Fearless Flyer

Welcome to Geeksville, part 2

2009-05-18T06:07:21Z

"Andrea, you promised to bore us with rants about Joomla and Drupal, but that was over a month ago. What gives?"

The sad truth is that I am so unenthusiastic about Joomla that I couldn't even muster up the energy to rant about it.

It wasn't always like this. When I first used Joomla last summer, I thought it was the bee's knees. Compared to WordPress, Joomla is much better for large sites and has lots of exciting third-party extensions. It's easy to make an attractive and professional-looking site, since there are heaps of free templates (themes) available, and if you want to take your graphic design to the next level you can buy great templates for a reasonable price. Admittedly Joomla has a steeper learning curve than WordPress does, but I was able to throw together a really slick-looking Joomla site in record time.

My problem with Joomla is that it's deeply clunky. It's the offshoot of a venerable open-source CMS called Mambo, and I think it's badly weighed down by its legacy interface. When I started using Joomla mid-2008, they'd recently made the leap from version 1.0.x to version 1.5, but it doesn't feel particularly Web 2.0. Come to think of it, it feels very Web 1.5 -- it has a certain amount of AJAX window-dressing, but the back end is bogged down by a lot of slow and inflexible CGI-style forms. (If you don't know what I mean by AJAX, some popular AJAX-style sites are Twitter, Facebook, and iGoogle, in which the page updates dynamically without having to reload.)

Another drawback of Joomla is that many of the extensions cost money. Joomla is open source, but a lot of the cool third-party tools are in the $10-$20 range (or more, if it's really fancy). You could argue that this creates an incentive for developers to produce high-quality tools, but I find it creates a certain disharmony between Joomla extensions and Joomla core. WordPress has a bit of this problem, but not to nearly the same extent.

It's hard to describe what I don't like about Joomla without launching into a discourse about Drupal. Before I used Drupal I thought Joomla was pretty cool, but now it feels like a real drag to use. Joomla's initial learning curve is not as steep as Drupal's, but now that I'm up and running with both tools I find that Joomla is always tripping me up. I'm sure that seasoned Joomla users have no problem with it, but I find it counter-intuitive.

Each CMS has its own basic unit of content: Joomla has articles and Drupal has nodes. The term "article" is way too specific and the term "node" is way too vague, but they're basically the same thing. A node or article could be any of the following:

- The unique contents of a page (e.g. the "About Us" spiel)
- An article or press release
- A single image in a gallery or slideshow
- An event on a calendar
- A blog entry

(Note that a single page might contain multiple articles/nodes.)

Long story short, Drupal nodes are much more flexible than Joomla articles. In Joomla core you can only classify articles into categories and sections, whereas Drupal core has many more ways to work with nodes, including the ability to have different node types. This is ludicrously useful, particularly if your clients want to be able to update the site themselves. The main contributor to the Joomla site I built is always getting confused about how to add a new item to the site and how to make it appear in the right place. He knows how to do only a few things to the site, and without my intervention the front page is getting overloaded. If I'd built the site in Drupal, I could have automated the workflow much better and made the site easier for him to maintain.

Furthermore, user permissions are much more configurable in Drupal than in Joomla. Joomla comes with seven preset roles, four for the front end and three for the back (don't get me started on the difference, because that's another clunky aspect of Joomla which Drupal lacks). There are authors, editors, publishers, etc. The problem is that you can't fine tune the permissions very well. For example, I built a site in Joomla for my sister's mural painting business in Chicago, and we'd like to give her employee Paula the ability to create blog entries and publish them right away (without approval). To do that Paula needs "publisher" permission, but the publisher role also allows Paula to edit any page on the entire site, which is a dangerous permission to give out. Drupal, on the other hand, lets you create custom-tailored user roles, so I could create a "blogger" role which would allow Paula to create blog entries and publish them right away, but she would not be able to edit any other text on the website.

