EL Studio Communications

The Case Foundation has released new research into the effectiveness of open grantmaking, from their Make It Your Own Awards experience. As part of the Case Foundation's technical staff at that time, I had the privilege of figuring out how to put the MIYO competition software together. In 2007, the Case Foundation launched its first public grants program, the Make It Your Own Awards (MIYO), which challenged people from all walks of life to discuss what matters most to them,...

What do the week’s Facebook and Google+ changes mean for your web presence? More opportunities to connect with your users and their friends than ever before. Larger and larger stores of data for the giants' benefit. Data crumbs for the rest of us. But if your site uses Facebook, users won’t have to remember yet another login. Is it worth it? Photo “Shadow of the Giant” by Grufnik Google+ opened to everyone this week, perhaps in an attempt to divert...

Maybe we've recommended building your website with Drupal, the content management system (CMS). Perhaps you've heard how the White House and Congress and Sony Music (and many, many others) use Drupal for their public websites. Quite right for you to hesitate a bit about using Drupal the platform, and about working with small firms like ours to implement and support your site.  These are both good decisions, I think. Of course I'm biased about el-studio.com, so I'd like to talk...

First off, Drupal is made for lots of content -- 16,000 articles is no problem. Taxonomy, views, search -- so much of what you need for handling big content is baked into the Drupal platform. Add Apache Solr for faceted search, and you have a scalable, flexible web publishing platform.  From a developer perspective, Drupal is a pleasure to work with. Getting content out of PDF, though -- that's not so fun. The problem is not so much reading the...