanity evolves.

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Bridge

Content Management on the Web has changed. Today.


November 2015

Today marks the release of Drupal 8, and the birthday of its founder, Dries Buytaert. This release is more than just a new digit, it's an entirely new platform with something for everyone to love, but it's particularly big for web site owners.

What's the big deal? The biggest, most powerful, one of the most successful open source projects in the world has two major, fundamental changes that change everything you thought you knew about it.

Well, not everything. Lots of the things that people love about Drupal are getting some nice improvements:

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Rainbow

You get out what you put in


March 2015

... this statement applies to just about any endeavor you can imagine... I've mostly heard it associated with education, the idea that you can get a good education anywhere if you work diligently at it and learn what the teacher has to teach -- and likewise, you can often skate by in good schools without coming out the other end with much learned.

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How should I manage my passwords?


May 2014

Heartbleed. The end of XP. Zero-day Internet Explorer attacks. April was a tough month for security on the Internet -- are the days of safe browsing over?

Probably not. But it is time to make sure you have good password management processes -- or learn how to do it if not.

Years ago I wrote about Smarter Password Management, and how to more easily create secure passwords. It's time for a brief update, as the environment has changed a bit.

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The death of dot com? Get ready for a whole new web


December 2013

In a few short years, dot-com will be a quaint throwback referring to a couple of economic booms, and not something to indicate a web site. Like the Great War -- everybody now calls it World War 1, since we've had another great war... Why? Because the floodgates are about to open on domain names, and so we're about to see the rise of dot bike, dot plumbing, dot gifts, and even dot dentist.

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Guiding Principles


August 2013

What are the guiding principles you use to make decisions? Over the past few months, as the Freelock team has grown, I've been spending more time on strategy, while delegating more and more of the day-to-day work to my team. To get us all working more effectively together, I needed to answer that question.

The more I dig into the decision-making process, the more I spend time on planning, the more I have found four key principles emerging that underly most of our business decisions.

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