brain tags Je Maintiendrai

Linkdump: CMS

• Big Medium I still have to try how to make templates, but this looks like the most usable CMS for club sites;
• Plone Watch out! Steep learning curve;
• CMS Directory Overview of Free Systems;
• Coranto The new NewsPro;
• Drupal Community plumbing;
• Open Source CMS Try it before you install;
• mezzoblue, Wanted: CMS Guess I’m not the only one searching for this;
• eZ Publish They mention the use of their product as webshop, corporate website, news site, intranet, extranet, forum, picture gallery, personal site andweblog;
• Mamboserver People say the next release will be able to create valid XHTML.

[Update 2004.01.12]: Added some more links

RIP BlogShares

Eight months ago I discovered BlogShares, a fantasy blog shares market. During these months I have spend my bored moments trying to convert my initial $500 into a fortune by trading virtual stocks. As far as I now, my account passed $90.000.000 this week, so I was really close to the ‘magical’ 100 million limit.

But I won’t reach that limit, since BlogShares is closed. Seyed, the creator and administrator of this game cannot support it anymore; the database crashed and won’t be restored anymore.

Game over.

Pixies on tour

A lot of people come here looking for information on The Pixies, so I better give those people what they want.

The big news is that my favourite band is going to come to Europe in 2004!!! Rock Werchter confirmed this week that they have contracted my favourite band. I really hope that the irresponsibles of the Benicassim festival have their eye on the pixies as well, so I can see them close to home.

[Update 2004.03.03]: For a complete tour schedule, have a look at Pixies 2004 Tour Dates.

Big Medium for Fimcap

A while ago I mentioned Big Medium as a possible CMS for the Fimcap site. Today I finally had some time to lurk on the Support forum to find answers to some of my questions. Already after reading only a few messages I found out that Big Medium is not what I was looking for. :-(

• The user interface of the produced site has some hard-coded English texts; so internationalisation (I18L) is out of the question;
• Big Medium only supports two document levels: the category and the subcategory. Only with an ugly hack it is possible to go deeper. This is also by design, and won’t be solved in the near future;
• The text editing area is too much a ‘guestbook’ styled page and not enough a text processor. For use by people without any HTML knowledge it is absolutely necessary that the interface has the buttons to change the text properties (bold, italics, headers,…);
• There currently is no search feature; so I’ll have to implement a separate search script. It is a big pity that you can’t search directly in the BM database;
• To edit a document you’ll have to go to the management interface and look up the document. I would prefer to have an ‘Edit’ button right on the page if my machine contains the BM cookie with the appropriate rights;
• Another thing I miss is the plug-in flexibility of Movable Type. Since BM does not support plug-ins, I’ll have to wait for a new release to have extra functionality.

Most of the point mentioned above are on the roadmap, but in general I miss the flexibility of systems like MT.

Season's greetings

Christmas is already finished, but I still would like to wish everybody a very merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.

Even though we live far away from my family, we were able to spend Christmas with both families. On Christmas Eve we had a wonderful traditional Catalan family supper over here, and the day after we jumped in the airplane to celebrate a Dutch Christmas (I am not going to compare the two ways of celebrating; they do not differ that much and I like them both).

Anyway, as usual my time in Holland was way too short. I would have liked to spend more time with my family and friends and maybe visited some nice places together, but that will have to wait for my next visit. We have planned to go again with Easter, but maybe I will book another flight earlier.

Christmas decoration

I have a problem. Now that we are halfway in December, I would like to have some christmas decoration in our house. But I found out that my taste is completely different from the taste of the people her. The trend seems to be many colours and a lot of blinking lights. In other sitiations I don’t mind Blinkenlights but I prefer that the lights in my christmas tree —which of course is not plastic— do not blink and have one one colour: white. I also don’t want any decoration that plays music.

I guess I’ll just have to wait until I am in Holland again and do my shoppings for next year over there. Until that moment, our house will only have a little bit of Christmas decoration.

No time to write

It has been really quiet on this site; I just did not have the time to write.
I could have written about how we put a christmas tree in our house, and why we have a real tree and don’t want plastic.
I could have written about the fire my company had which destroyed the warehouse and covered the rest of the building with a black blanket. Now we have placed our support department in a small cabin in the garden.
I could have pointed you to some nice sites about web design or tell you some jokes.
I could have told you that BlogShares is up again.

Anyway, I hope I will have more time to write now.