Django for non-programmers

Stumbling around the web this morning, I found this article about Django for Non-Programmers, which looks pretty amazing at first blush. The article describes what Django is and what it does better than the official website, which is humorous. I’d have to get it running on my own, which looks like it’s possible but not officially supported by my new hosting service. Here’s a simple “getting started” article as well.

More CMS Alternatives

Some additional CMS alternatives: there’s Simplelog, which looks like it might be as it sounds, and Textpattern, which sounds like it might be a contemporary of WordPress.

CMS resources

CMS Matrix is a handy feature search and comparison tool for CMS systems. Open Source CMS rates each one and offers a test drive for those who like to get under the hood before they buy. Looks like I might be going with Drupal.

Success And Failure.

I’ve got a lot of the templates set up in my local copy of Movable Type, and now that I’ve been immersed in it for a week, it’s making a lot more sense. I guess it didn’t help me at first using a year-old book geared for the previous version, but between that and the internet I’ve figured out quite a bit of this on my own. Stay tuned…

In other geek news, I reformatted a spare drive, loaded OS9, put RAM, a battery, and the hard drive back in the busted iMac, plugged it in, and…watched as the screen went dim, the power shut off, and a wisp of ozone-laced smoke wafted out of the grillework. Looks like the flyback transformer finally barfed, rendering it useless. Not that I need it anyway, but I’m always up for a challenge.

There’s not much else to tell—between work and freelance, I haven’t had much time to sit still. Jen, however, cooked me a roast chicken in her dutch oven last night and got me to stay on the couch for almost the whole duration of CSI.

Down With The Technology.

Progress is being made on the design front; I have a working, usable index page template in Movable Type running on my Powerbook’s webserver (where my test install of MT resides) and it’s been slowly coming together. I’m tweaking the fonts and coloring, and I’ve moved some stuff around. Next up is enabling and configuring the comment section (popup vs. inline?) and then wrassling with the Archive section. Finally, I’ll install some sideblogs for other content (the music and links sections). I’m excited.

Can somebody else out there with IE6 or 5 check my home page and tell me if the image shows up at all? Thanks! (My install of IE here at work is hopelessly buggy.)

This weekend looks like it’s going to be very barfy around here, so we may keep close to home and get things done around the house. I’d like to finish the painting job and put the baseboards back permanently, and actually get to work on the wiring in the back bedroom. I also got in touch with a friend’s wife who designs kitchens, in the hopes that we can get our disaster cleaned up before we’re in the family way. Note: the other night I pulled up about five square inches of the linoleum to expose a thin layer of plywood and green pre-war linoleum underneath. Under the green is pretty pine flooring, ready for sanding. No word yet on its condition….

Progress.

Progress. Let me know what you think of this here sketch for a new weblog. Anything broken? Out of alignment? on fire?

The End Times Are Upon Us.

Somebody busted out the Nerf darts at work today. For anybody who was employed by a certain alma mater of mine (or any dot-com, for that matter), this is a recognizable portent of doom.

<huddles under desk, shivering>

Update: It’s worse than I thought. Todd brought me one of the darts, which has the company name printed on the side for GDC. The timetable for Judgement has been moved forward six months.

The End Of An Era. Growing up on the outskirts of the New York City area, the local TV stations played many commercials aimed at that market. Besides the Broadway musical, Ritz Thrift Shop, and Potampkin Cadillac ads, there was the ever-present jingle for Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, accompanied by shots of goy vacationers skiing down shallow slopes, doing the overbite shuffle to Engelbert Humperdinck, and lounging in heart-shaped jacuzzis. This, apparently, was the height of luxury. It was to my dismay this morning to read that the whole place is up for auction, including those heart-shaped tubs. (If those tubs could only talk….yeccch.)

Upgrade. Yesterday I took advantage of the lull at work (about half the staff stayed home to take care of their kids) to install Movable Type on my Powerbook. Following a combination of these directions and the included instructions, I had the whole thing running in about ten minutes, with some minor glitches. I’d used the previous 2.X series a couple years ago, and found it easy to use, but the lure of inexpensive bandwidth has kept me decidedly low-tech. Looking around at some options, however, I think I’ve decided to invest in a secondary web address and migrate this log off the domain to a seperate location. This will allow for (finally!) the ease of online content addition, as opposed to hand-coding every log entry; a solution to requests for an RSS feed, a local comments database, a sideblog or two, and other goodies. I’m currently wrestling the CSS included with Movable Type and redesigning the layout, and when I have a clean working layout, I’ll pull the trigger and set up a new site. Suggestions for a new domain name, anyone?

Data Transfer.

Mike Lee writes a pretty good roundup of the reasons he’s going to sign up for TypePad’s new service. I too have been longing for some updates and enhancements to my log, which currently is powered by nothing other than BBedit and Samba. I’d like to add some basic functionality to the site, like a search feature, an automatic calendar, RSS feed, etc; in the long-term, I’d love to be able to simply edit from a browser and not be dependent on my Powerbook here to update. Plus, the new templates feature will essentially kick me into learning standards compliance and moving away from nested tables.

Additionally, Jen and I are slowly getting our wedding plans together, and instead of having all our stuff in two places, I’d love to be able to have multiple weblogs- one for the wedding stuff, and one for the house stuff. It would also be great to have guests (e.g. Jen, my sister) drop by and add stuff to my log, or just simply add comments. Jeez, the photo album feature alone would sell me on the service.

I guess the most daunting task is going to be how to get three years of archives into the new format.

Fonts and Blogs.

I found this informative link on OSX fonts via dominey this afternoon. Actually, I like this whole site—I’m putting it on my links page for daily reading.

I’ve given iBlog a shot this afternoon, attempting to see if it works well at publishing to a mounted volume (i.e., my webserver.) It does, but it writes ugly filenames and does a few things halfway well. I’m underimpressed.

Letdown.

I got the pictures back from the Scout guy, and they are not as good as I had hoped. There is some bubbling and rust over the passenger rear fender; the tailcap on that side is bashed pretty good, and there are dents over other parts of the body. I have some thinking to do about it this next week, while I’m off.

I also have a few ideas for an illustrated story that I want to attempt to begin; I’ve been waiting for a simple way to get some reference material, and now that I have a digital camera I want to start exploring the visual style.

More thoughts on the Bank Of America online billpay system:

1. Setting up recurring payments is a three, possibly four-step process; first, entering the payee information, then entering the payment information, and finally entering the recurring payment information. There is an entry page, a confirmation page, and a review page. This could be shortened into two steps and handled in fewer screens—the importance of warning screens are not to be taken lightly, but there’s room for simplifying here.
2. The review screens are split apart into several different ares. This makes sense on one hand, but not having all the information in one area, preferably in a calendar format, is confusing and possibly misleading.
3. I would also like to see the payment information come with a ‘hold’ button, so that when people like me, with an intermmittent paycheck, have cash flow issues, we can hold a payment up to avoid overdraft fees.