Website

Things related to my own website.

Thoughts on CMS

One thing that drives me mad is how every content management system (CMS) out there is now based around the concept of blogging, and yet most companies and simple website designs are still reliant on fairly basic static pages. As web developers, we go out and find the most advanced *blogging* tool there is because it’s stable, consistent, and easy to setup (read: WordPress…almost), and then watch as the client sits back and doesn’t actually post content in a blog-centric fashion.

This doesn’t surprise me. After all, if they hired me to implement their website, they probably don’t have too much information that needs to be critically shared on a regular basis, and unlike bloggers who are seeking to provide fresh content, get readers, and thus ad revenue; they don’t have much incentive to publish. (Look at me!)

As I worked away on fbcedmonton.ca which I setup with textpattern a while back, I started to drive myself insane realizing that in order to create a static page, you need to:

  1. Create an article (blog post)
  2. Create a “page,” or essentially a layout method that is statically selecting that post ID.
  3. Create a “section” or area for which the page will be served using a specific themeset.
  4. Create the link to the section within the navigation if an automatic nav generation tag is not in place.
Of course, if I just wanted to post an item to the blog it would have been one simple step. But really, our church doesn’t use its blogging features and the website would have been much better implemented in something more static-page oriented. Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough, but it seems like a simple static-page CMS is no longer existent in favour of blog blog blog.
Which is fine. I guess I’ll stick to my php includes and raw code. 
But hey if you know of something simple out there, let me know. 

Whiteboard of the Week – 1

This Tuesday I bought a whiteboard from Kevin after a long voyage to different Superstores on both of our parts. (Random thought: wouldn’t it be nice to have a stupidity checker? I just wrote that sentence wondering if it made any sense whatsoever and then just kept typing waiting for a squiggly line to indicate to me whether I was being moronic or not…)

Point is I have a whiteboard carefully mounted on my wall. I’ve found that having a large amount of space to just draw, sketch, take notes, and create is quite useful and mind opening. My plan is to not erase the whiteboard until I’ve taken a picture of it, and posted it here under the “Whiteboard of the Week” category. Who knows, things might just get interesting.

So what’s in this week’s whiteboard?

  • Front and center is the wintersaurus, the prehistoric creature that will be showing up on your lawn soon if you live towards in the Northernly parts like I do. As you can see there are some tobogganists enjoying their day on his back. (No, not tobacconists)
  • Up to we have The Running Man. (No not this one.) This running man started out as just a continuous run, but his persistence was interrupted, and thus it is two arrows. This came to me one morning (probably Wednesday…hump day) when I was feeling rather lethargic and realized that I just had to keep going and eventually the end of the week would come.
  • Parachute Man is symbolic of the excellent Coldplay album “Parachutes”. He became tridimensional a few days after I drew him
  • Finally our last creature is a bit of a complexity even to me, one which I can only describe as…Windshield Cat. I mean really, what else do you see in that illustration besides that?
So that’s it for this week’s Whiteboard of the Week. Hopefully I can keep this going longer than all the other things I strive to make “regular.”
P.S. In the writing of this email WordPress seems to have a bug in WebKit that locks up the UI when you try to add a link to text. I would like to thank the dude who forced a draft-save before activating any further UI, because it’s saved my bacon at least thrice.

Return of the Classic Gallery

So as I’ve been trying out my new site for a while, I’ve realized that eliminating the jolephoto gallery wasn’t the best idea. Photos are still best viewed in a gallery, not in blog posts. The gallery never really “left” because jole.ca/gallery was still there and it still the place I upload my photos before they’re processed into WordPress.

So the link is back in there, if you’re here for the first time and just want to browse, that’s still the best way, and if you want to get more information, there’s always the blog post about each image. (Heck maybe I can put in a link-back at some point…we’ll see.)

Happy browsing!

Updated Layout

So as you may have noticed, the website has been redesigned quite a bit.

Basically after spending way too much time on joleblog/flickrer I decided I would be better off using some well built existing software so that every time I wanted to post something, it didn’t turn into a 4 hour impromptu coding session.

Not totally true really, I’m staying with flickrer for photo management, and then will have Wp-o-matic import them from a custom RSS feeder, where I can then add more details to the photos, but they will still stay in the gallery for legacy and for simpler importing of exif etc. 

I know it’s a bit pathetic. My insistence on using server-lite tools is now a thing of the past. WordPress is the biggest server hog in the world, but the fact is, I’m running on Kevin’s underused enterprise class Dell PowerEdge anyway, so what’s the point in holding back? 

So I now have some nice tagging and category features, and the posts from my blog and the gallery came over very nicely thanks to WordPress’ new RSS import feature.

With any luck, the improved management features will mean more posts and more reliable updates. Oh, and I’m hoping to get a Nikon D40 soon!

I got it! Some shots are below.

 

UPDATE: So it looks like someone is stealing the classes off my RSS feeds on it’s way into WordPress, so the lightbox is a bit messed at the moment. Fix soon?

