• Baba Yetu
      • by Seriyu
      • posted on May 6, 2012, 7:23 a.m.
      • Got another landscape this month! And it's pretty rockin, looks kind've…. I dunno if airbrushed is the right term, but it certainly feels like it's right. Dreamlike, would be another good way to put it. Looks a lot like it was painted, as opposed to drawn, much like last month's image. Which may be the case, I didn't think to ask.


        Image used permission of lychi

        Thanks again for the permission Lychi! It's really a wonderful image.

        See you all next month!
      • MayTechUp: CMSes
      • by cogs
      • posted on May 6, 2012, 7:07 a.m.
      • Happy May! In the midst of change, as seems to be the norm presently, and not likely to settle down until July. As such progress remains slow for the time being, but plods along nonetheless. Since I haven't hit any particularly new technical hurdles in the website, I'll just talk a bit about a few frameworks I've used over the past year for the Clock, as well as a friend's website. These are just some broad considerations to take into account before putting together a website, and hinges on how much of the work you want to have done for you.

        Wordpress
        Why it's good
        Wordpress has gained its own category in terms of ease of setup and design. It is well maintained, has a crapload of plugins, and is the most widely used service for startup companies. I had the pleasure of playing around with it while setting up a blog for a friend's company, and it was exceedingly simple and fun. Since it is so widely deployed, there is a whole world of themes and plugins that can be obtained, and most of the time for free through a built-in interface. For a regularly updated site where you have a small team of people generating content, it's pretty much the best option. It runs on every operating system worth noting, and was painless to set up.

        Why it's bad
        In the event that you have a very specific layout or type of content in mind that doesn't fall into the blog category, you are more or less out of luck. You can generally coerce Wordpress into doing most reasonable layouts, but it will probably end up being you versus the system rather than you with the system, which is less than ideal.

        In the end
        Wordpress is pretty fantastic. I am still very much a novice at it, so I'm sure I'm missing a lot in both the pro and con sections, but overall it seems like a very solid choice for a website oriented at generating content a la a blog or webcomic. If you start trying to branch out from that, however, you will likely run into issues.

        MODX/CMSes
        Why it's good
        The majority of my friend's website is currently run through MODX and so I got a bit of exposure to that while updating their pages. The CMS solution seems to me like the happy medium between a very rigid format – like Wordpress – and a from-scratch website. It provides a lot in terms of plugins and graphical user interfaces, but still allows a reasonable amount of flexibility in design and how page templates are put together.

        Why it's bad
        For me as a programmer this solution is not a happy medium at all. You get the rigidity and hidden code of Wordpress, but without all the purpose-oriented design. Wordpress does blogs, very well, and it was designed with that in mind. As such it has a fantastic user interface geared at post creation and user management. MODX doesn't really have that same sense of intent, so when I have to work against it, and I do sometimes, I don't really know WHAT I'm working against. Fortunately my friend is using it mostly for a collection of static pages, which you can't really go wrong with, and to that end MODX does make putting things in the right boxes very straightforward, but I would never use it for any even mildly complicated project. I do not know how Drupal stacks up, and for someone less interested in the code than me it would probably be fine, but I'd just as soon put together a bunch of PHP pages if they were going to be static.

        In the end
        MODX is fine, but not really my cup of tea. While it is good for static pages, anything designed with such a loose purpose as a GUI-based CMS seems like it would only end up getting in the way of anything more complex. If you just want a page full of information, however, it's probably not a bad choice, since the fill-in-the-blank methodology makes setting up pages with good metadata fairly simple.

        Django/Frameworks
        Why it's good
        Obviously I use Django, so you know what choice I made out of all of these. For a programmer, using a framework such as Django or .NET is wonderful because it lets you deal with straight source – which may be easily version-controlled – but also takes care of a lot of the lower level aspects of webpage design like generating responses or verifying forms. It gives a ton of flexibility in terms of design and how the website is used, I have not at any point in time so far felt like I was fighting against the framework to accomplish some goal, only ever working with it or just generating my own solution.

        Why it's bad
        Using a framework represents a reasonably larger time commitment just to get something out the door. It has almost been a year since I've started honestly focusing on the website, and though a majority of that time was admittedly absorbed by a full time job, I still am only a little beyond a basic blog. If I had been using Wordpress I would have been getting more content out there more quickly, though it would not have been in the format I wanted. Also if you are not a programmer and do not want to become a programmer, this is not really an option for you.

        In the end
        A framework is a very solid choice for a programmer who is attempting to create something that does not follow a standard blog format, but if you are not trying to accomplish anything complex, would probably just end up being more time than it is worth.

        PHP/From scratch
        Why it's good
        Yes, I know there are PHP frameworks, but I'm just referring to how I started off this site. It was originally programmed in straight PHP using almost no libraries because I thought it would be a good learning experience, which it was. Going from scratch gives you as much flexibility as you could possibly ever want in designing a webpage.

        Why it is bad
        This is, by far, the most time-consuming option, because not only do you need to design your page, you also need to rehash all the common low-level operations that hundreds of people before you have gotten down to a science. This can be alleviated without a framework via libraries, and that will help a lot, and might make this bearable, but the way I was doing it was grueling.

        In the end
        All of that being said, I would recommend to every aspiring web programmer to try setting up a database-centric PHP page from scratch at least once just to see how it works. If you have a hyper-complex project that needs a lot of speed, you might be forced into this option, but otherwise I would probably say to steer clear.


        So that's a very broad overview, and each of those categories can be broken down a lot. .NET as a framework, for example, would force a Windows based operating system, which can incur its own costs and benefits, whereas a python-based framework like Django can more or less run on anything. There is also of course the open vs closed source camps, Python vs Ruby camps, everybody seems to have an opinion one way or the other, but in the end so long as you enjoy what you are working with that is what counts.

        Next month for our kind-of anniversary I think I'll go over what the actual purpose of this site is, so stay tuned! In the meantime Ser has found another beautiful landscape piece by the insanely talented Lychi! This piece appeals to me on so many levels, and I love the smatterings of red flowers throughout the coarse grass.

        -cogs