Month: March 2005

Introducing photoblog

My ‘Picture of the day’ projects has evolved yet again. It has been bothering me for some time now that single images that I take for that project don’t look very good when displayed in the album manner. Albums are good for collections of pictures, not for singles. It has been bugging me for some time and finally I found a solution.

I have wrote a tiny Perl script that displays all ‘Picture of the day’ images in the standard photoblog way. You’ll see just a single image per page. You can than click on the image to see the next one. There is also some EXIF data displayed. In case you get lost, or don’t like this new feature, you can also browse through the photo albums as you used to. There is a link from the photoblog page to do just that.

“Oh, and how do I find this photoblog thingy?” you may ask. Well, I have changed the old “Photos” link to point to the photoblog by default. Yup, it’s the one at the top of the page. Right.

Let the feedback begin…

Rolling missed

Sometimes I really hate my work. Now is one of those moments. While I am sitting here in the NOC, my son passed yet another milestone of his development – he rolled. Olga just phoned to tell me that Maxim was laying on his changing table when he rolled from back to his side even though he was wearing a size 2 Pampers. Damn it! Why did I have to miss it?

I am trying to reason myself with that he will be doing this sort of thing more and more over the next few days, but that doesn’t help much. All sorts of crazy thoughts are running through my head. Mostly they are of the nature: “If I missed his first rolling, how am I sure I won’t miss his first step, his first word, or whatever esle first thing he will be doing?”.

Which software to choose for blogging?

It has been a while since I looked at blogging software. I have been very satisfied with Nucleus CMS for the last year. One of the projects that I will be involved in the near future will envolve a blog-like content management system, so I decided to see what has changed in this area.

As many of your know, I am a strong supporter of Open Source Software. Open Source Software does not provide any solutions for certain types of problems, but content management needs are covered magically well. In fact, there are so many different open source content management systems, that there was a need for a special site that reviews, rates, and demonstrates all of them. This site exists and is indeed very helpful – opensourceCMS.com. If you need just a quick overview of what is available, consider CMS Ratings page.

Looking through the list of CMS – Blogs software, I get the selection of Nucleus CMS, Textpattern, pLog, Serendipity, b2evolution, bBlog, WordPress, BLOG:CMS, Simplog, and PHP-Update. This is a really good selection of tools. Now, which one do I want?

I am more than familiar with Nucleus CMS. It is very flexible, easy to use, and has a good deal of enhancements in the contrib area. I am missing a better WYSIWYG post editor, sub-categories for posts and multipaged posts. A better job could have been done with private and restricted posts. So far, there is no way to do it clearly. One can use drafts or post into different blogs. Still, this is a very good piece of software and can satisfy almost anyone’s needs.

BLOG:CMS is something I have used at some point too. This is basically the same thing as Nucleus CMS, but with a number of themes and plugins packaged and preconfigured to work smoothly. I have stopped using it because of the upgrade procedure, which is alsmost as violent as backup-remove-install-restore cycle. Not much fun when we you have few thousands of posts and a number of handmade customizations.

pLog is something I haven’t touched myself, but heard a few opinions. Alexander Mamchenkov and Vladimir Ivaschenko are both using pLog for their blogs. Both of them confirmed that pLog is a very low-functionality solution which requires a lot of work if you want to do anything advanced with your blog. And I do want to do something advanced with my blog.

Rest of the systems are totally new to me. So I decided to check them out. Thankfully, there is a demo installation for each one at opensourceCMS.com. I went through all of them, but only two really impressed me. These were b2evolution and WordPress.

With a quick overview that I gave both of these, they are very much alike. Both do provide things that I miss in Nucleus CMS (sub-categories, multipage posts, and better post editor). Both also have a tonne of other functionality that I didn’t have enough time looking through. So, if you are looking for a good blogging CMS, try either b2evolution or WordPress. These should provide any functionality you might be dreaming off.

Now that I have found something better I am thinking about migrating from Nucleus CMS, but the amount of work scares me though…

Let real parenting begin

My mother left Cyprus and went back to Moscow, Russia today. She stayed with us for one month, from 27th of February, which was exactly the day Olga and Maxim left the clinic. This means that today is the first time Olga and I are left to all parenting wonders alone. Noone will be helping us for some time now. In the clinic we had the assistance from all the trained personal. At home, my mother was doing lots of work and sharing the knowledge. Not any more though…

Two hours after I came home from the airport, Maxim started crying, looking around and demanding something. Someone. He was looking for grandma. I calmed him down with some tea and songs. It was enough for a mere half an hour. Than he started again. Three hours later he was growling and jumping at me like a mad dog. I couldn’t believe my eyes! He was as furius as an animal. I was almost afraid of him. Almost. That is because he doesn’t have any teeth yet.

Anyway, the fact is that Maxim is missing his grandma and there is nothing I can do about it. He is looking for her. He is crying. He is begging to bring her back. This is sad. But there is something which is even more sad – Maxim’s grandma is crying all over the place in Moscow. She is missing him already. I know that because she started it even before she left.

Sometimes I wish I knew some magic…