Website Perestroika

by Rick Stratton, founder

Typically, your CMS controls every part of your site.  It's part publishing system, part file manager.  Every page is created within the CMS.  Every file, script, image, etc runs through your CMS. 

It's a "Totalitarian Regime" of CMSes. 

A Totalitarian Regime is one that "recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible".  That sounds about right, doesn't it?

Well, consider Feed.Us your Lech Walesa... we're here to help generate a little perestroika.

Recently I was reminded of this fact when I helped create a site for a  new Feed.Us customer. 

The site is just basic CSS/XHTML and PHP, hosted on Godaddy, and:

Feed.Us for the blog content.  Comments from Disqus. The links come out of Delicious.  Ads from Google. "Share" options from Addthis.  Email from Google Apps. Contact form from Wufoo.  Images from Flickr.

Competition = Freedom

If there's some sort of issue with this site, any one of the pieces can be easily swapped out. 

Commenting system not working right? Switch it over to IntenseDebate.  The ad system can be quickly copied and pasted out of there.  Even Feed.Us can be quickly/easily removed - replace it with straight text or find another provider.

The Godaddy hosting? We can pack that site up and have it on a new host in about 10 minutes. There is no special software that we're using on Godaddy that isn't available on every other cheap hosting provider out there.

There are no more ties that bind. No more getting stuck into a crappy software system just cause it's hard to leave.

It's Perestroika!

Update... Wufoo is actually currently down.  The contact form that's on this site (on the right) and the site I describe above are both not working.  I can quickly replace it with FormAssembly.com if they don't fix Wufoo.