Make Your Own Louis-CK-Style Video Distribution Site

Louis CK is probably the best standup performing today—and I say that as podcast-listening, special-re-watching, club-attending, die-hard fan of standup comedy. But CK is more than a comedian, he’s a director, writer, and producer (who edits his own show on his MacBook Pro) and recently he made big waves with both comedy nerds and tech nerds (I am ...

Media Temple Tuning Tips

Here’s a quick one for everyone else out there who’s a fan of Media Temple hosting.  To get the most out of your dedicated or virtual dedicated box running on MT’s 4.0 platform, check out Making it Better, a great article in MT’s community wiki.  This guide will show you how to upgrade to Plesk ...

How-To Guide for Podcasting

photo credit: billaday If you’re interested in creating a podcast like Surprisingly Free—the stellar tech-luminarie interview show hosted by my friend and colleague Jerry Brito—then Tate Watkins has the guide for you.  Watkins does a lot of the production work for Brito and has assembled his methodology in to a single-purpose Tumblr site modestly titled ...

An Analog Solution for Talking to Politicians

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media

Plugin Monday: Customize Your WordPress Site with Advanced Excerpt

photo credit: trekkyandy Oftentimes in working with WordPress I find that I don’t want things to be as automatic as they are by default. Or, more precisely, I want things to be automatic in a very custom way to fit a certain theme and design. An example of this is excerpts, this WordPress function annoyed ...

Accepting Online Payments

photo credit: kevindooley If you’re interested in accepting online payments, FreshBooks has a great series of posts that exhaustively evaluates the different payment gateway options available to small and large businesses alike. I should also note that FreshBooks is proving to be a great solutions for estimates, invoicing, and expense tracking at ReadyMadeWeb.  It’s a ...

11 Essentials of Writing a High-Quality RFP

photo credit: DeaPeaJay Requests for proposal for websites—or RFPs as they’re often called—can be difficult to write, especially for non-technical customers. So, I thought I’d draft a set of guidelines specifically geared toward non-profits working the public policy world—the core audience of ReadyMadeWeb.

How to Spend Next to Nothing on Your Non-Profit’s Web/IT Needs

After talking about tools like content management systems, databases, bulk emailers, measurement tools, web forms, and a bunch of other tools here on ReadyMadeWeb, it seemed like it was time to do an overview of these tools and outline how to run an entire organization using only ReadyMade tools.

Give Your PHP Code Even More Speed with eAccelerator

Many of today's best open-source CMS systems are written with PHP, an incredibly popular and powerful scripting language. PHP's power lies in its ability to dynamically generate pages, eliminating the need to code pages by hand in HTML. However, that same dynamism is one of the chief disadvantages of PHP because of the processor power needed to generate pages on the fly. Thankfully, that disadvantage can be easily mitigated by using caching programs like eAccelerator.