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.

Drupal vs. Joomla!

I just can’t do it.  I tried, but I haven’t come around just yet.

I tried 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.  What’s more, I’m not convinced I could even template the site without some serious study in how to create a comparable them for the Drupal site.

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 editting templates, show that Joomla is really for the design-minded developer.

The documentation and community for Joomla are first class.  I know many sites out there say one of the greatest things about Drupal is it’s strong documentation, but I’ve always felt it was easier finding quality tutorials for Joomla than for Drupal.

So for now, Joomla has Drupal beat.  Wtih Drupal’s v.7 release in the near future, we’ll see whether developments in the code and community are enough to entice this designer to make the switch.

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 http://tedblog.typepad.com/.

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.