Links, Explained
This is a beta test for an exciting new music website I’m developing with my friends. I wish I could describe it better, but since I can’t hand out passwords willy-nilly due to the nature of the work, it will have to remain a mystery until I have the proper clearances.
This is my employer, Dragonfly Networks. I am currently a partner in the business with my cousin.
This is a WordPress-based site we built for a local business. It was interesting to see how WordPress can be used in a more sales-oriented fashion. I’d like to add a shopping cart module sometime, and I wish their was a free NewsLetter plugin for WordPress. (The Semiologic plugin looks good, but it is part of a $300 bundle.)
This is an interesting site by my uncle, who is an attorney. He initially was blogging on some custom software I wrote for him back in 2000-2001, but eventually we decided that WordPress made more sense, and it’s been working very well. He gets quite a bit of traffic, probably due to the longevity of the site and archived sections. Plus, he’s pretty smart about what to write, and likes to feed certain keywords into his posts.
This is my friend Estelle’s web site. She is a massage therapist, and also makes jewelry, which she’s been taking photos of and posting on her site. I’d like to help her with the site sometime, so far I haven’t had any input into it.
This is my friend J.D.’s web site. He’s pretty smart, knows quite a bit about computers and coding, and politics and stuff, too.
This is my girlfriend’s web site for her letterpress printing business. They use a couple old-fashioned printing presses to create absolutely divine paper goods. I’ve been learning quite a bit about design from her. She’s amazing on her Mac G5 with Photoshop and Quark Xpress and whatnot.
This is Nick’s friend Alex Koprowski, who runs a glass-blowing studio in Northeast Minneapolis. I believe this site was also built on WordPress, but Nick took care of that.
This site is a pretty simple migration of an old Microsoft FrontPage-based site to WordPress. The project was interesting because we decided to re-use the layout, and swap out the engine completely. It worked all right for a while, but I’m probably going to redesign it fairly soon to make it more sophisticated.
This is the local hosting provider we use. It’s run by my good friend Tom Kleinschmidt, who I’ve known for quite some time. They do very good work, and although they’re a little more spendy, we feel it’s worth it.
This is J.D.’s politically-oriented website. He recently migrated it to WordPress, and I think they’ve been pretty happy with the results so far.
This is a commercial site we made for a group of attorneys in Minneapolis specializing in cases filed under the False Claims Act.
This is my little sister’s MySpace profile. I miss her - she moved to California a while back. I don’t go to MySpace very often, but it’s nice to be able to see what she’s up to these days.
Anyway, I just wanted to explain the links in my blogroll. Nobody ever does that. Maybe it will be a new trend.
This site is actually just a total mess of beta code I’ve had kickin’ around for a while. (Which explains why the site is unreadable right now.)
Basically, I use it to experiment with the WordPress codebase, and also to serve as a repository for my enormous and ever-growing link collection. I’ve installed the beta version of my WordPress PostCat2LinkCat plugin, which is nifty because it lets me show different link categories on different post archives of the site, so you can expect to see a lot of my CSS references in the Design section (and CSS subsection.)
It doesn’t have a lot of post content yet, but expect to see more in the future. I basically just started blogging again for the first time in several years, but this is the first project I’ve really tried to steer in any particular direction so far.
Oh, yeppers. This is Tom Beedem’s website. He’s a local lawyer and a good friend of mine - I think he needs to start posting though.
What Are We Doing?
Basically, we’re trying to get more people in our business circles to create dynamic web sites with comments sections, feedback, syndication feeds, and well-organized content. It’s slow-going; many of our business clients are rather busy, and it’s hard for them to make time to post.
WordPress is absolutely spectacular as far as I’m concerned. Once you try it, it makes most of the other content management interfaces and blogging software look extremely primitive.
I don’t know why it’s so polished compared to, say, Drupal, which is another platform we use. They both use the TinyMCE text editor, which is a rich editing control for form submissions written in Javascript. However, Drupal’s TinyMCE implementation is a plugin, and it’s not very well integrated into the platform in my opinion. WordPress, on the other hand, is absolutely seamless.
My only complaint about WordPress so far is that I wish they would slow down the frequency of their upgrades! (That’s kind of a joke - I’m glad they’re so active.)
Seriously, though, it’s sort of a pain to have to go through the upgrade process every time they have a point release, which is around once every two or three months (sometimes even more frequently.)
I’d like to work on an automated upgrade plugin that would handle the process dynamically, but since our installations are hosted at different providers, and the access methods (i.e. ftp vs scp, phpMyAdmin vs. mysqldump, shell access vs. no shell access, etc) vary so much, it’s tough to code that sort of thing and expect it to work consistently.
Current Issues
Currently, I’m not having any major problems with our installations. There is one issue looming in the near future; apparently, at least one of our WordPress installations that was recently migrated from one server to another has suffered some kind of data conversion error within the MySQL database.
I’ve done a few hours research on the problem, which seems to stem from the way MySQL handles character sets, but haven’t figured out a solution yet. The WordPress output looks fine, but when trying to export the database from the phpMyAdmin control panel (or the WordPress Database Backup plugin) the SQL file has numerous occurences of text corruption.
I do expect that the problem can be fixed; if not, I’m sure it will be possible to index or spider the content through the website and find a way to re-import the data into a fresh MySQL install. This would, of course, be a last resort, but it’s an option.
Minor Complaints
Although I’m happy that work on WordPress continues to improve the codebase, and I am excited and happy to see the huge amount of momentum that the project has gained over the last few years, I am fairly sceptical that the changes made to the way the Link Management in 2.10-alpha releases are helpful. This is obviously a fairly subjective opinion, and although I agree that changes need to be made, I’m not very thrilled about the way they’re attempting to resolve the issue. I’ll write more on this later after I have more of a chance to fiddle with the 2.10-alpha and beta release.
http://www.emaystar.com
Comment by Estelle — March 15, 2007 @ 7:27 pm