There is almost certainly a third-party extension for Joomla that would duplicate the Drupal behavior, but (A) it would possibly cost money and (B) every additional module is a potential security and stability risk.

Anyway, I should wrap this up before it turns entirely into a Drupal pitch. Joomla also lags behind Drupal and WordPress in search engine optimization (SEO). By default, Joomla URLs are big nasty PHP strings like http://sigmufi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17. You can enable SEF (search-engine friendly) URLs in Joomla core or use free third-party tools like sh404SEF, but it can get pretty complicated and feels like Deep Magic. That said, the SEO tools do work, and I've been pleasantly surprised by my sister's Google rankings since we switched to Joomla from a static site.

Joomla Pros and Cons

Pros:

Better than WordPress for large, complicated websites

Beautiful themes are available, especially through reasonably-priced template clubs like RocketTheme and JoomlaJunkie.

The moderate initial learning curve makes it easy to make a professional-looking site very quickly.

Upgrades, though not automatic, have mostly been smooth.

Cons:

Many of the good extensions cost money.

Comparatively rigid administrative interface

Article workflow is clunky and often inflexible.

User permissions are not customizable without third-party extensions.

Search engine optimization can get pretty complicated.

At this point, I think the biggest advantage of Joomla over Drupal is the availability of gorgeous templates for a reasonable price. That was the main reason I chose it for my sister's website, and I'm not convinced I wouldn't make the same decision even now. Other than that, I prefer Drupal in nearly every way.

Guess which CMS I'm posting about next!

Welcome to Geeksville, population: me (part 1)

2009-04-18T06:28:03Z

About a year ago, my life as a web geek took an unexpected turn. I'd been designing websites since 1995, but I'd long since decided that I didn't actually like the work very much, and I honestly didn't think I was much good at it. I am a competent but uninspired graphic designer, I am code-phobic and could only cut and paste the simplest bits of Javascript, and I never learned the fancy tools like Dreamweaver or Flash. My one virtue was that I was a generalist -- I can write the content, design the pages, and take the project from start to finish.

On a professional level this was mostly a moot point, since I've been a dharma loafer for nine of the past ten years, sponging off the nice Ted and doing only a few web projects. I felt like a bit of a fraud describing myself as a web designer (considering how uninteresting I found it), and even though there is no shortage of people I can help by building a website, I was quite unmotivated to do so.

Anyway, this time last year one of my teachers asked me to help her with a website for her non-profit organization. Having noticed that other people were building nice out-of-the-box sites using WordPress, I decided to try it myself, with the idea that it would be easy for my teacher to use.

I was quickly sucked into an engrossing new world. I discovered that in my absence from the front lines of web design, a whole new set of tools had emerged. For example, I set up a hosting account for my Lama's site and discovered the magic of cPanel and Fantastico De Luxe. cPanel is a dashboard for web hosting accounts -- it comes standard with most low-cost hosting packages ($7.95/month, unlimited everything, blah blah blah). It allows non-techies like me to set up e-mail accounts, create subdomains (e.g.: foobar.steamkite.com is a subdomain of steamkite.com), etc. Fantastico de Luxe is a tool within cPanel that makes it easy to install complicated scripts like WordPress, etc.

I was overwhelmed with this new power! I'd built some powerful websites before, but it was always with the help of some programmer who could handle the messy parts (mooshjan, bovlb, and of course tsennyipa, I'm looking at you!). cPanel and Fantastico suddenly enabled me to do the dirty work myself, and having my own hosting account meant I could tinker all I wanted without messing up Ted's server or wasting any of his time.

And WordPress was so cool! First, there are hundreds or thousands of free themes out there, which meant I didn't have to bother with the graphic design or CSS. I could just download someone else's work (freely given), customize it a bit here and there, and *bam*, I had a professional-looking website. Second, WordPress has heaps of free widgets and plugins, allowing me to add all sorts of groovy bells and whistles without needing to know what I was doing. Fun stuff!

