Drupal is a great platform as well. I work with K-12 school districts every day and the majority are not choosing Drupal because the support and custom Drupal development needed is too expensive. Instead, they are choosing WordPress.
The exception is the higher education market (colleges and universities), who are choosing Drupal over WordPress.
Yes, that is exactly right. Public school districts can no longer use E-Rate (federal money) funds to pay for web site hosting or web site management systems. The FCC decided to re-allocate $5 billion in E-Rate funds for a 5-year wifi roll-out plan for all public school districts.
This is a really smart acquisition. WordPress continues to dominate the CMS market. With the upcoming REST API, it's only going to get better. I'm watching niche CMS industry after niche CMS industry crumble under the continual migration to WordPress.
The latest victims are the small CMS vendors who have been selling proprietary CMS solutions to public school districts for the past 15 years, charging far too much money (your U.S. taxpayer dollars!) for barely functional CMS's. The FCC voted recently to prohibit spending federal money on these solutions, a practice that basically created the market, so now every school district in the U.S. (14,000+) are looking around for cheaper and better solutions. A large percentage of them are migrating to WordPress.
This is great, if....the school software vendors adopt it as a standard and allow their systems to be Clever-enabled.
I work for a large school district and a large majority of our vendor solutions come with their own proprietary, locked-down technologies. When queried, some of these vendors see the writing on the wall and say they are working on integrating with Clever while others keep their heads stuck in the sand while counting their millions of taxpayer dollars spent on overly-complex, un-flexible and un-interoperable solutions.
I believe this is the why our Armed Forces recruiters often have the names, addresses and phone numbers of our graduating seniors every year. It's usually up to the school administrators to release this information upon request, and most do. Private schools do not have this issue.
Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just another average designer doing average crap.
The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.
This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.
I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.
What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.
Congratulations to LayerVault on their biggest day of traffic ever. Whether this brew-ha-ha was intentional or not, a lot more people are now aware of them than before today.
I like browsing their Designer News links on a daily basis, but I would think twice about signing up for a service run by people with questionable character and morals, which is the feeling I am coming away with after reading through this thread.
This whole thing could have been handled a lot better and with far more professionalism.
I understand the problem, and I feel for these people who have the crushing student loan debt. I left college with a lot of student loan but debt, too. I struggled but managed to pay it off in less than 5 years. This required sacrifice, hard work and lot of luck getting jobs.
I made some bad decisions in my 20s and early 30s and ended up with $40K in credit card debt. I met my wife, got married and had a kid - and in the course of four years paid off all that debt, saved $50K, bought a house and continue to save.
It was hard, and required a lot of hard work, coupon clipping and clearance sales.
I love Lanyrd. You have gone and built something that is better than what came before you. I conceived a startup in in 2006 called Confabb.com that strove to be what Lanyrd has become. Great work!
The chalk dot on the wall story comes directly from a 1983 book called "A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative" by Roger VonOech. A proper credit or footnote would be nice.
If there were a biography of Dave Winer, I would read it. I might not like it all that much, but I would certainly read it and probably garner some great insight from it.
I don't hate recruiters. There are a few really great ones and a whole lot of really bad ones. I don't fault them for trying to make a living, but I do recognize that the entire practice of placement fees is what drives these bad behaviors.
The recruiting/placement industry would vanish overnight if companies would stop paying placement fees to any recruiter who manages to locate and then recruit good talent.