Downtime Notice

 

Well it’s been a good run folks. For over 345 days, the good old Dell Dimension 2200 has been whirring away in the basement of AHTR Headquarters, without a single glitch of downtime, but sadly all things must come to an end.

 

No, jole.ca is most definitely not going offline, just a brief time of downtime as AHTR reorganizes it’s power and network structure, and while we’re at it, replace jServer with a bit more modern equipment. (A Dell Optiplex to be precise, and more specs to follow as I receive more information)

 

Unfortunately, my efforts to convince Trent to delay the upgrade for a few weeks to that I can at least celebrate the one year anniversary of crappy dell desktop uptime, but he’s a bit of a bogon and refuses to wait, so I guess I’ll have to just have to suck it up and be happy with being 20 days short of my goal. (Dang!)

 

Moving forward, I can only hope that the new machine will be snappier and perhaps perform database querries a bit faster, but I kind of doubt there will be any noticeable difference.

 

I’ve considered a few options during this time, notably hosting myself on my own connection, or hosting with another company like dreamhost. Of course, dreamhost is no reliability expert, and if you really want reliable hosting you’re going to have to pay for it. As for running it out of my house, I can sort of picture myself subsidizing the Internet bill to get a better connection into the house, but it doesn’t quite compare to what I’m paying for colocation services right now, so I guess I’ll put up with the yearly cable management sprees from trent.

 

The whole ordeal is going down at 10PM Saturday at last check-in, and with any luck he wont’ fall asleep while doing it and we will be back online by the morning!

New Website!

So yeah I guess I forgot to blog about this.

  • New Domain: I finally registered jole.ca and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. For all those Canadians out there who want to register one, beware that you'll have to face CIRA first, this ridiculous Canadian organization that manages all the dot ca's. I encourage the idea of having Canada manage it's own TLDs but they seriously need to resolve some issues.

First of all they don't put any glue on any of the NS servers, so you can't use your own domain to create your nameservers. Plus they limit your number of NSs to 2. I would prefer having 3 NSs at least, but they don't allow that. Sigh…at least once you have a dot-ca you have the option of becoming a member of CIRA, so I suppose I could recommend this to the board, but what a pain.

  • New Website Design: In celebration of the new domain, I redesigned the site a little bit. I know I just updated it, but the whole misaligned left bar and everything was really annoying me. I designed this all myself using the awesome fluid guide from [CSS Tinderbox http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/] It's fully fluid, and I pulled a few tricks to get that header image to be fully scaleable and still look great. In case you haven't noticed, it rotates through a few different pictures of mine.

Also I changed the directory structure up a bit. I now have everything in folders. (I would use mod_rewrite but I'm way too lazy to figure it out.) For anything jole just add a slash. All the feeds and stuff should still work in legacy fashion but you may have to update a bookmark or two (if anybody bookmarks my site…)

And of course if you're sitll using jole.ahtr.net it will still work, but make the move to jole.ca!

Hope everybody's having a great summer!

Uptime Celebration

So, I know I haven't actually had 93 days of 100% uptime. There have been a few glitches where I accidentally disabled the network interfaces over SSH and some issues beyond my control. (DNS, Internet, which are now much more in my control. I now serve as backup DNS for the AHTR domain.)

So the website hasn't been "Up" per se for the past 93 days, but my crappy little Dell Dimension 2200 has been jetting along it's little fans (and they sure are small) for 93 day straight.

My goal is to keep running throughout the summer, and hopefully make it 120 days. Either way, 93 days is more than any other server at AHTR can claim.

So in celebration, I'm giving away 2 dozen Apple iPhones 8GB.

Just kidding. They aren't even being sold in Canada yet, and I barely have enough money to buy one for myself, but seriously guys, this thing is awesome. If you haven't watched the tour, do so now, you will be even more amazed.

So happy uptime everyone. 2 days until I'm done school, and 6 days until iPhone!

Downtime

We'll be going offline for a few hours to resolve some long standing routing issues on our setup. We should be back before the morning.

New Website!

Ok so I just went for it.

As you can see, new design. I basically just went down to OWD and looked at some nice designs and picked one, implemented it, and in the meantime upgraded joleblog to .8 "blu" for my backend.

I also wanted to have my twitter status and my del.icio.us on there, so now I do.

Enjoy!

Big Organisation Website Planning

Right now I'm working on two different websites for two different organizations, both non-businesses.

It's fascinating to me how slow going these processes are. Unlike a business or enterprise, organizations are like student drivers shoulder-checking three times at each lane change and covering the break on stale green lights. As I work with the administration with these organizations, I begin to see their perspective on things.

Mostly I think of things as easy, quick, simple to do things. Build a website? I can have you up and running in a couple hours, a day for something more elaborate. But the legal, privacy, and representation are all stumbling blocks.

It's too bad really. If they were to think more in terms of "Let's build a nice website, and we'll make it better as we go along" there would be progression instead of just working and having nothing and then having everything, rather than having something and getting to everything.

Perhaps I'm too Web 2.0. Let's make things BETA. Let's release it now and squash bugs later. Maybe I need to rethink things.

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