knitabit

Half a cuff

In the midst of all this holiday craziness, I did manage to get going on the cuff on the second sleeve of Lochinver. I hope to finish this evening while watching the Bronco game, and maybe even pick up the stitches around the neck and get started on the collar.

This week, I had some MAJOR frustrations with the website I manage for my job. It is a cobbled-together mish-mash of regular HTML pages and three different open-source PHP/mySQL components. One of the PHP components has been modified to provide password security for the HTML pages, and it's just a real pain in the you-know-what to add a new page to the site - even though I've got some templates developed to do the heavy lifting.

I like using Movable Type so much (it's what I use for this blog) that I got to thinking, I wonder if there's something similar that could be used to manage an entire website? Well as usual the geeks are way out in front of us regular people when it comes to that kind of thing - of COURSE there are! After a little bit of googling around, I found the world of Open Source CMS - Content Management Systems. And after much research and reading and playing with demos, I decided to go with Mambo.

I thought about uploading it to this site to test and play with it, but my hosting provider does not have up-to-date PHP modules. Fortunately, the hosting provider for my work website has everything I need. After a couple of days of playing around with this thing and uploading some add-on stuff to it, I can see that this is EXACTLY what I've been looking for. So I think I'll take my work website down for the holidays and move it onto it's new platform.

So that's a very long and convoluted way of saying that I might not be doing much knitting here over the next couple of weeks.

For those of you who managed to stay awake or even stay with me through the above technical musings, I offer you our family holiday greetings (for a limited time only - I don't like having this kind of personal stuff hanging out there for just anyone to read - you fellow/sister knitbloggers are of course the exception.)

Comments

Karen, that's interesting and useful information for me, too. I have a couple of folks whom I am trying to convince to use blogs as a way of maintaining up-to-the-minute info about their projects. Some of them won't send me current content to save their souls, but their sites would be far more interesting if they even would blog the weather report from their part of the world.

Posted by: Patricia Tryon at December 21, 2003 07:21 PM

Karen, although I didn't understand more than half of the technical lingo used in your posting; I think I got the just of it. You are way more educated in this stuff than I am. Notice my blog ringer thingy is still gone :( ...I'm thinking of re-applying and trying again. I did enjoy your re-cap of the year. I'm with Katie on the sports scene...who wants to get hot and sweaty? You have a lovely family. God Bless you all and Merry Christmas!

Posted by: Lisa at December 22, 2003 06:43 AM