BretWagner.com

I don’t get Twitter

Are people actually following what I have to say? I’ve got 24 followers, none of whom I know. I have trouble believing my four tweets of the past two years (that averages to an update every six months) is enough to keep people’s attention.

Sure, Twitter is great for celebrities. If only there were celebrities I cared enough about to warrant receiving an update every time they posted a tweet. But there aren’t. Sorry MC Hammer, I do not care what you had for breakfast:

I caught the “Red-Eye” and now it’s time for “Shut-Eye”!!! I had a little breakfast…. wait.. I might mess up my hair ! oh, Le coconut !!!

So what IS Twitter good for? Probably something, but what, I don’t think anyone knows. Since its inception in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, it hasn’t turned a dollar of net profit.

Wordpress has come a long way

I just finished upgrading my site. Took 45 minutes total (most of that spent waiting for background jobs to finish up), which isn’t bad considering I hadn’t spent any significant time on the site maintenance-wise in the last 6 months.

So where was I? Turns out you can cram an awful lot into 6 months.

Drupal vs. Joomla!

It’s been two years since I discovered the Joomla! community.  Back in 2006, the core development team had just split from the Mambo group and set off to take the CMS in a new direction.

However, I have been hearing more and more about the merit’s for Drupal as a CMS.  Actually, it turns out it is more like a content management framework.  I decided to give Drupal a chance to win me over with it’s flexibility and growing community of developers / designers.  I spent a few evenings searching out what I would need to develop something comparable to ScienceForAmerica.com.

I’m aware of the fact that Drupal is more extensible than Joomla!.  However, after the release of Joomla! 1.5, this advantage shrunk considerably.  With the MVC framework of Joomla, developers can create plug-ins with considerably cleaner, more compliant code.

Groups management is an area where Drupal is a clear leader.  It seems like Joomla! assumes that everything on a particular site will be done with an admin or super-admin.  This is annoying, as it seems a short-sighted assumption.  Besides creating content, there’s not much you can do.

The other clear winning area is for SEF URLs.  Joomla has never handled these well.  In fact, many of the components developed for Joomla to accomplish SEF still fail to fully enact unique, well-formed URLs.  Drupal has Joomla beat, with the code optimized and lean.

When it comes to design and ease of use, Joomla wins hands down.  The larger number of free and pay-for templates, combined with the well documented how-to’s for editing templates, show that Joomla is really for the design-minded developer.

So I guess at this point things are a bit of a wash.  I don’t see a need to develop SFA any further- it’s got a decent forum (although severely underused), a good downloads management system, and can handle multimedia relatively well.  I’ll keep an eye on Drupal, however, for future projects.  If it ends up I need an ecommerce solution, the Ubercart module appears to be a strong Virtuemart competitor.

TED Blog

TED Blog is all you’ll ever need to visit to learn about technology, entertainment and design (hence TED!).  Thing I love about this site is all the streaming content- TED has some great presenters.  What I would give to get a ticket to this event.  Check it out here.

More BCMKE3 – Best Sessions

I’ll admit – from the moment the intro session started at BarCampMilwaukee, I was hooked.  People throwing around names like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and Rich Internet Applications and I knew I was in good company.  Granted I’m not very experienced in the last, but I can recognize the potential and am trying to grasp the concepts of Adobe’s AIR development platform.

The sessions I got the most out of were the ones I could use that day.  My professional web site (you’re here, obviously) was stale and the Wordpress session inspired me to tackle a redesign that made maintanence 100 x easier and posting 100000 x easier.

The second-most useful session was Drupal.  I’ve never used Drupal to build a web app, but when I was trying to decide between CMS’s it was Joomla or Drupal.  Armed with some new ammunition, I might do some more exploring of Drupal as a robust CMS that has solid code and some cool features that Joomla doesn’t offer.

BCMKE3 – Where did all these photographers come from?

Note to self: I need a Nikon SLR.

I just got back from BarcampMilwaukee3, the technology and creativity “un-conference”.  I wasn’t prepared for the creativity side of it, but I found this to be more refreshing than the discussion about web technologies I had throughout the two days.

It seems interesting to me the sheer number of photographers in the crowd.  I would put this number at one out of five participants either had a camera at the conference or were active flickr users for their blogs.  The photowalk was one of the most popular sessions.  Maybe this is a release for the sometimes mundane tasks of writing code.  But the creative side is important for programming, so maybe this is another means to foster that creativity.