She’s still reading her new reference books, which apparently provide you sample files that don’t match the examples, which has her kind of stumped, but she’s forging ahead, and says she’s making progress.
Meanwhile I’ve got some books mostly ready to go, and I’m halfway (after a month) toward getting Rusalka into shape, but it will need a new cover.
Jane has ordered her art computer, and will be in shape to start back to work on covers. Right now everything I have ready to go has a cover, but Jane did mine before doing her own, and of course whose books now don’t have a cover as we approach launch? Jane’s. So she wants to get to work on that. She’s been saving her sanity meanwhile by painting the mural on the garage (pix on her site) and getting the house into shape while I try to meet my deadline.
Lynn is also sacrificing her own files to work on the technicals. I’ve had it easy, comparatively. Lynn hasn’t had time to work on her files yet, has no covers (I don’t know if Jane may undertake them, but she might)—and Lynn’s still buried under stacks of manuals. She’s very methodical. She will eventually get it and become proficient, but she has her methods, and she just goes step by step. Hopefully when this gets up and going, she can drop that to our general maintenance and get her own stuff going. She’s got some great ideas.
So far so good: we wish we were faster, but sometimes you just have to punt and hope, and we have punted a lot this summer—we didn’t count on having computers blow up, or on having the Joomla! programs be this huge a learning curve.
Believe me, Drupal has a steeper learning curve. Can I make it count my downloads? no. Or redirect from a “thank you” page after five seconds? (Fill in the obvious answer here). But I’m going live this weekend anyway — I’ll probably be happier not knowing how little interest there is. 🙂
Why do it complicated when a single line of javascript will do the redirecting for you? There isn’t a single technology that will do everything easily – you stand a better chance borrowing the easy solutions from all around.
Note: arkessian is doing what Closed Circle is doing. Give it a looksee. Link is above in the Small Press Page.
Ooooh. Shiny. Thanks for the pointer.
I wholehearted sympathize with samples not doing what they propose to do – this happens *all the time* when you’re doing programming, and I’ve grown used to it- I no longer assume automatically that I’m the person making the mistake. Which is kind of liberating.
On the ‘step by step thinking’: it may sound alien, but you need it in order to program. This is an insight I fought very hard for and that took me several years to internalise – I’m still only an indifferent programmer, but I can drop the gestalt thinking and go into sequential mode, and do one small thing, test it, and then move on instead of wanting everything to work at the same time which it never will.
Which is probably why I stopped with basic…
Being able to put together decent web pages is a useful skill, and one I would not miss. But I am more of a person who wants to have programmed (because there are many things that a computer ought to be able to do easily, but for which no applications exist) than I enjoy the actual process, and there are too many demands on my time to go and become proficient at it.
And which is why I was a top-notch programmer and analyst. Very left brain.
Programming can be very creative. There are dozens of ways to make something work – the trick is finding the elegant solution. I had a sea change in my thinking about programming after meeting my husband who is very talented in that area. He was a fine arts major (photography) until switching a couple years in. Maybe that is why I see the creativity – he drips with it when he talks about his work.
I guess I think that a truly inspired software designer – someone who is working on creating something new from nothing – is very creative.
So don’t sell the other half of your brain short! I think it takes both sides! 🙂
Yes, the aim is an elegant solution, not a kluge, easy to understand for the poor person who has to maintain your work of art.
I think the difference is more one of process than of left vs. right brain. And I use a lot of analytical skills in my writing – in the revision phase – but for me, they just have a completely different quality.
Once upon a time . . . thirty years ago . . . I had an Apple ||e (with 64 whole KILObytes of memory), and I learned BASIC from the reference manual, no tutorials or examples, and I was the guru for the biology department. Biostatistics, leaf shape analysis with Fourier transforms, graphics to doodle with …
Then I got a Macintosh (with 512K memory and no hard drive, just 2 floppies), and I FELL IN LOVE the first time I dragged an icon to the trash to delete a file … but I never knew how to program again.
Carolyn, thanks for the Calibre link. I’ve just been converting some things to Mobi, and it’s great. Except s.l.o.w….. Have you found it to be kind of poky, or do I need to see if I can reserve it some more memory, or something?
Abigail
I’ve not noticed a speed issue; I have 2 g on this machine, so that could help, but I don’t know.
I’ve been looking at Joomla myself, lately, and it seems so counterintuitive. The introductory set-up pdf is itself a discombobulation. The words all individually make sense, and the basic ideas, and yet when you set about doing the exercises… Major learning curve, indeed.
I imagine that automatically guarantees all programs in the future will be more like Joomla.
It’s pretty scary. Lynn says there are between 35,000 and 50,000 files in our structure. Wah! And for a while she didn’t have a utility to back it up. I’m pretty sure I heard that number correctly. Now she has backup.
The 30-50K files seems horrendous for that type of application.
The number of files seems pretty shocking too, unless it’s counting each and every time it has to look at some tiny graphic snippet for the web page. That can generate a lot of bloatware in a hurry. I’m sure Lynn is slogging through it and making it functional at best speed. There is undoubtedly a market for easy homebrew websites that don’t look horrid, but you can have it fast, cheap, or done right; pick two. 😀
Oh yes, that’s the mantra when developing any product. Usually your client, even if it is just another department down the hall, wants all three. I’ve sat through innumerable meetings where I’ve felt like taking a bat to the user who can’t understand the concept. It’s worse when the other mantra quoted is “competitive advantage” and the competitor has just spent the last year developing this nifty new tool in secret.
Problem with some open-source applications is they have too many features and too much configuration to be user-friendly. Personally I would way rather just roll my own than figure out something like Drupal. That said, some people swear by it.
I’ve grown to love Drupal — I can mostly do what I want with it now, and if I can’t, I’m likely to find something else I want to do instead…
I had to build a site using Joomla as a core, once.
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Anyway now that the site has been rewritten in a nice clean homebrew MVC style, I don’t have to look at Joomla ever again! It is not horrible however, and it does work so long as you don’t try to customize it outside of its out-of-the-box functionality. This is even more true as you begin to add third-party plugin applications, such as a shopping cart (I’m looking at you, VirtueMart!). The plugins might work pretty well wired up just so, but the gods all help you if you should want to change the order of the shipping and billing pages. That would require looking at the php under the hood, and it is not pretty under there.
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That said, while I’m certain that Lynn can more easily find out answers to php questions by way of the interwebs, if she has any questions about php, css, or LAMP programming or just wants to vent about it, she should feel free to drop me a line. I’m Glenn! glennds at gmail dot com
Thanks!