That first site was a lot of work, mostly because it included an online store. There's a very good free WordPress shopping cart out there, but in 2008 it was about 90% functional and 20% documented. I spent a month banging my head against it and finally got it to work (and I contributed some docs just to be nice), and in the process I learned a lot about WordPress and database-backed websites in general.

WordPress Pros and Cons

Pros:

Easy to use

Easy to add widgets and plugins

Oodles of free, attractive themes

Easy to update, in theory

Cons:

Difficult to update in practice. My site was rather more complicated than other WP sites, mostly because of the online store, and my E-Z upgrades tend to go very very wrong. The site is now several versions behind, which is a major security risk. I am close to getting it migrated to the newest version, but that's involved rebuilding the site rather than just upgrading it.

Security-challenged. WordPress is very popular and it's written in PHP, which is notoriously exploitable, so my out-of-date WP site is a hacker attack waiting to happen.

Limited features. At heart, WP is a blogging platform, and the site I built is not a blog, which means that my needs are not a perfect match with the WordPress feature set. This mismatch wasn't obvious to me at the time, but since I started using other content management systems, WP's shortcomings have become rather glaring (more on that in future posts).

The site I built, by the way, is at www.diamond-heart.org. I used a gorgeous free theme from Smashing Magazine, customized with some illustrations from iStockPhoto. It has way more features than any site I'd ever built without help, and my teacher has been very happy with it.

Looking back, I think of that site as my initiation into the wide world of content management systems (CMS). It showed me what was now possible for a code-phobe like me, and I suddenly began to wonder if I didn't enjoy web design after all.

Watch this space for part two: Joomla!

We meet again, My-Lar

2009-04-17T20:40:06Z

Yes, it's tomato time again. Longtime fans and stalkers will know that I can't resist planting tomatoes, and that it's usually a great big failure. The first time was in 2001, back in Saint David, Arizona, and the sucking was truly epic. Then I tried in 2006, here in Tucson, and an auspicious start just didn't pan out. I think our neighbors enjoyed some tomatoes while we were on an extended trip that summer (India, Chicago, Montreal), but by the time we got home the plants were useless.

Last year, of course, was the exception. I put in four plants: Big Beef, Early Girl, Ciudad Victoria, and "Texas Wild Tomato" (these last two are from the Native Seeds/SEARCH store nearby). The two native varieties grew like gangbusters, setting fruit all summer (not so surprising, since they're both cherry tomatoes). Early Girl did OK, though it didn't set fruit during the hottest months, and it was eventually overwhelmed by the two enormous natives. Big Beef provided the yummiest tomato of the year, but it shut down production during the high temps and never really recovered. The plants, all indeterminate, kept growing and growing, and I feared we wouldn't get a freeze. But we ended up dipping below 32° around New Year, so I got to start fresh.

This time my approach is different. I followed some (though not all) of the advice from the Sweet Tomatoes Test Garden in Las Vegas. I tried growing a few of her seeds from scratch, but that didn't work out so well. So I bought some starter plants instead: Cherokee Purple (a weird-looking heirloom that supposedly does well in hot climates) and Sungold (a well-loved super-sweet cherry that's also alleged to survive the heat). I'm following the tomato lady's advice of using silver mylar mulch to keep the ground cool and reflect sunlight up to the greedy leaves. I planted quite deep (adjusting the drip irrigation accordingly), and I'm not going to stake or cage the plants (she says it's cooler near the ground, and the mylar mulch keeps bugs off the fruit). She even advises not to shade the plants, but rather to cut little pieces of shade cloth and put them directly on top of each ripening fruit. I don't think I'll bother with the Sungold plants, but I'll try it with the bigger Cherokee Purples.

