Best Tool for the Job

Homeowners

Finally! We're first time homeowners. After finding a house we really liked the last day of last year, one month later, we're ready to move in. It was a pretty crazy process--the way lenders pry into every detail of your life; one I'm not looking forward tor repeating anytime in the future, but hopefully that will all be forgotten with the new home. We move in tomorrow. Pictures here.

It's an old home--built in 1938 and needs work, but is very livable in it's current condition. We're love the neighborhood and all the character in the home. Tomorrow is going to be a very... very busy day :)

Marketability of Online-Only Talk Radio

I'm listening to Your Mac Life, a live radio show that is (as far as I know) only broadcast online. The show quality is great--it's entertaining, the audio is clear and crisp, and really, it's comparable if not better than a lot of what you hear on talk radio, both AM stations and morning shows. (Here in the US).

I'm not aware of any similar, web only, talk radio shows, but from all I can tell, they are probably making a profit on this. It seems like a feasible business model--they are targeting a very specific, tech-savvy group of listeners who most likely fall into a high income bracket. They appear to have quite a few sponsors on their site, and the commercials (there aren't many at this point) seem to be professionally done.

Lots of people are looking for a way to make money online, and I think that this is one of the few content delivery areas that has yet to be saturated.

I found their site from a link to the Pepsi iTunes giveaway superbowl ad. You can see it in it's entirety on their site now. Check out the ad. It's cool (Quicktime, a few Mb).

Best Tool for Online Genealogy

If you're interested in putting your family tree online, there's only one way to go--PhpGedView. Most genealogy programs will export to the common GEDCOM format and aside from a webserver that supports PHP, that's all you need. In fact, if you.re just getting started, you don't even need a GEDCOM file, you can create it from the web interface phpGedView provides.

The project is Open Source and has an active team of friendly developers headed by John Finlay. After the research I've done, it.s the only good way to graphically display your family tree online in a usable, dynamic format.

Complete OS X Application List

Ok, so this isn't the most exciting thing you might have seen this year, but here they are, all the programs in my applications folder on my G5 at work. I really think you can tell quite a bit about what type of computer user someone is by their applications, if not about what type of person they are in general. If you haven't figured it out already, click the image to see it full size.

Just today I found Iconverter and Pic2Icon, two very cool free programs for creating Icons from existing files. Another cool one to check out is ColorDesigner, a program for creating color schemes.

Best Open Source Content Management System

In keeping with the "best of" theme of this site, this entry is about the Open Source Content Management System that I believe to be the best all-around. WebGUI.

WebGUI is almost 100% template driven. When you go to a WebGUI site, you won't know it right away because it looks just like every other WebGUI site. It is easy to make the site look how you want without breaking the content engine or tweaking source code. There are other solutions available that are also template driven, but I have yet to find one that maintains the ease of use and customizability of WebGUI.

It is powerful, intuitive and development is continuous since the primary developer has created a business out of selling support and can afford to actually spend time developing and improving it. Since WebGUI is Open Source, it also benefits from a great community of developers who actively contribute code to the project.

It's written in Perl, it was somewhat of a challenge for me to install the first time, but one instance on the server can power multiple sites and upgrades are usually painless. For basic, community driven support, the forums on Plainblack.com are usually very friendly and helpful, if you need more advanced support, you can purchase it.

Once you install WebGUI, you should never have to open your FTP client to edit source files (whether you're changing the look-and-feel of your site or uploading content), templates or upload images--all this is available from the web based admin interface.

Another reason I really like WebGUI is that it provides a dozens of features "out of the box." It is billed as a development platform, but really, for most common (and not so common) features, you'll never have to write a line of code. It comes with forums, customizable forms, customizable user profile fields (which is actually why I originally started using it), user submission systems (which can do a variety of tasks like image galleries, web logs etc.), file managers, polls, content syndication and link lists to name a few.

WebGUI is not perfect--it's not the best at versioning and it does not come with eCommerce built in (but there is a great add-on that does this) and I'm sure there are other features here and there that it's lacking, but it is, after all, billed as a development platform and if you really needed advanced features, it shouldn't be too difficult for a Perl programmer to write them.

I personally have developed 6 WebGUI sites for paying clients in the past and in every case, they have been pleased with the power and ease of use of WebGUI. I personally can't say enough good about it.

WebGUI - is what a CMS was meant to be. It's not your typical Geeklog, PostNuke or Drupal, and don't get me wrong, those aren't bad, but for an all-purpose Content Management System, WebGUI cannot be beat.

The Vice of Reading

I just had the chance to read "The Vice of Reading," by Edith Wharton. It's an essay in which she takes the position that there are certain types of readers, which she calls "Mechanical Readers" that basically should not read and are harmful to literature in general. She contends that real readers, like musicians or other talented people, are born, not made. Mechanical readers are those for whom reading is a task--people who consciously make it a habit to read and who keep track of how much they have read. She explains four reasons that these types of people are harmful, the gravest of which is "the crime of luring creative talent into the ranks of mechanical production."

It's an interesting point of view. I don't think I agree with her opinion that a good reader can't be made--I think that with enough exposure and the right circumstances most people could become good readers. The essay has something of a condescending tone to it, but that does not mean that most of what she says is not true. What type of reader am I? I'm not really sure--which may in and of itself place me squarely in the mechanical side of things.

If you'd like to read this essay, you can find it here: The Vice of Reading, by Edith Wharton.