Last week, someone that goes by the name of Anti sent me an e-mail stating that she finally got a copy of the John K. Vandyk's and Matt Westgate's Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development. To my surprise she also congratulated me for being quoted on the inside front cover. Having a quote by me included in the book was a welcome surprise.
I just spent the day with my son hiking along the trails of a nearby state park. My son is only 3 1/2 so some of the the sights, sounds, and smells are still new to him. Those trails I've walked a hundred times also becomes new to me when I allow myself to see it all through his eyes. I left the cell phone in the car and the only modern tools we carried were our walking sticks which were found and left in the woods we traveled. It was a good day for both of us and the experience served as a reminder to me the value of taking a break from IT now and then.
For the rest of this summer I will be turning it down a notch on the number of posts that are placed on the "front page" here at CMSReport.com. You shouldn't notice a difference in quality, but I suspect some of you may miss the quantity of new posts. While we do schedule the time for when a post or excerpt is placed on the front page, by choice we do no automation when it comes to the placement of excerpts on the front pages. In other words, for an article to make the front page...I need to be sitting at the computer and that's not going to happen as often during the summer months.
If you really want to help, create an account today and start contributing your own CMS stories here at this site. Even suggestions for links to other articles is appreciated.
Interesting observation by Karl Rove as well as good commentary by Charles Cooper.
In an illuminating interview published in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker, White House political aide Karl Rove suggested that a nexus exists between the spread of technology and a centrist-conservative outlook on the world."There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture," Rove told the magazine. "One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people's principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand."
A couple weeks ago, I found on my doorstep Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1. The book was sent to me by the book's publisher, Packt Publishing, in hopes that I would review the book on the Joomla! content management system here at CMSReport.com. While I do not promise to review every book or Internet link that comes my way, I always appreciate the opportunity to do such reviews. In this case, I was eager to review the book since I have lost track of the new features introduced in version 1.5 since Joomla!
A new version of the blogging application Serendipity is now at the beta stage, Serendipity 1.2 Beta 1. The most significant changes in this new version of Serendipity is the authentication and session scheme for easier plug-in interaction. Also support for theming/template authoring has been improved using Smartyfield.
The following is a list of some of the new enhancements according to the Serendipity 1.2-beta1 announcement since Serendipity 1.1:
So you want to write a successful blog? Or perhaps just have a successful Website that people actually visit? Lorelle reminds us just how to make your blog of interest to others.
I have many friends raised within countries which still play by these rules, where you are and do what your father or mother did, and maybe your grandparents before you, not what you want to do. Where apprenticeship programs are the only way into a trade. Where you are tested and found competent for a specific job, not because your heart leads the way.
During the past couple years I have recommended to people that they host their Drupal sites on a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a shared hosting plan. While a large number of people do not have problems running Drupal under shared hosting plans, I have always felt that there are less headaches with using a VPS to host your sites. For example, with a VPS I don't have to worry whether the shared hosting plan gives me the necessary MySQL privileges needed by Drupal (especially CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES). From time to time, you also hear from people with "Drupal friendly" shared hosting plans eventually find that their hosting company isn't so friendly toward their Drupal site. Planet Drupal contributor, Clancy Ratliff, is one of the most recent examples for having a host provider not really happy she is using Drupal. So I often ask myself, is shared hosting for Drupal really worth the trouble?
I don't know if shared hosting is worth the trouble but a chain of events have brought me to giving shared hosting another chance for my Drupal sites. Last month, I pushed my VPS so close to the bleeding edge that it became unstable. While I was able to get my sites back online, the downtime clearly told me it was time to move my sites to a new server. While most visitors observed a performance improvement for my Drupal sites since the server migration, it's only now that I'm letting the cat out of the bag. For the past week, CMSReport.com has been under a shared hosting plan and not a VPS. I'm currently running my site using a budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy.
I don't know how long I'll keep my site on a shared hosting plan but I am currently enjoying a break from the work, worry, and experimentation that comes with administration of a VPS. While I may go back to a VPS, I thought it would benefit some newbies and other Drupal users my experiences and thoughts on migrating my sites from a VPS back to a shared hosting plan.
This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS. The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?". The author writes: