Tales of dedide the templater
Being convinced that sites need to be built with a cms leads to some teeth grinding and hair pulling. All my study of usability focuses on making the site a joy to use with great navigation, content and flow. But how to make this worthy goal match up with the impositions and restrictions of the CMS? So many CMS and so many impositions and restrictions to work around.
As noted elsewhere in this blog, I have given up working with Joomla (and family) templates as the pain does not justify the gain for most clients I have come across. I have also worked with both CMSMadeSimple and WordPress 
, where you are presented with an editor to rewrite bits and pieces.
But by far the easiest CMS from the point of view of templating is my current favourite li’l CMS, LightNEasy.
Morality
- doing the right thing because you believe in justice and mercy – not because of some religious bullshit someone has brainwashed you with, or some political contingency that really is a cover up for greed and powerlust.
Just watched Foyle’s War in which a “dirty tricks unit” was developed and demanded that Foyle lie for them. What makes Foyle’s War so interesting for me, besides the acting and high production values, is that it presents the problem of values in a high stress situation. The show constantly examines the notion that purposes of the war must be served at all times!?! Of course WWII was a declared state of war, unlike the current conflicts. We are at war with the planet that births us and at war with justice in this socalled time of peace and prosperity. Suckage.
Nothing to do with software and sites, just a bit of high level ranting
Out of the wilderness
A newish year ( only half over) and an updated skin on the blog (plus the latest engine under the hood to mix my metaphors most tragically), so I thought I should take it out for spin with a new post.
Lots going on off-blog as usual – physical house stuff, job re-alignment, celebrating 10 years of marriage without murder (ha ha!), bodily degradation – you know, all the usual stuff.
Plans (not promises) to write another in the templating tales series, reflections on the life of a web manager, reviews of software, sites and scripts – the usual suspects. Well, we will see – not sure it makes any difference to the viagra/cialis mobs but maybe, just maybe I have an actual reader out there.
Happy upcoming solstice.
Taking on responsibility
I have just updated WordPress, the software which powers this blog (generous term for this sporadic raving). The old oil change and grease. I haven’t been teaching this year so I don’t know why it popped into my head to think about how I would convince my students to learn from my experience. I have been doing the rounds of updates and patches on Moodle and Joomla plues lesser know gems such as Trellis HelpDesk.
Sigh, the good ideas when I would just look around for what I thought was the best script for a job. Now I think about
- published vulnerabilities and exploits
- the longevity of the developer/company producing the script
- the clues offered by their website about who they are and how they do business
- the comments on their forums ( if they exist)
- comments about them on other people’s forums and blogs
- how easy the code is to modify if that is allowable and needed
- what its interface looks like
- what php configurations it will work with
- if it costs, is it in the client’s budget
Sigh indeed.
Then there are plug-ins which demand the same attention. If you have several clients with very different needs, you need to keep oversight over maybe 20 or 30 scripts – so it ends up being a full-time occupation.
Yep, it needs the triple sigh.
Second post this year – WOW!
I have thought to myself this year – I should blog about that or the other that or even stuff, but I finally put fingertips to keyboard to talk about consolidation.
Brashly believing that a knowledge of HTML and a bit of programming would be all I needed, I launched into my web career in 1996 by showing my personal web site (complete with animated gifs, full width text in TImes Roman and pale blue solid background) to my boss and convincing her that was some potential here for online learning. Little did I know ….
Wahoo – a new record
for the longest time without a blog post. Do I rule at slackness or what?
What, really. I have been working three jobs for 4 managers over the last 6 months, a 6 day a week gig with little in the way of holidays.
But things might be a bit different for a while as I have one less job to worry about for a few months – that is after I have to fly interstate to give a seminar to 5 people and then jet off to Hawaii for a week of hard leisure. Anyway enough of my whining about how I finance this blog………………
System utilities I use when I am working – which mostly means researching web servcies, doing site maintenance and editing on the server.
Templating tales
Long hiatus but living up to my rep as a spasmodic blogger. I have been hard at work on lotsa projects but as I live in a nominally christian country, I now have a few days off from everything. So I thought I would write a bit about sNews and my templating adventures.
Changing my mind
In my last post, I talked about how I replaced Joomla with WebSite Baker. This has in turn been turfed out in favour of CMS Made Simple. WebSite Baker was giving me a load of grief with respect to scripted uploads being owned by nobody on Apache and all the hassles that entails. CMS Made Simple was unfamiliar to me but once I took the plunge, I found it fairly easy to deal with. I particularly like the templating flexibility. And it seems to have an active developer community producing quality plug-ins – a must nowdays when even though a CMS might be robust, it can have some rubbishy plug-ins.
More lives than Beric Dondarrion
but maybe a longer time between death and rising through the ashes. If you don’t know the reference, think repeat offender Lazarus.
I have been busy with paid work for which I am thankful and unpaid work soothes my soul, but I never quite forget my bloginess. So on with the show…
Click to continue…
My brain hurts
Too much information and too many ways of storing it. Yesterday, I was ordering an item over the net and I needed a record of a previous transaction in order to qualify for the frequent buyer discount. This started a search (using Agent Ransack) of my hard discs (I have 6 partitions) as I couldn’t remember where the hell I stored the receipt. Some time later…..