Spent a lot of time over the last few days looking into open source cms solutions. Frankly it looks like Drupal, Zope or Joomla. Even more frankly it looks like as much as I have the desire to get familiar with at least one of these (probably Joomla as of the moment) I have absolutely no need for it with the Something Else site, and so it’s not worth taking up the hard-drive of this (awful) pc or the hosting server. Something to look into as and when I start on the next site. Ditto php for the above.
What has been very useful though, is jQuery, which is a free java-script framework that I only got around to downloading this evening, but is already clearly about to be very useful, If only for being quietly exciting. The possibilities are clearly endless, and you can quite see why it’s popular.
Google analytics started returning results earlier, which is the first time I’ve had it do so to a live site rather than a test beta, lots of incredibly brief visits from Germany. Which is nice. I expect entirely artificial though. Still, it’s nice to know that someone/thing other than me is looking.
Managed to solve the background-color problems with the a:hover, which were due to what, in retrospect were obvious mistakes in the cascading of the css. The current solution is still relatively ugly, and the ability to set different a:hover css properties to text or image links without using what are frankly needless divs would be nice. As would a way to use text pop-ups for image links, although I suspect that the problems with this are a lot more to do with the intrinsic ugliness of the current solution to the above problem than any specific fault. As of right now, it works. Just. I may use a per-tem java-script solution for a) functionality and b) adding jQuery in a useful setting.
So the plan to learn ruby has sort of gone by the wayside. One of the major problems is that I have no specific problem that I need to solve using RoR. Which makes the learning a very abstract process. In the course of flicking through part of a bunch of tutorials though, I have begun to see the possibilities of what you could possibly do with the thing. Although have not actually managed to install properly. The install instructions are all either horribly vague or are assuming a level of technical competence that is frankly beyond me.
Facebook continues to plague my email inbox with alerts including those from people I have absolutely no desire to think about. Which is nice. Just about beginning to see the attraction. Although still in quite a dubious, gruff sort of way.
NewsGator on the other hand, looks to be very, very useful. All sorts of useful little extras, the ability to email the contents of a feed to any email address using a pop-up box rather than transferring the link to an email client is very useful, although it does require you to remember email addresses, and will cut down on ‘replyability’. Still very nice for just firing off the odd link.
Basecamp meanwhile looks to be a fantastically useful program, and if only I had any collaborators, would be even more useful. In any case, using it to manage the label will be a useful exercise methinks.
ma.gnolia seems to be a very good bookmarking site although it does somewhat seem to go very very slow a lot of the time, and also to crash firefox when I have more than one tab open. However already it seems to be full of relatively reasonable/interesting people, and the best quality links I’ve found in the last week have all come from here. In comparison Digg looks like complete banality.
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