Archive for June, 2008

Joomla vs. Drupal vs. Custom CMS

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Lately, I have been felt the urge to better understand the buzz words of Joomla and Drupal. To me they seemed like almost a waste of time as I can build a custom CMS specific for the client’s needs.

During the past few days I have read some documentation on both of them, played around a bit, and have been rather impressed. I didn’t doubt the great functionality that they contained, but was more concerned with how easy it would be for me to create my own templates within them. A company does not want a generic theme applied to their company site, and thus my reason for tampering around with templates.

I found Drupal’s terminology, and ease-of-use very appealing, but overall Joomla seems to be more popular. I must confess I have briefly tried these two systems out, and am not a master of them.

Here are some points worth noting for each:

  • Joomla uses articles, while Drupal uses nodes
  • One installation of Joomla must be made for every site, where one Drupal installation can be used for many sites
  • Both have great documentation, and a great open source community
  • Both have a wealth of modules/add-ons freely available

In the end I will most likely remain using my Custom CMS code, as I understand it all and can make it bend to my will. The one thing I envy about these systems is its modularity, and how it would save the tedious tasks that bog down a busy programmer like me.

Posted in Web Programming | 1 Comment »

The Evolving Web Developer….

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

I have always had something in me that has driven me to learning as much as possible about computers and in particular the internet. I feel that is one reason why I love my job so much. There is a ton of variety, even though at times can be repetitive.

I really enjoyed my time at University as i got to learn a lot about the internet and how it works. It helped me break out of my small town setting and got me to see there is a huge market for this type of work.

With web development constantly evolving it is key to constantly be learning and have informative sites that you visit regularly. Below are some of mine:

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Firefox 3

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

As many of you are techies, you would probably have heard the buzz surrounding Firefox 3 the past couple days. In an attempt to break the record for the software downloaded the most times in a day, their server crashed and did not allow users to connect. Some of the new features include one-click bookmarking, smart location bar, password manager, and improved performance.

I challenge you as a web developer to considering switching to Firefox if you have not already. Firefox has great extensions such as ColorZilla, Firebug, Web Developer Extension, and much more. All these tools can aid your web development

Now you may say, the majority of users will use IE right? Well the key is to develop it in Firefox which forms its pages in a standard way and then check in the rest of the browsers and fix the css bugs in them.

I figure this is a good time to spit out some recent browser stats. As of April 2008 IE7 holds about 25% of the users, IE6 is still high at 29% (you can’t just drop this browser out of your development process), and Firefox has 39%.

The real key to web design is keep all browsers in mind. It might not look perfect in all of them, but at least fail GRACEFULLY!

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Search Engine Positioning

Friday, June 6th, 2008

This topic has come up quite frequently in the past couple projects I have worked on. The common question is usually asked “Can you guarantee that our company will be first on GOOGLE?” My answer always is that I can’t. There are far too many factors involved that I have no control over, but there are the few I do.

  • First off, code in a semantic way. Use h1 tags for the most important titles, h2 for the next important etc.. Don’t use an h5 just because its smaller. All these attributes can be changed later with a technology called CSS.
  • I have heard this many times “Content is King”. A lot of times we put way too much emphasis on how a site looks, instead of what we should put on it. You know what? Google does not index your graphics. It crawls through your site and grabs the text on your site.
  • Use the title tag appropriately. This is what actually shows up as your heading when your site is found on google. On the left should be your most specific keywords, such as the page name.
  • Avoid long dynamic urls such as index.php?page=mypage&section=mysection&prodID=5. Instead use your friend mod_rewrite to make your url more google friendly. http://brenelz.com/My-Page/My-Section/Widgets
  • Most importantly, design your site for a HUMAN, not for a search engine. People have tried to cheat the system for a long time now, and google notices and might even ban you. If you design your site with accessibility in mind, google will reward you in return

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Backups

Friday, June 6th, 2008

The other day I bought myself an external USB hard drive. I had wanted one for quite a while as with starting my business backups got a little more important.

I know many of you probably are thinking “Should I really backup my data?” OF COURSE YOU SHOULD!! You may think it is a pain doing it once a week, twice a week. One question you really have to ask yourself is how much data are you willing to lose.

How about a day’s worth of data? Well that’s not too bad, but a week’s worth, a MONTH!! If you have not gone through a massive crash, or hard drive failure; you need to learn the easy way and not the hard way.

It is very easy to backup as there is many automated solutions out there. This can even be done during your downtimes at like midnight. Windows even comes with free backup solutions, but there are other options like Norton Ghost as well as others.

I hope you will learn at some point in your career, that data is very important!

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