Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category
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).
Posted in General, Open Source | 4 Comments »
Nov
23
2007
at 12:09pm
Up until just over a year ago I had really only ever used Windows. I’d encountered Mac in passing but hadn’t actually used it. Why? Pure ambivalence. I didn’t feel the need to try other operating systems. And let’s face it, OSX isn’t exactly easy to acquire for the average PC user. Buy a new computer just to try a diffent OS? Not happening. I had a vague awareness of Linux but I assumed it was just for super-geeks.
Was I ever missing out! I’ve ben using OSX for over a month now at my new job. Although I wouldn’t say I’m enamored with it I do appreciate many differences from Windows. Liam (my husband) encouraged me to swtich to linux at home (when I had my old computer last year) and I haven’t looked back. Just this week I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop at work (and put Windows in virtualization) without much trouble at all. Any problems are always a quick Ubuntu Forums search away. I’ve always been big on customization so Linux is a great choice for me.
As an avid computer user and web professional it’s been a great experience to have a better understanding of how other operating systems work. Can you imagine only ever using Inernet Explorer? Of course not! So why are you satistfied with the default operating system that came with your computer?
I’m finding that OSX + Ubuntu is a great combination for web design. OSX for graphics, multimedia, and Dreamweaver. Ubunutu for file management and development tasks (one of the reasons why I wanted a Linux laptop is because I find the file manager in OSX to be really limiting). Of course, it helps that right now my Mac is hooked up to the nice big monitors 
That may change…
Come think of it, the lack of diversity in operating systems is really kind of sad. I don’t mean that alternatives aren’t available — they are. But the general computer using masses have very little awareness of them. Can you imagine if everyone drove the same kind of car? Or bought the same kind of DVD player? With almost any product used by regular people you can think of a wealth of alternatives. Consumers have choice. With operating systems, they don’t take advantage of the choices available. But you can’t really blame the average consumer, because the choice really isn’t available. Ever try to purchase a PC with no operating system or even an operating system other than windows? Generally not available (unless you know where to look and even then it’s difficult).
Posted in Open Source, Software | 7 Comments »
