all posts relevant to ‘development’

yes, things look quite different. let me explain.

i’ve switched web hosting companies, which in itself should not make a marked difference in the site. but while i did this, i upgraded my site to the latest release candidate of Drupal, an Open Source website management system (they call it “community plumbing” and i think that suits it well).

so now i’m on Drupal 5.0 RC1, instead of Drupal 4.7.4. this is the default theme, “Garland” with a few little tweaks. i will be further updating the php code to fix a few pecadillos that i’ve observed, but other than that, i think the out-of-the-box experience with Drupal 5.0 RC1 has been fantastic.

mikeyboy.com has once again changed content management systems.

what does this mean? it depends who’s asking! for anyone who reads this (my god, why do you bother reading this?) anyway.

for a normal visitor to the site, you’ll notice things look a bit different, and the organizational structure is new.

hopefully this means the site will be easier to navigate. it also means, that’s it’s much easier for me to create new content — so i have one less excuse as to why i don’t do that more often.

for any geeks in the audience, i’ve switched from the mambo server content management system to the drupal framework.

why? various reasons.

why i left mambo:

fragmentation and disorganization.

this happens to a lot of open-source projects: they try to be everything to everybody, and turn out to be a big mess. the quality of the code is suffering under the burden of so many features crammed into the core product.

not easy to use.

it’s quite difficult for a single-owner website operator to just post new content using mambo. i wanted more of a blog; not to swim through administrative menus just to create a new content page.
if anyone wants to argue “well mambo CAN do that, silly!” i say: it was not intuitive, nor apparent after consulting the documentation. so if a feature cannot be utilized by an average user: it’s not there. don’t argue that a product can do things that only the products creators can find or decipher.

not web standards compliant, in the least.

the html output of mambo is horrific. like really nasty 1997-type stuff. nested tables, spacing hacks, horror show. not semantic, not logical. i would never write code like that, period. so why have it representing me underneath my personal website?

why i chose drupal:

“community plumbing” is their motto, and i like that.

you do the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting, and leave the window dressing (that is, what the end-user sees) to me. both design AND client-side code.

simpler, yet more robust user model.

create rights groups and let users do certain administrative tasks, or not.

integrated administration.

the admin functions are integrated into the main website once a user is authenticated. there’s no “admin site” and “public site.” this is especially useful for community sites where various users will have different levels of access. why maintain 2 disparate interfaces?

i could continue, but i think the reader gets my point.

i hope you enjoy the new mikeyboy.com as much as i (now) enjoy writing, designing, and administering it!

a few web dev books recommended to me by a friend. (i’m working on making the transition from CSS1 to CSS2.)

http://www.simplebits.com/publications/solutions/

http://www.simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/css-tdg/

love my blog notepad.

add to this a good article about pocket-PC compatible websites: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/pocket

i have a bit of work to do on this front. that right column just doesn’t play nicely with others when you shrink down.