Information Technology

As I have mentioned in the past, besides this site I also run a site called "WebCMS Forum" [now defunct]. The forum is a place I started in hopes of bringing users of various content management systems (CMS) together for exciting discussion. While the number of users participating in actual dicussion have always been low, those people that are posting often write something that makes hosting this underused forum well worth my time.

This week I had a user, Anti, talk about frustrations with rapid changes currently happening with the content management system, Drupal. Don't get her wrong, she likes Drupal. However, for the first time in a long while, she is in need of taking a deep breath before absorbing all the new changes into her routine. At the forum she writes:

I just got done reading an interesting and important post by David Baron of Mozilla. Although his initial focus is on the Firefox 2 browser, he makes some valid points that easily carry over to lessons learned involving software development and general project management.

The post in focus from Mr. Baron is "New Theme, Old Problem" and as titled centers to some problems with the new Firefox theme. Mr. Baron states that he doesn't "really care one way or the other about most of the changes". But what does care about are the changes done to the tabs in the new theme. Mainly that the new tabs no longer blend well from the operating system it is running on. He likes the "old way" better where:

I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site:

I have two Ping-O-Matic related questions that I cannot find answers too. Maybe someone can help me find the answer to these two burning questions:

1. Why is Ping-O-Matic so popular for pinging the blog search engines?
2. Is anyone else bothered when they see that the blog at Ping-O-Matic has not been updated since April of 2006?

By no means am I saying anything bad about Ping-O-Matic. I just find it curious that Web applications such as Wordpress and Drupal by default point to Ping-O-Matic. Why not point your CMS to alternative ping services such as Pingoat or Blog Flux?

I don't care who you are. I don't care how much education or how little education you have. If your profession is in information technology (IT), you and I share the same exact thoughts, questions, and even dread toward this particular topic. The topic is user surveys.

Over the past several years, I have had a number of people ask me for advice on how to get their own Web site online.  I've been very cautious in the advice I've given.  I simply didn't have the resources available to really get them where they needed to go and stay there.  You would think with more than 20 years of computer experience, helping the government manage their Web pages the past  ten years, and having my own Website would be enough to start my own Internet business.  However, someone who wants to put their business online needs much more than just a single computer geek can provide.  They need 24-hour user support, they need various options in Internet services as their business grows, and most importantly they need to have online security.

Our family recently went on a mini-vacation a couple weeks ago.  We spent a few days at Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side).  The weather was initially warm so we were able to dine outside and walk the tourist areas.  This is my fourth time in Canada and I'm always amazed just how much more "relaxed" everyone seems.  On the third day it rained and we were pretty soaked during our visit to Marine land.  Karen likes to see the Dolphins and more importantly, Logan does too.  We had a blast despite being wet. 
 

Last week we moved bryansplace.com to a new hosting company. You likely noticed the new look. For the most part, consider the site still under construction. After taking a look at several Content Mangement Systems (CMS), I've settled on Drupal. Once I install a few more modules and tweak the code a bit I think I'll be happy with the results. At least happy enough to go to bed at a decent hour.

I have not written too much about technology or IT related issues. In part, this is due to spending most of my work day dealing with IT problems. Shoud not that be enough?

However, increasingly I am finding the need to be more creative outside work in applying what I know. At work I have been working quite a bit with the Mozilla products, Thunderbird and Firefox. Thunderbird is an e-mail client and Firefox is a browser. I was the team leader for deploying the Thunderbird e-mail client in my organization's region. This was not too much of a stretch since our previous official client was the Netscape 4.7 suite. For those that don't know, Firefox and Thunderbirds roots are with Netscape.