Category: Geekery

Content Management Systems

My experiments with SQLite have been on hold for the last week or so because Vicki signed me up to be on the web committee for the Browncroft Neighborhood Association. The current page is functional but not pretty, plus it’s hosted on an AOL member’s account. If I were to host it myself, they’d have gigabytes of space instead of the 2 megabytes they have now.

We’ve got a committee together, so the first thing I did was set up a mailing list for the web committee. After a week, though, not one member of the list has sent any messages to it except for me.

The second thing I did was register the domain BrowncroftNA.org and set up virtual hosting on my home server.

The third thing I did was spend some time at OpenSourceCMS.com trying out different Content Management Systems (CMS). One that caught my eye was ModX, which has a really nice AJAX-y administration interface. So I set it up on my server to experiment with. Obviously, I’m going to have to wait for the committee to decide on what content they want and where they want it, and that sort of thing. But I think a CMS looks like the way to go for the basic framework.

One thing I haven’t figured out how to do with this CMS is how to create role accounts that can upload files and link them to one particular web site – so, for example, the news letter editor can upload PDFs of the newsletters and link them from a news letter page. Or the History Committee can upload pictures and articles about the history of the neighborhood. Maybe I can do it, or maybe I’ll have to switch to a different CMS.

One thing that some CMS have, but this one doesn’t, is a web forum. I don’t like web forums much myself – I much prefer email lists. Some people like them though, so perhaps what I should look for is a web forum that can also email out posts to a mailing list as well as through an RSS feed. That way everybody can be happy.

The search continues.

Look at that counter click up!

Since I switched from MovableType to WordPress, my blog has gotten almost no spam, and almost all of it was caught by SpamKarma. In the past, I’ve gone months without any WordPress spam, and then suddenly a bunch of it for a day or two, and then none again. Since I upgraded to SpamKarma 2, it’s put a nifty little count of how many spams it had caught down there on the bottom of the blog page. It was up to about 7 this morning. As of right now, it’s up to 43. I suspect it will be higher by the time you read this. I’m hoping this is just another day or two spurt.

If I ran Apple…

…I’d do two things to improve the iTunes/iPod/ITMS experience:

  1. I’d license Pandora’s algorithm for suggesting similar music, because the suggestions that they’ve recently started showing in iTunes are not anywhere near as good as Pandora’s and
  2. I’d make the liner notes available to scroll through the way that Podcasts have information you can scroll through on the iPod. I’d especially like to see the lyrics.

We’ll call that a tie, shall we?

The controlled test turned out to not show the symptoms at all. So now the QA person is going to have to figure out what he did to get it into the state where he saw the problem. I suspect that the database wasn’t in the state he thought it was in, and the problem is going to devolve into another finger pointing exercise, this time between the other group (the guys who send us the playlists) and a third person in our group (the guy responsible for accepting those playlists and putting them in the database). That one won’t be nearly as much fun, because Tony (the guy responsible for accepting the playlists) doesn’t have anywhere near the ego that I do.