Archive for January, 2010

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How Social Media Changed us


07 Jan

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Posted in Random, Raves, School | 1 Comment »

A few days ago, I wrote about Social Media, and got more comments than I expected, and it gave me a lot to think about and yes I do plan to respond to the comments and discuss social media more.  However, this article

How Social Media Has Changed Us was sent to me, and it brings to light a few things that I haven’t completely considered before.

The article was sent to me, by my good friend tengrrl, who very much has education on her brain, and always looks out for the best interests of me, and everyone else.  What the article discusses is the different aspects of social media in our world. The main part that I like, is that it shows that children that use social media, are writing and reading, and thus then more that we read and write, the better we understand literacy. In an age that we hear more about children using txt chat to write their papers, its awesome to see more positive aspects about literacy.

I hope to have more time to comment about this further, but if you are interested in the social media world as much as I am, it would be a good read to take a peak at.

Thank you again to tengrrl for sending me this link :)























Text Rental and Chegg


07 Jan

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Posted in Raves, Reviews | 3 Comments »

A friend was asking me about our text rental system at UWSP the other day, and started asking me questions about chegg, so I thought I’d take time and share a great experience that i had with them

I am blessed to attend a school that provides text rental as part of our tuition, which means that we have very few books that we have to purchase, as most of them are provided in form of rental, for free. Well, somewhat free, it’s included in the weird fees that they charge us, but that’s another story.  The main benefit to these rentals is that it saves us money, but also the environment.

Well, what if you attend a school that doesn’t provide text rental, or that you want to just read a book that your local library doesn’t have?  The solution came to me last year when I needed to buy a book that was quite expensive and I only needed it for a few weeks of a class.  The answer is Chegg.

Chegg is the online version of my local text rental system.  You look for the books that you need, and odds are the book is in their system.  It tells you the price to rent the book for different lengths of times, ranging from a few weeks to a few months.  The books ship promptly, either from chegg’s offices, or from the publisher or Amazon if it’s a newer book.  In my case, the book arrived two days after I ordered it, directly from Amazon.  The system is also great, because for each book that is rented, they plant a tree to help restock the rain forests.

When you are done with the books, you log back into Chegg’s system and tell them that you want to return the book, and they provide you with a shipping label that is prepaid, and you drop it off at a shipping point. Boom. You are done and don’t get charged anything more than the rental charge.

But what happens if I don’t like the book or it’s the wrong one? Chegg offers a 30 day no questions return policy where you get your entire rental price back.

The system honestly is one of the coolest and quickest options for a text or book rental system.  If you do have books that you no longer want that you have purchased, you can sell them to Chegg, which is a cool option.  They take into factors things such as how many classes might be using this book, the update frequencies and stuff like that, but still, it’s a cool system to take a peek at.

Do something green for the environment and that is also easy on the wallet, and check out this cool system for any books that you need for the upcoming terms.























Winter Project and Hosting


06 Jan

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Posted in Random, School | No Comments »

I have a few ideas of what I could do for our winter term project for WDMD 346, I’m thinking that I could do the portfolio, but considering that I can’t find all that much currently that I’d want to put into it, thanks to a timely failure of a thumb drive with my early works on it; I might consider updating a website for a chat network to be Drupal or Joomla.  It would be for my slow work in progress DevilsFreek.  Haven’t had a chance to update its website in ages, and it would be a good way to add the scalability of features that a more powerful CMS offers.   Otherwise I’m going to keep thinking of ideas for this project.  I have a few days to think and get ideas and feedback, so nothing too important to get set into stone right away.

If you can think of  any other ideas that meet these goals. ” Be a portfolio of your own work, offer substantive content and opportunities to interact around a common interest, or provide similar functionally for a non-Profit or other organization of your choosing”  Let me know.

For hosting, it is no surprise that I’ll host it on my current host, ServerBolt.  I’ve been with them for hosting for close to 3 years, and never had any issues.  Even with a hard drive that failed on the server last night (that, and my stupidity, caused my style sheet not to load correctly last night, sorry for anyone that got a really goofy looking site) the amount of downtime is perfect for school projects.  Also, the backup options that are provided and done automatically ensure no data loss.























CMS Revisited


06 Jan

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Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments »

To help compare with the other CMS systems, Professor Krause was kind enough to group together all of our files, normalize them and produce an updated matrix of how we feel as a class the main CMS systems did.   We did normalize a few of our results, mostly for the workflow control, and performance and scalability.   I still stand by our research from playing with it, both on a local install and the demo account on exPublish’s webpage that it is more sluggish than the others, but to each their own.

Click for a Larger View

From looking at the other groups results, it appears that one to take a peak at and play with would be Plone. However, since its written mostly in Python vs PHP there would be more of a learning curve at the start.

Its important to note, that not one single CMS is going to be perfect for everyone, and studying your needs and what you actually want to accomplish is important.  I’d recommend starting with a blank sheet of paper and writing the main aspects and features you want on your site. (If it’s new, start small and work your way up, most CMS’s features are scalable).

The global scale of CMS’s typically does put Joomla, Drupal and WordPress in the top three choices that are used as CMS.























CMS, What is it good for?


06 Jan

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Posted in Rants, Reviews | 2 Comments »

My winter class this year (WDMD 346) is on Content Management Systems (CMS).  What is a CMS you ask?  It is a system for taking the everyday tasks of managing a website and simplifying it into something that is more manageable for more users.   They are able to dynamically (create on the fly) create pages with content that you provide.  The main benefit is that you can have a static template file, and the content changes for every page, but you only have to update the template file once and it is applied globally to all files on the site that use the said template.

A vast range of CMS’s have existed for a long time, but a few have stood the test of time, and have proven to be more useful.   I have used a few CMS’s over time, mostly for blogging.  The CMS’s that I have used are GreyMatter, MovableType, WordPress (This site), Drupal, Joomla and phpnuke.

Because most of the sites that I manage are mostly static content, and a few blogs, the blogging suite of CMS’s have gotten more of my focus.  From my class work, I’ve used Drupal and Joomla.  Both are very powerful, but have more of a learning curve than I have had the time for.  Today in class, we took the time to compare a few CMS systems to another.   The new CMS that my group and I played with was ezPublish, which is known as the “The Content Management Ecosystem”.

Our first thoughts of the sites that were produced with ezPublish were that they looked nice, and had a professional feel to them.  However this is mostly just the templates that were used.  From exploring the administrative options and the backend of the sites, we started to become less and less impressed as time went on.  The Demo sites, including one that we locally installed, were sluggish, and the interface was just clunky.   Our task was to evaluate the CMS on a range of features and compare them to Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.

CMS Matrix

Click for a Larger view

(I’ll try to post an update with all of the CMS’s that the entire class looked it)

While the above picture shows our results, one thing to note, is that ezPublish seems to focus itself on the ecommerce side of things, and not as much of the pure content systems that the others do.  EzPublish works more as a media server, and Enterprise CMS system for intranets.  While the other systems can be used in these environments, this looks to be the area that ezPublish shines.

I still plan on sticking with WordPress for my blogging needs, as its interface and plug-ins associated with it, tend to work the best and the quickest.   For my other sites that aren’t a blog, I think that Drupal or Joomla might end up being a better choice. The scalability of adding more features with Joomla and Drupal seem to really catch my interest, and is something to keep looking into as time goes on.























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Corey's Rants

A Web Developer's rants, raves and randomness.