Nov 2005
Favorite web management software (CMS)
28/11/05 04:40
While not having tried every brand of web site
management software there are a few that I find to be
my favorites.
Postnuke offers a secure and feature rich Content Management System but I have also found it to be a little difficult to administer and write templates for. That being said it has met my needs and I use it frequently.
WordPress is a great and simple blogging tool. Mix that with the possibility to email in your blog articles I like it, especially for its simplicty. There are however some areas that can get a little complex but there has always been a solution.
OSCommerce is a very dynamic E-Commerce solution but it also has a slow moving codebase with most interesting things happening in the Contributions/ add-ons. Very flexible.
phpBB is, overall the best solution. Easy to understand help forums, clean install and easy to understand administrative interface. Then again it doe not try to offer as many features as these other web site management tools and focuses exclusively on being a forums/ bulletin board type information solution.
Finally, more and more people are trying to get me to use Joomla (a recent spinoff from Mambo). While it looks nice from the adminitrative side and is the easiest to use for installing add-on solutions with, I am still too new to it to give much feedback. However, I do like what I see.
- Postnuke: Content Management System
- WordPress: blogging
- OSCommerce: E-commerce
- PHPBB: bulletin board/ forums
- and maybe soon Joomla: Content Management system
Postnuke offers a secure and feature rich Content Management System but I have also found it to be a little difficult to administer and write templates for. That being said it has met my needs and I use it frequently.
WordPress is a great and simple blogging tool. Mix that with the possibility to email in your blog articles I like it, especially for its simplicty. There are however some areas that can get a little complex but there has always been a solution.
OSCommerce is a very dynamic E-Commerce solution but it also has a slow moving codebase with most interesting things happening in the Contributions/ add-ons. Very flexible.
phpBB is, overall the best solution. Easy to understand help forums, clean install and easy to understand administrative interface. Then again it doe not try to offer as many features as these other web site management tools and focuses exclusively on being a forums/ bulletin board type information solution.
Finally, more and more people are trying to get me to use Joomla (a recent spinoff from Mambo). While it looks nice from the adminitrative side and is the easiest to use for installing add-on solutions with, I am still too new to it to give much feedback. However, I do like what I see.
Make quick photo contact sheets in XP
27/11/05 19:51 Filed in: Graphics
When my father-in-law gives me these CD's he bought
while traveling and said he wanted to see the photos
that were on them. I thought it would be no problem
and happily agreed. To my dismay there turned out to
be nearly 2000 photos in various folders and I was at
a loss.
I remembered that with Windows XP there was a way to select a photo and then use the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP but I could not get it to work on the folders I had chosen. Everytime I clicked on a folder the list of wizard tasks on the left never offered the print tasks.
So, finally, I discover that a folder can be identified as a "Picture" folder by right clicking on the folder, choosing customize and then selecting "Pictures" or "Photo Album".
However the trick is to do this to the folder above the folder where the photos are. This means that if the photos are in /home/photosnew/printme you need to make the "photosnew" a "Picture" folder. Then you can select one or more other folders inside of it and see the print picture wizard.
Once that was done I selected all of the folders and used the printing wizard to make a contact sheet for all 2000 photos. It came to about 63 pages (35 photos per page) but it looked good and all of the photos had their file names on them.
Note, the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP did not search deep into my folders. For example, some photos were in /home/photosnew/printme/originals and I was in the photosnew directory when I selected the other folders (2 levels higher). I had to move the photos from /originals to /printme and then everything went fine.
I remembered that with Windows XP there was a way to select a photo and then use the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP but I could not get it to work on the folders I had chosen. Everytime I clicked on a folder the list of wizard tasks on the left never offered the print tasks.
So, finally, I discover that a folder can be identified as a "Picture" folder by right clicking on the folder, choosing customize and then selecting "Pictures" or "Photo Album".
However the trick is to do this to the folder above the folder where the photos are. This means that if the photos are in /home/photosnew/printme you need to make the "photosnew" a "Picture" folder. Then you can select one or more other folders inside of it and see the print picture wizard.
Once that was done I selected all of the folders and used the printing wizard to make a contact sheet for all 2000 photos. It came to about 63 pages (35 photos per page) but it looked good and all of the photos had their file names on them.
Note, the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP did not search deep into my folders. For example, some photos were in /home/photosnew/printme/originals and I was in the photosnew directory when I selected the other folders (2 levels higher). I had to move the photos from /originals to /printme and then everything went fine.
Creating a MS Word index
20/11/05 06:39 Filed in: Microsoft
Creating a MS Word index with a word frequency list.
Free Windows optimization tools
18/11/05 15:21 Filed in: Microsoft
Free tools for defragmenting, autologin, directory
size, page file defragmentation and more.