Sharp eyes or maybe just attentiveness has probably made regular readers here aware of the subtle changes in the layout of this blog. I am always tweaking here and there. Most noticeable is the two RSS feeds I added to the right column. They link to my two other blogs.
I like that the RSS feeds tie everything together. I am not sure if a lot of webinites take advantage of RSS. If you have favorite places you like to visit (like here!) for “what’s new” then the RSS will do that for you. The two feeds on this page need no attention. When I add something to Dimensional Art Org, it will appear here in the listing. Cool!
I have a few RSS feeds tied into my Outlook, separate from email and that keeps me up to date on a few sites.
Last night I started looking at some new (to me) CMS (Content Management System) software. It’s called Joomla! , with and without the exclamation point. The software is Open Source so is completely free of corporate cost and control. I use a lot of other open source CMS software including Linux OS, WordPress, and phpBB. The only web software I paid for is the X-Cart that my web store runs in.
I set up a virtual machine (VM) computer running within my Windows 7 (named “Playground”) computer. I have a Linux Ubuntu OS, Apache web server and a MySQL database all running in the VM. On top of that I have Joomla! running. The VM looks like and is a web server setting on my home network. I link to Joomla! using its network IP address with a web browser on my home office computer but I could use any home network computer including “Playground” to connect to Joomla! as a user or administrator.
I have been creating HTML web sites since day one, but a lot of the web software including my X-Cart store are now using high level CMS programming. What makes it so nice is the program is extremely modular. If I want a new feature, someone has already written the module and I just plug it in. Also modules can be updated without changing the entire content display. We have come a long way, baby.
Perhaps coming soon to a URL close to you, may be my version of Joomla! Content Management. What will it be?