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I posted a burb on TechLinks about iPhoneCTO.  I’m an editor over there and put together a review of the WebEx iPhone app.  Take a look and let me know what you think.

-Andrew

Put up a rather lengthy post on TechLinks about the maturing tool market for Web2.0 tools and especially ModelBaker.

http://www.techlinks.net/community/community-voices/Maturing-Tools-Signal-Maturing-Market.html

Many thanks to Jonathan Freeman for his excellent presentation at Atlanta PHP.

-Andrew

Just posted another entry over at TechLinks about Avoiding Distractions.  It sites the article

How distractible are you? The answer may lie in your working memory capacity

I may have to start reading this blog.  But right now I can’t be distracted.

-Andrew

I just posted a bit for TechLinks about my continuing disappointment with the the cable TV company.  I’m tempted to use Comcast for my Internet service, but I just can’t trust them.  Am I wrong here?

http://www.techlinks.net/community/community-voices/One-Step-Closer-To-Cutting-The-Cable..html

-Andrew

Last night I helped out at the Atlanta Web Entrepreneur’s meeting.  Unlike most meetings that are mostly networking and a presentation, this one was a hands-on workshop where the participants came away with a fully working website driven by WordPress and customized for their specific situation.  Mike Schinkel did a great job of pulling this together and my survey of the participants was very encouraging.  Everyone seemed to get a lot out of it.

While not every website is be patterned after a blog engine such as WordPress,  WordPress makes a good core starting point for many who just want an easy way to get periodic content up on the web without all the muss and fuss of building your own web pages with a tool like FrontPage or DreamWeaver.  WordPress not only allows you to add news-like content and a typical recent-first format, but also allows you to create pages of content that can be organized in whatever way you see fit.  You can create a website with a main news page an the typical “About Us”, “Products and Services”, and “Contact” pages or whatever else you need.  WordPress indeed also has a module system that lets you extend the core functionality to add such things as the ability to turn your website into a podcast by adding audio files.

WordPress is an open source project so if you’re inclined you can use it as the basis of whatever you needs my be given you want to dive into the code and start modifying it to your purpose.  However, if your needs start drifting to far off of what WordPress offers, you’ll  probably be better served by using a more generic CMS (Content Management System) as the basis for you site.

One that I ‘m involved in is a project called Drupal.  There are literally thousands of CMS’s available to choose from as evidenced by CMSMatrix, but Drupal fits the needs of a wll thought out core system that is very extensible and has an extremely active developer community.  The Atlanta Drupal Users Group is also a very valuable resource if you are considering  it for a project.  Unfortunately, with great power comes complexity and many users are put off by the learning curve of Drupal.  But once it’s concepts are understood, you can pull together a relatively complex site quickly.

Of course if a CMS system like Drupal doesn’t fit you needs and you need additional custom features, you can build a site with a programming framework like RubyOnRails or CakePHP.  These approaches are much closer to raw programming, but offer a certain leg-up on getting things created quickly and maintaining a structure to your site.  There are other frameworks available and if you’re language of choice is PHP, I’d recommend you attend one of the Atlanta PHP User’s Group meetings.

And then there is just raw programming.  While offering the ultimate in flexibility, you will also be creating a system that only a few people are familiar with and be effectively on your own as far as getting help and adding functionality.  Widespread changes will be difficult to implement and costly in term of time and rework.

Today, I look at all of these approaches as tools in my tool belt.  I usually start at the most complete tools for the problem and then work my way to the more customized approaches.  It’s really about adding your own special sauce without having to reinvent the wheel.

-Andrew

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I’ve been programming as a professional since 1989.  In that 20 years, I’ve seen the technology evolve so that things that used to be very difficult to do have become much easier to do.  As a result, I’ve shifted my skills to the next high-demand difficult to do area in order to keep ahead of the curve.  Remember when Multi-Media was all the rage?  It used to take a serious programmer to create something as simple as an animated graphic with synchronized sound and a background music track. Continue reading ‘A Case For Raising The Barrier?’ »