This, of course, assumes the plants live that long. I don't know whether last year's bumper crop was a turning of the tide or just a weird exception to my grim rule. For one thing, I'm not following all of the tomato lady's advice. As usual, I'm being ludicrously Buddhist when it comes to pest control. Last year I had whiteflies and leaf miners, but they didn't seem to do any real harm. I also wasn't able to stretch the mylar mulch down as tightly as she advises, due to the drip irrigation equipment. In fact, I think I'm creating a lovely little habitat for insects, since it'll be cool and damp under the mulch -- hopefully they won't be the tomato-killing insects.

I also couldn't find her recommended fertilizer strengths, so I went with some eco-friendly worm-poop fertilizer in a recycled soda bottle instead. I was ludicrously vegan while choosing fertilizers (even though I'm merely vegetarian), rejecting anything with bone meal or blood meal. Later on this summer I may add some of the Indonesian bat guano solution I used last year, and I'll probably use kelp spray as well. Yes, I know I'm a crackpot.

Anyway, that's the report for this year's crop. I wonder if they'll survive.

(The big plant in the second photo is our serrano pepper plant, which somehow survived last year's freeze and has little peppers on it already.)

In other garden news, the rose bushes I planted last year are doing pretty well. Here are photos of the two best specimens:

For a walk down Andrea's-tomatoes memory lane, see all my posts tagged with "tomatoes".

Earplugs at rock concerts FTW!

2009-02-26T18:57:04Z

Ph34r my sc4ry t0mat0z

2008-12-23T23:43:30Z

My tomato plants have grown. A lot. We haven't had a freeze yet this year in Tucson, and some years it doesn't freeze here at all. A freeze would normally kill the tomato plants and let me start fresh again in the spring.

I am afraid.

Before:

After:

ironic juxtaposition otd

2008-12-11T02:08:33Z

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Surprising endorsement OTD

2008-10-19T23:23:32Z

The Houston Chronicle endorsed Obama today. Houston, Texas. They haven't endorsed a Democrat for president in more than 40 years.

Awesome

2008-10-19T00:29:06Z

The Chicago Tribune resoundingly endorsed Obama today. If you don't realize why this is amazing, here's a quote from the endorsement:

This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

For the record, the Trib was founded in 1847.

Meanwhile, in another part of the banking industry...

2008-09-26T21:10:21Z

I *heart* my nerdy mortgage bank. Check out their website -- they barely even have an online banking feature.

The best part is the copyright statement on the bottom of the page: "© 1917 - 2007". Does copyright even go that far back?

I called our banker today just to say hi and see how they're doing amid all the turmoil. She answered right away (main branch number, no phone tree) and said things are just fine, as I knew they would be, and then asked how Ted and I are doing. Awww... nerdiest bank ever. I always picture her and our other banker (the branch director) locking the doors at 5:00 like they're tucking it in for the night.

I have no doubt their management is feeling rather vindicated, if not downright smug, about sitting out the last boom. Back in 2004 when we bought our house, I asked whether they even offered ARMs and such, and the banker looked as if I'd mentioned something a little tawdry.

Sigh... if only the rest of the industry had followed suit.

Where can I get one one of these!?

2008-07-21T18:40:44Z

I'm not at all tempted by a regular pedicure, but I'd love to try a carp pedicure!

Can the iPhone apps be far behind?

2008-07-20T19:18:42Z

http://www.instantrimshot.com/
http://sadtrombone.com/

Telephone Rock rides again!

2008-07-18T22:48:29Z

With iTunes and GarageBand I can make a custom ringtone for the iPhone from any digitized audio. So Ted had the brilliant idea of bringing my old friend "Telephone Rock" back to life. This was my beloved ringtone from our 2005 trip to Japan, where I rented a phone for the week. I blogged about it at the time, and today I converted and loaded it onto the phone -- yippee!

Get down to the rhythm of "Telephone Rock"

Is it just me?

