I’m often asked, “How can you make any money with Open Source software?” While I’ll attempt to answer this question in this post, the real topic to be discussed here is why developers like and want to freely give their code away; why open source matters, why it works. These two questions, how one can make money with free software and why a developer would want to give code away, are very well connected.

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I heard at work this week that I’ve been selected to attend the Tools for Grassroots Organizers Conference to be held at the end of April at the Stanford Sierra Conference Center. I’m excited to attend but hope some day to be selected to present as well. I think I have a lot to offer NGOs with regards to how to setup a professional web presence without a huge price tag

In the coming weeks, I plan on writing a blog outlining the web tools I would recommend for any Tools conference participant.

I really love the power and flexibility of Joomla. (I know that I’m suppose to write Joomla with an exclamation point at the end, as that technically is the name for the project, but I just can’t do it.) The system is so powerful to begin with and so easily modified, I can’t imagine building a site today with out.

One simple hack I do to nearly every template I work with is to modify the call for the breadcrumb trail that one can use. That’s the so called “pathway” function within Joomla. Most of the time, you’ll find a line in a template that says:

mosPathway();

I change this to be:

if ($option!="com_frontpage") { mosPathway(); }

The results of this change is to simply hide the pathway on the home page. Why would the user need a breadcrumb on the home page? They are at the top of the tree and if that’s not already obvious, there are bigger problems with the information architecture and design.

After six months, I’ve finally gotten back to some work on Advocacy - my Joomla component for providing non-profits and NGOs with a tool for creating email and letter writing campaigns. I originally worked on this component for the Nevada Wilderness Project during a Patagonia Internship and it was pretty bare boned at that time.

Now it’s feeling pretty polished. Read More…

I’m guilty of this problem. I assume because it makes sense to me it will make sense to others. Hey, I’m logical - it must work like this for everyone, right?

Denial is a powerful thing indeed. When it comes to looking at an interface I’ve created and designed, I can’t successfully be the final judge. I can make arguments about why I did something, placed an icon here, set this link to be in the first position, and made the wording like this and not like that… but ultimately, I need someone else to look at it and try it out, and to be honest with me. Read More…