Blog - thoughts and ramblings...

Pricing on value instead of hours

Submitted by neil on Fri, 01/13/2012 - 09:27

A number of years ago I took a client named Alex out to lunch. As is typical, I asked how we could be better. He paused for a moment; thought and delivered the best advice I've ever received from that question. "I don't care about your hours" was his response. He went on to explain how we always estimated in hours how long the work would take. While he appreciated having a metric to measure value. He didn't really have a frame of reference to truly validate the reference. If he knew what it took to build websites, he wouldn't be seeking companies like ours to do it for him.

2012 Trends to Watch

Submitted by neil on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 09:25

Content Management Systems will socialize. - Up until now, most companies had their social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) segregated from their corporate website. Mostly this was because the tools were separate. For content management systems, like Drupal, this year will focus a great deal more on social content integrated with their normal web content. Specifically, look to integrate streams of content from Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or other social media channels that matter to your industry.

Office Hours Start Today...

Submitted by neil on Thu, 12/01/2011 - 08:52

Remember when your college professors would offer "Office Hours?" Specific days and times where you could drop-in and ask questions to your heart's content. Sure, you could ask questions after most any class or send an email (ok, it wasn't quite email for me) anytime but knowing that she'd be there in-person with nothing better to do than help you was reassuring. Well, we've brought office hours to Lucidus.

Why is Lucidus leaving Keene, New Hampshire? (Spoiler: We're Not...Not Even Close)

Submitted by neil on Thu, 08/11/2011 - 17:19

There have been more than a few surprised people around the region when I told them I'm moving my family to Northern Virginia (this month).

The first question..."Is Lucidus moving out of Keene?" I always reassure..."Lucidus was founded here and will remain a vital part of Keene and the Monadnock Region. We're not going anywhere." We've just committed to taking physical space with our partner, Communicators Group, at 9 Church Street. We actually have plans to expand our presence regionally.

Standing Up Daily - How Lucidus uses Daily SCRUM meetings for Drupal development

Submitted by neil on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 09:32

Two years ago this month, Lucidus started down the path of applying SCRUM to our development process. At the time, we were struggling mightily with a number of goals that we talked about a LOT and never seemed to make progress on. One particular question we always wrestled with was "Where are we on each project?"

Espresso Code Editor - How to open a directory from the command line (like TextMate)

Submitted by neil on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 08:01

We had a number of interesting conversations last night at the Keene (NH) Drupal User Group meeting and one of them centered around text editors. Recently, I've been playing with Espresso and REALLY liking it. However, a great question that Damien McKenna asked was if you could open a directory in Espresso like you do in TextMate. For example, let's say I wanted to open an entire folder, e.g. httpdocs, to appear like a project. I would enter the following in Terminal:

Drupal Geek: Using Drush to Pull Latest Production Website Back to a Development Environment

Submitted by neil on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 09:08

In this blog, I'll describe how to leverage drush, the DRUpal SHell, to pull a production system back to a development environment. Couple of assumptions here:

Microsoft Acquiring Skype: Fears of History Repeating Itself

Submitted by neil on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 09:16

The news came out this morning that Microsoft had, in fact, agreed to purchase Skype for $8.5B. I suppose that I've known all along that Skype would not go on as-is forever. My hope was that it would go IPO and remain committed and focused to what it does really well. With the news this morning, I'm filled with more than a bit of trepidation. You see we've gone through this once before with a product called Groove.

Saving the planet (with ColdFusion) is just part of the job

Submitted by neil on Mon, 05/02/2011 - 16:53

So we've been the primary web partner for the Student Conservation Association (SCA) since just after we spun off of IniNet back in late 2002. For me, working with them has been a point of great pride. It resonates with me on two fronts...1) they are mission driven and 2) they work with young people to help prepare them for life. They put (mostly) college interns and high school volunteers out into parks across the country to "serve the land." That is, they do things to make the parks better and they've been doing it since 1957.