Free/Open Source Software

You don't need a new website. You need to make your current website more effective! How can you do that? There is no single answer -- websites are part of a larger system, and you need to consider many different aspects to make your site effective. We've been making websites since the start of the web, and know what makes them work -- as well as not work. Take what we have learned to make your site better!
🕑Aug 20, 2013 🖋John Locke 💬2

What is the value of your web site?

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.

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Sustainable/Open Business
🕑Jul 09, 2013 🖋John Locke 💬0

Making technology decisions in a sea of alternatives

July 2013

If you learned how to make decisions before the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might get overwhelmed by decision making today. We used to live in a fairly black-and-white world -- East versus West, Pepsi or Coke, Miller or Bud, Democrat or Republican, ABC, NBC, or CBS.

How do you decide? If you're like a great many people in my generation, one tactic might be to create a list of pros and cons for each of the alternatives, and then compare these lists side-by-side. Ok, great! Let's use that to select a content management system. Let's see, what are our alternatives?

🕑Jun 18, 2013 🖋John Locke 💬0

Obvious and Worthless: the Patent System in software

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.

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Off Topic

Successful Turkeys: Redefining Success in Web Projects

In the software industry, the definition of "success" isn't necessarily the same as it is for the rest of the world. The customer asks for a complex system composed of many parts, with a specified budget, and a timeline. A software project is usually considered successful if any part of the system is developed, at any cost, at some time. Not necessarily the functionality requested, the budget, or the deadline.
So claimed Steve McConnell at a recent talk about the business value of software processes Timon and I attended.

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crowdfunding, community funding, open source, Kickstarter, GPL license, game development
🕑Jun 04, 2012 🖋John Locke 💬2

2 Crowd-Funding Opportunities

Crowd-funding is a pet favorite topic of mine. It's the opposite of taking control over a shared resource and turning it into profit -- it's building something that benefits everybody, enlisting a large number of people to make it happen.

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Sustainable/Open Business
🕑Feb 13, 2012 🖋Michael Brandt 💬0

Changing the creative approach.

What an interesting time to be working in and around the internet! Mass protest showed MPAA and Congress that ill-formed, top-down actions like SOPA and PIPA are unacceptable solutions to the challenges facing the entertainment industry.

🕑Jan 23, 2012 🖋John Locke 💬2

Static Brochure sites are easier?

We've had several clients recently chafing at how confining Drupal sites can be -- it can be a lot more work to make individual pages vary from the template, and if you have build web sites using a tool like Dreamweaver, you can't tweak the layout the same way.

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Ask Freelock
🕑Jan 03, 2010 🖋John Locke 💬4

My New Years Resolution: The end of estimates

I have a confession to make. I'm absolutely terrible at making estimates. No matter how long I think something is going to take, it always takes longer. Even if I double, triple, or even quadruple my original guess.

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