First it was catatonic withdrawal. Then it was catatonic withdrawal with video games. Then catatonic withdrawal with computers, then catatonic withdrawal with obsessive html tinkering, and then the first Freedom Center website was launched. Our earliest version was I believe on Tripod, then we got a Frankenstein site incorporating pmachine, a lot of badly formed html, and the occasional javascript bell and whistle that I put together from scratch.

Now Freedom Center has now switched to Drupal, an open-source content management system that you'll be hearing a lot about as more and more activist and nonprofit -- and even huge corporate clients -- adopt it. Open source, free software is a geek assault on the competitive corporate approach of dinosaurs like Micro$oft, based instead on sharing, opennesss, and collaboration. Drupal cost us nothing to download and install, other than dozens of hours of do-it-yourself learning on my part, and scores of volunteer coders chatting away at 3am on IRC helped get the bugs under control. The bottom line is that the site structure and design, and of course the content, are all the same as it was before. But Freedom Center activists are going to have a much easier time contributing to the site and editing content. And if we decide to change the design or architecture around in the future, it is going to be very simple compared to the previous site.

Thanks to the developer team at Icarus Project for their help in getting my Drupal skills up to speed. I worked as project manager on the Icarus migration to Drupal, and all my learning on that project translated directly over to this one. And please feel free to email me with any feedback or comments to will(at)freedom-center(dot)org. Unlike our last site, Drupal is very customizable, and I need your ideas on how to improve things or add features.

If you're an organizer with Freedom Center and have some info you want up on the site, just let me know and I will set you up with a username and password. And if you are feeling nostalgic for the old site, you can find the old homepage here: http://www.freedom-center.org/indexOLDHOMEPAGE.php