2008-07-18T01:20:11Z

I saw these two bumper stickers on one car -- am I the only one who finds them a wee bit contradictory?

the backstory, literally

2008-06-10T04:22:34Z

I changed all the depressing links so they point to an explanation of the happy news page, with commentary on some of the stories.

whoa, now it's global

2008-06-09T18:03:46Z

http://blog.lefigaro.fr/hightech/2008/06/google-news-le-meilleur-des-mo.html (I replied to this one)

uh oh

2008-06-08T18:24:09Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/08/google-news-from-a-b.html

Update:

http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Why_can_t_the_news_be_like_this
http://www.reddit.com/info/6mgs6/
http://whedonesque.com/comments/16541

Another update:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/08/tv-soundoff-sunday-talkin_n_105889.html
http://www.thismodernworld.com
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/google_news_for.php

A new record!

2008-05-09T01:57:59Z

Today, May 8, Ted and I ate the first wee little tomatoes off one of our plants. I didn't even know there were red tomatoes on it until I tended the plant this afternoon. The tomatoes were tiny little fellows, hardly more than a centimeter in diameter, with a nice flavor.

I'm not certain what variety they are, but I think it's the vaguely-named Texas Wild Tomato, from the wonderful Native Seed/SEARCH store in Tucson. Hooray for quirky local varieties!

Scone Recipe

2008-04-22T06:28:50Z

My friend recently showed me how to make scones, and they're really quite yummy. Today someone asked me to e-mail her the recipe, so I figured I'd post it here as well. NB: Don't be fooled by the date -- these scones are not kosher for Passover.

Ingredients:

1-3/4 cups flour. I use a mix of regular white flour and King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour (made from a different variety of wheat that's as nutritious as regular whole wheat without being bitter or tough).

1-1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp sugar

5 tbsp butter at room temperature - soft but not melted

3/4 cups "milk" (your choice: evaporated milk, buttermilk, half and half, regular non-skim milk, soy milk, or even water mixed with some whole-fat plain yogurt)

(optional) fresh strawberries, blueberries, raisins, currants, chocolate chips, etc. Strawberries should be sliced fairly thinly.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450° and raise oven rack toward the top (but not the very top). Mix dry ingredients thoroughly in a large bowl. Cut up butter and blend by hand into flour mixture, until it reaches a uniform granular texture. Add fruit if desired.

Slowly add "milk" and blend by hand until the mixture is doughy. You don't need to add the entire 3/4 cups if the mixture doesn't need it.

Roll or flatten the dough on a clean surface. Add flour as needed to make the dough less sticky. Don't handle the dough more than necessary. You can either shape the dough in little pie-wedges, or you can cut out little circles with a cookie cutter or drinking glass. Place on cookie sheet.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes at 450° until lightly golden on top. Remove from oven -- if they don't seem completely done inside you can let them sit for a few minutes while they continue to cook a bit more. Eat promptly!

The Gashlycrumb Seedlings

2008-03-23T22:37:10Z

Blessed with unbridled optimism and a short memory, I planted some tomatoes today. Longtime fans will recall that I've never had much luck growing tomatoes in Arizona (or anywhere else). But I'm trying again -- I planted "Big Beef", "Early Girl", "Ciudad Victoria" and another local variety whose name escapes me. I have no real expectation of ever eating one of these tomatoes, given my dismal track record. Indeed, I think I'm planting only out of morbid curiosity.

For my next trick I'll plant a serrano pepper plant, sunflowers and okra. Updates to come.

the plot thickens

2008-02-09T05:39:54Z

Actually, not a bad explanation of karma...

I'm curious to see how this turns out

2008-01-20T02:34:56Z

I just offered to give away a toilet seat on Tucson Freecycle. It'll be interesting to see if I have any takers :-)

White plastic toilet seat for elongated toilet. One month old, hardly
used, thoroughly cleaned with bleach. Includes unused mounting
hardware. I think it's this one (link to Kohler website):

http://tinyurl.com/ypro6x

The story is that several weeks ago our friend accidentally broke the toilet seat in our guest bath while we were out of town, and he kindly replaced it with an unbreakable plastic one, not knowing that I deliberately chose the wooden one he broke. And having grown up with nice solid wooden toilet seats, I just found myself grimacing whenever I sat on the plastic one. So yesterday I finally gave into the dark side and bought a replacement wooden seat for all of $16.69, and now I'm seeing if I can find a good home for the plastic one. It will be a good test of whether Tucson is the ~~cheapskate~~ practical town I think it is.

