Welcome

Wacky Enterprises provides free internet publishing for the greater common good. Clients pay for their domain(s) (currently $15 per domain per year), and we take care of the rest.

Market value for our services runs into the thousands of dollars (based on what political candidates pay for their Web sites). We think there is too much power concentrated in too few hands in the realm of political Internet publishing, at least here in our home state of Oregon.

Professionals charging for their time is no problem, but when political candidates are dropping $2000 on sites that can be built in a couple hours and hosted at almost no cost, somebody’s skimming some serious profit. Things are seriously out of wack.

Ergo, Wacky Enterprises: a small attempt to start putting things back into wack.

Currently, publishing is by invitation only. For more information, please send e-mail to steve <at> rawley <dot> org.

Services

Our front-to-back services include:

  • Web site planning and consulting,
  • domain registration,
  • DNS configuration,
  • configuration of up to five POP3 or IMAP e-mail accounts on your domain (user@yourdomain.tld) and unlimited e-mail forwarding,
  • Web site set-up, layout and rudimentary graphic design (we’re happy to work with your graphic artist),
  • copy writing and editing assistance,
  • training and documentation to help clients with limited technical skills manage their own sites with easy-to-use tools,
  • search engine optimization (SEO) to help drive traffic to your site,
  • and transparent back-end administration, including nightly backups, software updates and statistics monitoring.

Free is a very good price…

Why do we do it? For the common good. And because we can.

But how can we give it away?

The biggest cost in Internet publishing is human time. The other things are either cheap (hardware, bandwidth) or free (software). Since we have professional expertise in writing, copy editing and enterprise software engineering, running a little Web publishing empire is refreshingly simple. And since we want to give back to society, sharing our time, skills and digital printing press with others working for social justice just seems natural.

In other words: This is how we give.

What’s the catch?

Hey, you get what you pay for! No seriously, it’s a hell of a deal, but you don’t get:

  • a redundant connection to the Internet (our connection goes down, your site goes down)
  • a whole ton of bandwidth (your site gets crazy international, you start paying for bandwidth)
  • backup power generation (PGE blows a circuit, your site goes down)

History

For the nerds

Our servers run 100% free, open source software, and are powered by wind energy (at least that’s what PGE tells us).

We’re a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)/WordPress shop. Our software stack includes the GNU/Linux operating system and tools (openSUSE and Debian distributions), the Apache Web server with PHP, the MySQL database, and the WordPress publishing platform. We’ve also run or messed around with phpBB, Plone, Confluence, and Drupal. We can hack C/C++, Java, Smalltalk, Perl, PHP, Bash, etc., not to mention CSS, JavaScript, XHTML, etc., so there’s not much in these software packages that we can’t fix, modify or extend to suit our clients’ needs.

We do not test on animals. In fact, we barely test at all. If you find something broken, let us know, and we’ll see about fixing it.