Editorials
The Editorial section of the PLIA web site that provides commentary, opinions, insights, stories and events from a group of guest columnists who have a connection to the lake. Choose a columnist from the menu on the left. [The views and opinions of columnists are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the PLIA or its members.]
| August 2006 - Jeff Gurrier |
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| Written by Jeff Gurrier | |
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We are wrapping up our second month with our new hosting service, Siteground.com. I must say that they have provided excellent service to us. It is remarkable the breadth and quality of service that can be provided to an organization like ours for under $5 a month. This says a lot about the maturation of the internet, five years ago the PLIA could not have dreamed of hosting a web site with this level of complexity and capabilities. It would have been technically and financially way out of reach. The hosting is just one part of the equation. Our web site is built on a sophisticated content management system called Joomla that can be downloaded by anyone FOR FREE! Joomla is Open Source software (www.opensource.org), which means that it was written by a group of volunteers all over the world who collaborated together to write the software. All of the source programming code is published and people can offer to write new features or fix problems in the original code. A peer review group analyzes the submissions and decides whether the changes can be included or not. The Open Source software movement has grown significantly over the years and has contributed significantly to the explosion of the internet. Consider that 50% of all web servers on the internet are running Apache web server software. Apache is Open Source software. If everyone had to pay thousands of dollars to a big software company for the base web server software, I guarantee that the internet would not be what it is today. Our entire web site is built from software components that have been provided by the Open Source Software community. From the base web server software Apache, to Joomla, to the variety of Joomla add-ons we use including User Registration, Forums, Photo Gallery, File Download Repository, Mailing List Manager, etc., it is all free Open Source Software. Commercially available software with this level of capabilities can cost upwards of $20,000. Our web hosting company SiteGround boasts of hosting over 10,000 web sites using Joomla. I suspect very few of those web sites would exist if they had to pay for the web site development software. This community of volunteer Open Source developers has enabled small organizations like ours to spend our money directly improving our community and spend our time putting out educational and community building content. So, Pawtuckaway Lake sends out a big thank you to the Open Source Software community for making our web site possible! |
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