Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Sep
08
2009
at 8:04pm
Well, actually, we didn’t really “choose” anything. Something was chosen for us in the form of a “donation” from OpenText of their web content management products to the university. I co-chaired the committee that was charged with investigating content management systems in the fall and winter 2008/2009. This “donation” was arranged completely outside of our committee. In fact, we didn’t even know it was happening until the deal was essentially done.
I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:
- Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
- “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
- Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”
There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source | 5 Comments »
May
29
2009
at 10:25pm
There was been a lot of controversy last week over Andy Clarke’s proposed Universal IE6 CSS. Most of the arguments against it seem to revolve around the level of IE 6 usage and clients’ needs to maintain their brand image. Valid points, in many cases.
However, as Zeldman notes:
No hammer fits all nails, and no solution, however elegant, will work for every situation. But if we’re open minded, Andy’s proposal may work in more situations than we at first suspect.
Posted in Browsers, Web Standards | 5 Comments »
Aug
29
2008
at 1:08pm
When I started my new job in October the computer that I had to use was a Power Mac G5. This wasn’t my choosing – the guy before me really liked macs and had the whole office switch over several years ago. I was allowed to get a new laptop as well, and chose a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and installed Ubuntu.
Until now the Mac has been my primary machine – home of email, web browsing, scheduling, and my main design activities. Why? Because that’s the way I set it up at first, before my laptop arrived. I used the laptop mainly for harder development activities, and file transfers (more on that later).
This week I finally decided to move to the Ubuntu machine for my primary activities. Why? Because I just don’t like OSX that much. It hinders my activities in some pretty significant ways.
Why I’m leaving Mac
Crap file management.The Finder doesn’t work for me. No location bar and no tree strucure side panel makes it difficult to navigate folders and move files around the way I want to.- Insufficient panels & customization. In Ubuntu I can have as many panels I want, can put all kinds of stuff on them, and can arrange them however I want. In OSX You just have the dock, and you can really only put applications or files on them, and you can’t even put in a separator to keep them organized.
- Various other annoyances. Such as:
- program menus are glued to the top of the screen on one monitor only, which detaches them from the window. This is especailly annoying when the program you’re using is on the second monitor.
- the date/time doesn’t open to a navigable calendar. I often use this to check dates in the past or future.
- you can’t see hidden files unless you run a command from the terminal to turn them on. Thus, hidden files are either always on or always off.
Why I’m keeping Mac
I’ll keep the Mac around for some tasks (I have a KVM switch set up so I can easily toggle between the two), including:
Those pesky .docx files. Correction: Open Office is now able to open .docx format. This must be new because when I tried last week it didn’t work.- Dreamweaver – until we get a CMS in place I still need to manage sites built with DW templates.
- Photoshop – because sometimes the Gimp isn’t enough.
Update 02/09: My apologies for the tone of this post. I didn’t mean for it to be inflamatory in any way. I actually had made some edits that were accidentally lost (how, I don’t know!). Sorry about that!
Update 03/09: Comments on this post are now moderated.
Posted in Open Source | 66 Comments »
Jul
11
2008
at 9:11am
Have you ever wanted an easier way to install Wordpress themes and pugins? If you have ssh access to your website you can install them directly on the sever with a few simple commands. No more downloading to your computer, extracting the zip file, and uploading again. This also works really well with Drupal Modules or any other script you need to download from another site.
(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)
- SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
- open a terminal
- type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
- agree to any host authenticity messages
- enter your password at the prompt
- Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:
cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
- Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
- Type in
wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
- Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
- Unzip the file by entering
unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar -xvzf theplugin.tar.gz.
Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.
Posted in Software, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
May
11
2008
at 11:13am
The much celebrated Wordpress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.
The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.
Read more…
Posted in Design, Open Source, Software, Usability | 10 Comments »
Jan
13
2008
at 12:50pm
Finally, after many months of planning we’ve converted The Webmaster Forums from vBulletin to Drupal! Liam wrote a good explaination of why we made this choice in his article, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. In short, we felt that vBulletin was too cluttered, too difficult to work with, and was hurting our search rankings.
We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.
The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.
As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.
If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.
(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks 
Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).
Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.
Posted in General, Open Source | 4 Comments »