Update: Three people have e-mailed me to say they'd like the toilet seat.

long silence broken

2008-01-17T17:54:24Z

Hi! It's been rather a busy few months. Ted and I were on the road from late November until New Year's: first in Austin, then to New York City for several weeks, and finally for a dramatic xmas visit to the in-laws in Massachusetts.

New York was, unsurprisingly, quite exciting. Our vague housing plans fell through, so we were thrown upon the mercy of our wonderfully merciful friends and relatives. We couch-surfed all over the place, and we eventually landed in a terrific studio apartment near Union Square, courtesy of our friend Rebecca. Ted discovered some of the best espresso ever, just a few blocks away at Everyman Espresso, and I indulged heavily in the wonderful cheese shops of Manhattan. I got to see lots of old friends, plus Ted and I took a terrific meditation course from the aforementioned Rebecca.

Next stop: Massachusetts. We arrived at night, a few days before Christmas. After saying our hellos to the in-laws, we walked outside to drive to the house where we were staying, and WUMP! Ted slipped on the ice out front, and was completely dumbstruck with shock and pain. A single glance at his wrist told us all we needed to know: it was very broken. Calm and mechanical, I drove him to the emergency room 40 minutes away in Keene, New Hampshire, where they gave him morphine and a cast. Much suffering elided... he had surgery in Tucson after New Year's and is finally doing pretty well, though he'll wear a brace for another month.

Anyway, Ted spent most of the visit languishing on the sofa, while I went about my usual business of decorating the family xmas tree. Never having done it as a child, I love decorating trees and have utterly taken over the job from my burned-out in-laws. ed_lemon set up the video camera and made a sped-up movie of my tree-trimming shenaningans (not all the chatter is mine, BTW):

Back in Tucson, I've been busy looking after the nice Ted, who has suffered quite a bit through surgery and also some very unpleasant dental work. We also have another friend staying here who has been felled by some terrible joint pain, so I've been cooking for her as well, and I've quite enjoyed this new domestic trend. I've amazed myself by cooking several meals a day and then cleaning up afterwards, which is not usually my style. I hardly recognize myself as I clean off the stovetop several times a day or vacuum the house for no particular reason. There are still papers everywhere (those are the last frontier, I'm afraid), but I've nearly turned into some kind of neat freak. I don't expect it to last very long, so I'm trying to make the most of it.

With the cooking, I've invented a yummy breakfast we call "panscones", which are extremely fluffy pancakes made from the miraculous King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour (thanks shadowsmark!) and frozen blackberries and raspberries. They began life as regular flour griddlecakes from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, covered in maple syrup, but as my pants grew tighter I decided that having refined flour and lots of sugar for breakfast most days was perhaps a bad idea.

So that's pretty much it for now. I've been neglecting just about every non-domestic part of my life lately (sorry Kee!), but I'm quite enjoying myself. I feel a little ghoulish to be having such fun while Ted and our houseguest are suffering so much, but they don't seem to mind since they are reaping the benefit of all my TLC.

In parting, here's a photo of the nice Ted in happier days making espresso at Diamond Mountain:

This I must share

2007-11-26T01:50:19Z

From 1925, an early talkie, featuring Gus Visser and his "singing" duck:

Not sure what to make of this

2007-10-27T04:42:28Z

Did anyone else find it odd/amusing that Elvis Costello sang "Pump it Up" at Hillary Clinton's birthday party?

This is an order

2007-08-17T05:18:41Z

Go see the movie Stardust.

Go on. Off you go. Yay!