Web Wizardry

Notes from the Chief Wizard of Liberty.me
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  • David Veksler

Case study in content management system selection: Liberty.me vs FEE.org Mar 28, 2016

In my previous post, I talked about the process of building a website for FEE.org using the Umbraco CMS. In this post, I will discuss why I chose Umbraco for this project. WordPress, Umbraco, or Custom? Background: Most web developers who were around before the explosion of modern content management applications have built one themselves. I built my first CMS using Classic ASP and Access around 2002 for a university newspaper. In 2004, I designed a new CMS for Mises.org and evolved it through the latest Microsoft technologies for just over 10 years.  (More on this project here.) It was a great learning...

By David Veksler Vote6 0

Essential tools for managing software projects Mar 27, 2016

Running software projects from concept to production requires much more than jumping into writing code. My most recent large project was to build a CMS for FEE.org.  Making this project a success in just three months required several key processes and tools.  Let's review the high-level process I used and the tools that made it possible: Development Process Overview Here is a high level overview of the implementation process: Interview stakeholders - understand their workflow and goals for the new site Perform in-depth site survey - build a sitemap to understand site structure Document types/page fields - survey all fields (properties) used on each page, think about...

By David Veksler Vote5 0

Six productivity best practices for software development leaders Mar 26, 2016

In the dozen years I've worked in the tech industry, I've balanced working as a small cog in large enterprises and working as a an independent IT consultant, building and running software for organizations like the Mises Institute, Liberty.me and the Foundation for Economic Education. One of my biggest challenges as an independent consultant has been time and task management. It's essential to track the list of priorities and the time I spend on each project. Here are six strategies I use for time and task management in my projects: 1: Make setting priorities the first thing you do, and write down tasks for...

By David Veksler Vote5 1

Liberty News Feed Dec 30, 2014

Liberty News is an aggregate news stream from over 50 liberty-related publications and organizations and links submitted by our members. Subscribe by RSS, email or add the widget to your web site: Enter your email address:Delivered by FeedBurner Subscribe in a reader Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: Powered by FeedBurner

By David Veksler Vote10 0

Liberty Links Bookmarklet Jun 9, 2014

The Liberty links Bookmarklet is a magical shortcut which you drag into your browser's Bookmarks Bar. Then, whenever you want to submit the current page as a Liberty Links story, just click on it. Then just click "Publish Link." Try it now: Drag this link to your browser's bookmarks bar: Submit to Liberty links

By David Veksler Vote18 4

Set a custom logo for your Publishing Site Jun 3, 2014

While you can't yet set a separate image from your profile for your publishing site, you can use this CSS hack to override the default image.  In the "Customize Publishing Site" settings, add this to the "Footer HTML."  Replace the image url with yours. <style> .avatar-box { background-image: url(//liberty.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/liberty.me-bird-logo-white.png); background-size: 100% 100%;}.avatar {display: none;} </style>

By David Veksler Vote1 0

Liberty.me Feeds, Podcasts, and Email Subscriptions Jun 3, 2014

The Liberty.me team is working hard on more ways to share our content with the world.  You can of course browse Liberty.me on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone, as Liberty.me scales automatically to fit on a mobile screen. But what if you want Liberty.me to come to you, instead of having to visit the site?  What if you want to get an email alert when a new book or guide is published?  What if you want new interviews and classes to auto-magically appear on your iPhone?  It's actually pretty easy to do with our RSS feeds & podcasts. Below is a...

By David Veksler Vote12 8

Liberty.me Publishing Site Secrets, Episode 1 May 19, 2014

The development team at Liberty.me is working very hard to make your site a publishing powerhouse, and we have a ton of tips and trickys to make your publishing site more awesome. Monetize your site, add social widgets, tracking codes, email subscriptions, and more.

By David Veksler Vote26 14

Turbo boost Liberty.me: Optimize your images with these simple tools May 11, 2014

Look at these two images:   They look identical, right?  Yet one of them is just 1/7th the size of the other – 109 KBs for the PNG and 15 KBs for the JPG. Why does this matter?  The Liberty.me homepage is over 2 megabytes in size, and most of that is images: While the development team is working hard to make our back-end perform faster, our speed is still limited by the size of the images uploaded.   We can make it faster by using a few simple tools. We suggest you run them on every image you upload...

By David Veksler Vote15 1

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