Oooooh this blog now powered by Wordpress 2.5
Well, so far the upgrade for my blog has been painless. Just followed the instructions and it worked!
My horse site, Tanbark Acres (which currently “steals” horse stories from this blog, is working too. And both sites are faster now!
What a relief.
As I mentioned a few posts ago, I almost do not care what is in 2.5, though the feedback on th eupgrade has been rally positive, so I am pleased about that. More importantly, now that 2.5 is here I can begin the work on converting Tanbark Acres over to using WordPress for the “stories” part of the site, as well as for managing static pages. The complex parts of Tanbark Acres will use custom programming – most of which I have finished (though it is not yet installed). When all that is done Tanbark Acres should be much more feature rich and flexible, and it will definitely have a new look. Of course the jury is out on whether or not the look will be something people like (I am gonig to try to use a WordPress theme, slightly modified).
Next week I will be traveling for business, so I figure I’ll have a lot of “sitting in the hotel room” time for doing this new development. Sinc eI haev my entire development platform on my laptop, it should be a breeze.
I must say, this web technology really is a lot of fun.
Looking forward to Wordpress 2.5
This blog uses Wordpress, and I am liking it fairly well. I spend enough time on things that are complicated, so having a simple blog engine is just fine for me. The Wordpress authors have a new release coming – version 2.5. It was supposed to be released March 10, but has been delayed and the latest news is that the new release comes out March 17. We’ll see.
I am looking forward to this release, but not for the reasons one may think. I actually am not quite sure what is in it. I just know it is a pretty big release so once it comes out, upgrading from an old version may be a chore. So I have decided to freeze everything with my blog until 2.5 gets here.
You see, I am planning to split out Accidental Essayist from Tanbark Acres. I have been simply having the Tanbark Acres site grab anything that is a “horse” category blog and place this in a news section. That is working fine except that for Tanbark Acres I would really like to take advantage of all the functionality Wordpress has to offer – better navigation through posts, polls, tags, static page maintenance, etc. And therefore I have decided to reconstruct Tanbark Acres on top of its own blog platform. That will be a fairly time consuming task. No need to do it now and then have to migrate it once 2.5 comes out.
And so I wait. But I am pretty excited about this little endeavor. It will be nice to have a true blog engine for TA, and it wil be nice to start using Accidental Essayist once again for just personal frivolity.
So many projects, so little time.
The world of Content Management Systems
As I sit here on a Sunday morning, coffee by my side and laptop firmly planted, I am doing some thinking and research about what tools to use for building the latest websites I am contracted to do.
Although I have decent programming and database chops, when I have a customer who needs something I am much more focused on the business problem than a sophisticated technical solution. In a website I want the client to be able to easily update information and to have flexibility. All wrapped up in a nice graphical design that can be easily changed if/when needed. Personally, I would much rather have an underlying engine that is highly configurable to give me these things, than writing a bunch of my own code from scratch.
CMS engines are good at what they do, but do not seem to be very customizable without writing (or using) lots of plugins/extensions. Well, I prefer not to have to use these if at all possible because I do not want to have to upgrade the damn things everytime the core code upgrades. So then the question becomes – what CMS’s are out there that are full featured, cheap, flexible, and have a lot included already? Well, there are LOTS of them, each with their own strengths or weaknesses. It all comes down to how you will be using them.
This blog uses WordPress. A couple of years ago when I decided to stat a blog – primarily for the purpose of simply learning about what a blog is and how it is put together – I decided on WordPress as my engine. Turns out that this was a good choice. Other engines have come and gone while WordPress is gathering steam. So, I’ll ride this pony for a while.
For the websites I am starting to develop for customers, I need something where there is basically one user – an admin. There are various pages, but some pages serve as, in essence, a product catalog where the products are grouped by category. Product information needs to have containers of attributes. For example, one product should be able to have its own set of photo galleries (preferably managed through something like flickr). its own posts, its own custom attributes (general info, size, weight, etc). So I am looking at how best to achieve this in WordPress. There are a couple of ways to skin the cat. I am still trying to figure out the best one.
“Tanbark Tales” is now coming from an online journal
After a bit of experimentation, we’ve succeeded in using an online journal entry (“blog”) facility for multiple websites. Read more
Merging Video with Computers, cont.
A while ago I mentioned the effort I was going through to try to capture the video signal from closed circuit TV in the foaling shed, and have this beam over the internet so I could check on the mares from afar. You can purchase an IP network camera to do this, but they are expensive and not durable enough for my tastes. So instead I purchased a computer TV tuner and TV signal beamer. There was a lot of experimentation and special encoding software needed, etc, but I did get it working. However, in the last setup to the camera at the farm, I just could not get the Tuner to capture the signal. There are reasons for that, but the bottom line is that I was using an old laptop as the web device and the laptop and tuner were not very compatible. The good news is that I was able to use the TV beamer to send a signal from the kitchen to mom and dad's bedroom so they could check on the mares at night without havng to get up and head to the kitchen.
Recently I saved enough money with the part time job to buy a new computer. Hooked the tuner and TV beamer to that and it works beautifully! The short story is that I can play satellite TV on my computer (up in the corner of the screen) while I plug away on other programming tasks. Sound is great and picture is lovely. Next year I'll hook up cameras at the new barn and tie it in to the system here over wireless LAN. Technology is really something nowadays.
