Friday, September 01, 2006
Life Is Funny? That Way
Categories: Life
I had been planning on this huge post about how my landlords decided to refinish their floor during a crunch time at work (the sound of a belt sander coming through the ceiling above your office is an amazingly loud thing). I also had plans to talk about how my family was here at the same time and how my younger brother's logical thought processes are something to behold. Then I was going to talk about how my plumbing backed up and resulted in sewer water coming out of my shower drain and spilling all over my bathroom floor. To finish it off I was going to mention the fact that my email was down for the entire week and I just noticed it yesterday.
Then someone asked me to pray for their father who is in a really bad way medically right now, and suddenly last week didn't seem so bad.
Posted by Jamie at 05:56 PM
(8) Comments • Entry Link
Friday, August 11, 2006
I Just Realized That Today Is My Birthday
Categories: Life
Do you know how I found out? A web forum I registered on ages ago emailed me a Happy Birthday message. How pathetic is that? :)
In honor of my 28th birthday on which I'm pretty sure I will not have a party, surprise or otherwise, I will quote Ze Frank from The Show:
A surprise party is where your friends and family lie to you to make you feel alone and unloved.
Then, when they throw you the party they would have thrown, regardless, you experience a sudden rush of emotion as your depressed self returns back to normal.
Some people think that life in general's like that.
They keep waiting for the party.
I call that: denial.
In reality I got birthday wishes from a number of my friends and family basically moments after the one from the web forum. Thanks guys. :) I appreciate it.
Posted by Jamie at 10:26 AM
(8) Comments • Entry Link
Monday, August 07, 2006
Oh Drupal How I Hate Thee
Categories: Technology
And why I think ExpressionEngine is the bomb.
I do web design and development for a living now. I used to do it just for fun. It is funny how your perspective on things changes when you do this stuff every day.
Now to qualify this. I'm going to beat up on Drupal. Drupal is currently very popular. I have built one site in Drupal. I have experience with a number of CMS type scripts, with MovableType, pMachine Pro, PHPNuke, and WordPress being some of the more well known ones I have dealt with in my time (besides Drupal and ExpressionEngine). But I'm not Mr. Genius Web Coder Extraordinaire. I don't know everything. I just think I do. So feel free to think I'm stupid or simply disagree. :)
When building sites anymore it is almost a given that you will be using some kind of CMS (Content Management System). The most ubiquitous CMS on the web right now is generically referred to as a blog. There are a quite a few different choices for a blog CMS. There are ones that are hosted and setup for you (Live Journal, Blogger) and those that you install and setup on your own host (WordPress, MovableType).
When building a site for a client that doesn't want a blog you typically go with a real CMS; something that isn't just for blogging. Some will tell you that WordPress is perfectly sufficient as full CMS. I think those people are insane.
Regardless people are instantly met with a very big decision. What CMS are they going to use? There are literally hundreds (probably thousands) of choices and they obviously can't all be equal. So you start looking for things to help you make a decision. Price often comes into play.
Some people want their CMS for free. Lately these people often end up with Drupal which, since it is Open Source Software, can be used for free. Free. Lovely word. Sadly free is typically anything but.
On the other hand there are CMS's that require you to pay for a license to use them in your site. The CMS I prefer is one of those. ExpressionEngine has a free Core version that doesn't cost a thing to use but if you want all of the fun stuff you have to pay. You don't have to pay as much as you do for some similarly capable commercial CMS's (in fact I think the price for EE is way more than reasonable) but you do still have to shell out those hard earned dollars.
Why do I use ExpressionEngine when there are perfectly good CMS's like Drupal around? And let me be clear, in many ways Drupal is a great CMS. It has some good stuff going for it. But in my view it isn't enough to have good ideas and powerful core features.
Let me explain.
Read More...
Posted by Jamie at 11:58 PM
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