So what's all this about purpose-driven technology?

There's a lot to say about that, but I'll endeavor to be brief. First is the principle that technology and expertise should serve a higher purpose. And related to that is that we should support those who have contributed their time and energy for the common good.

Now obviously, one way to support these people who have given of themselves so freely would be to pay them some money. But another way to support them is to enjoy the fruits of their labor and to follow-up on their investment by contributing to their projects. On this page we list not only some incredibly useful open source projects that may well save you thousands of dollars but also a few enabling technologies that expedite and simplify things behind the scenes.

     This site was built on Refinery, a Ruby on Rails (RoR) content management system (CMS) that is '100% free and open source', 'supports Rails 3', is 'simple and easy to use', has a 'slick, clean user interface', is 'modular and extendable', has 'design flexibility', is 'multilingual', and has a 'vibrant and active community' of developers.

We really like Refinery and consider it to be the RoR CMS of choice. Apparently, we're not alone. Refinery is now ranked #1 for RoR CMS.

     Spree is an RoR ecommerce framework that we believe is the most robust and scalable 'shopping cart' software that exists in the entire Ruby on Rails multiverse. Railsdog, the crew who started Spree had learned a great many lessons from their work on the Substruct project (an older RoR ecommerce effort), and those lessons have been applied in Spree. Of these, one of the most significant is the impressively industrious and ever-growing developer community. If you're looking to do clicks & mortar, you'll want us to throw down an instance of Spree for you. Wrap it in a glossy design from our network of creative geniuses and away you go.

     Heroku is an application hosting environment that makes life easier. No more hardware obsolescence. No more disk failures. No more shared hosting security concerns, and no 'virtual server' fanciness either...we're past even that. No more outdated operating systems. No more firewall management. No more systems administration period. Double period. With Heroku we develop locally and simply push the application onto Heroku to deploy. Done. And if the site starts to get a lot of traffic, we just turn up the dynos and workers and kick back to let the hits roll in. No need to worry if you get slashdotted, your site will have all the resources it needs to make the most of this blessing that most folks on poorly scaling hosts are inclined to view as a curse.

     From the jquery.com front page: "jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript." 

We use jQuery to make your site look good and act more like a desktop application, fast.

     Sharing code with other developers is a key point in our development strategy.  More eyes on our code means tighter, cleaner, better code for you. In addition, because github is based on git, a fast and powerful SCM, your code will never be lost, and mistakes can be rolled back with very nearly the click of a button.

GIMP

{A write-up of GIMP and it's coolness goes here. Coming soon.}

Rails

{A write-up of Rails and it's coolness goes here. Coming soon.}

Ruby

{A write-up of Ruby and it's coolness goes here. Coming soon.}

Bash

The terminal is the center of the geek universe. This is where all of the sexiest stuff happens. Unless ye be born again...well...if I had to explain, you probably wouldn't understand. It's all best summed up in the phrase, 'Talk nerdy to me.'