I was having this conversation on Saturday...

I'm hanging with my new musical buddy George Kilby. He's decided to upgrade his website so we're doing a consult to get a feel for what direction we're going to move him in (pardon my grammar). He said something at one point about a friend of his who'd decided to totally forgo having their own website in favor of just managing their presence through Facebook and a couple of other social sites.

I'm kicking myself for not having a canned...

The open source website system for musical artists

It's so obvious when I say it out loud. (edit: that's not exactly the most succinct tagline though, so help me out.)

If you're just joining the party and you don't know what open source is, check this out. If we haven't met before, this is some more of my backstory over the last year or so.

Pre-ramble

Forgive me if you've read some of this here a hundred times. Part of my process is to refine repeatedly.

I'm a musician. I'm 32. My...

I realized about a year ago that nobody anywhere even had a clue, never mind a plan that saved what was worth saving about the music industry – the music part.

Guilty. Most of us reading this are. There were several entire generations that went by where it was a perfectly logical thing to associate money and music as somehow being comfortable companions if not downright synonymous. It was BIG business - not in the way that defense contracting is, but it was perfectly logical for a...

So, the 14 of you that still swing by here know my backstory. Sometime in 2003 I joined a band with a neglected website. At one of my first band meetings we discussed overhauling said website, since the majority of our fanbase was a grassroots kinda thing and most of our promotion happened via online channels like the Archive and YahooGroups, etc. Sometime in 2005 we still had that same website. I was at my parent's house in north Georgia when it occurred to me "hey, you know, you could...

What is open source? It can actually mean a variety of different things, but most simply it means free software that anyone can use as is or alter as they see fit for their particular needs. According to Wikipedia - "Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology." I think I fall into both camps, but being the pragmatic, methodological guy that I am I shall present that angle today.

When I first got into software and development a few years ago it was...

Quick bio - The difference between As in, the difference between your brain and your computers CPU. The difference between how you think and speak and interact, and how your computer does. The difference between languages, be they interpreted or compiled, object oriented or procedural. This first chapter will hopefully assist in the process of the first few days after the moment where it first occurs to you that you want to learn how to develop software, be they games or business or...

At least these guys get the clean thing. There's a raft of interesting content up there, and all you have to do is sign up on their page to get access to it all. "Inbound marketing" I believe the savvy would call it. Applause, please..

Here's a band with the resources to do something cooler than they are. Is it just me or is this front page totally overstuffed with info, rendering it almost impossible to glean the useful bits at a glance? Are the links at the top of the page really 2003 looking? Are there an obscene amount of links on the right border that take forever to load?

Or is it just me?

Edit: I count 16 banners of equal size and flashiness (90% of which point to the same merchandise page) on the right margin...

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters...

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters...

Ever heard of it? It stands for Software as a Service, and it's a little sector of the software/tech business that everyone is keeping an eye on right now. One of the leading vendors of this service right now is a company called SalesForce.com. My brother in law is actually their director of recruiting for the midwest region. What SaaS does is remove the need to buy software for your business. It moves the important stuff to the "cloud", which is another name for the internet, and...

So, if you're in a band and you don't have a website, you're not really a band, right? If you own a business and you don't have a website, your business doesn't really exist, right? If you ran a festival, could you see how you could get by without having a website?

The iPhone, and the mobile platform in general, is going to be the means by which info is spread, by which content is delivered, by which people are entertained and kept in the loop. The portable website, but better. Can we...

Okay, so this blog is gonna be really boring if I do it in chronological order. I want to make sure that my two readers so far have something to look forward to besides cleaning out my mental closet.

I had an idea for a business that would be really cool if someone started.

I'm in a band that gets virtually no love from the mainstream media, the major record labels, the world at large...Yet, we've been together for 8 years now. I've been in the band for 6. When I first joined the band...

To speak into the void.

So I've had this idea simmering on the front burner of my brain for several months now. But first, I should probably introduce myself, or do a bio, or something. Maybe this will take several parts, because I've never tried to write a bio, and I feel like I've done a good job living unconventionally with my first 30 years here...

I was born in ATL, Georgia, that is. No brothers or sisters. Great parents. Always totally behind me for some reason. I got pretty...