At Freelock, we're huge fans of Drupal. But we keep running into customers (or potential customers) who are terrified of it. So here's our take on why.

A question came across the Drupal Developer's list today asking whether Drupal could auto-update itself, like WordPress. As someone who thinks about security a lot, the very thought of this horrifies me.

It's a bad idea for several reasons, but the biggest reason:

That's the essence of a question I got today. And it's not one that can be answered easily, because there's no such thing as a site being "secure." It's not an either/or question, it's really a "how much" type of question. How hot is it today?

Not 2 weeks after my newsletter calling out how people take for granted that nothing bad will happen to their web sites, two of the biggest providers went down yesterday, Amazon and Akamai, in several separate incide

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).

Here at Freelock, we've been making the transition to using Open Atrium as our project management platform, and thus far I've been quite impressed with it.

How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

Illustrating the point I made previously about the value of Google+ integration, ITProPortal reports on a growing trend of businesses devoted to selling Google +1s to highlight company listings in

The recent beta release of Google+ provides a good opportunity to revisit a topic in which our clients have expressed a keen and consistent interest- leveraging social media to promote small business.

Cloud computing has been a buzzword for the past couple years, but what does that really mean, and why should you care?