Alright! I finally have some time here. I apologize for the dearth of interesting verbiage from this blog over the last week or so. I’m still getting the hang of this whole thing, of course.
One thing that I’ve realized on reflecting over the past week is that the whole method that I have of getting all fired to write and then putting out four things at a time is probably not the most effective means of running this blog. I guess that’s why none of the blogs that I’ve been reading do it that way. So, I’m going to try and keep this to a more or less daily occurrence. We’ll all see how well that works out.
So to catch up -
I’ve picked up a second job here that has been working for me very well. I more or less started last fall and it started as a one-off consulting gig that snowballed into more or less a full time thing. The consulting gig was to help this marketing company/call center up in NJ get set up with a computer recording system. They wanted to be able to do hold music or messaging for their clients for whom they provide an answering service. It went well. Spending other peoples money on recording gear and computers is the perfect job for me, but alas, they only needed one system to get the job done. That led into another freelance gig rebuilding some old crappy computers that they had laying around into Citrix clients, which led into some more involved networking and pretty much whatever they need, which is alot. The head of IT at this place is a friend and fan of the band who keeps throwing me random jobs that I either already know how to do or can figure out with less babysitting than expected. Their network guy is completely swamped at this place, so I’ve been learning a lot from him about Windows networking. This is what has kept me away from the computer for 2 weeks now. I’ve been pulling the 6am-3pm shift, and on my feet basically the whole time, so it hasn’t left much time for writing, even if I did have something interesting to say. I haven’t though.
In the few in between times that I have had time to screw around, I’ve been doing some tinkering around with RRE’s web presence. Check out our Facebook Page, specifically the Boxes page, as that’s the place where I’ve found the first foothold on the mountain that I’ve been sizing up for the last 9 months as far as this whole software/web development journey goes.
I also got the codes to RRE’s web page and promptly learned why you don’t do direct work on a live web page! That was fun! I got the site back up, fortunately, but there are a few broken links that I’ll be fixing, on the local copy of the website, of course. Stay tuned for those as well. Now that I have the access, I intend to see what I can do with the RRE site as it is before I launch into my wet dream of a band website.
Got a good Dummies book on a website framework called Joomla, which seems very, very interesting. It’s what’s known as a Content Management System, or CMS for short. Joomla is an open source framework which is supposed to make it really easy to do exactly what I had the big idea about a few months ago. It’s a modular system for building, updating, and maintaining your web site with new content, new features, etc. It’s a cool idea, but also pretty mature and full featured. This is good because it means that many of the bugs have been worked out for several years now. This is bad because it means learning a LOT of stuff that I probably don’t really need in the context of doing what I want to do. I guess it’s not so bad, since I like learning new stuff.
Learned a little how LiveDownloads runs their operation from a content management standpoint. I’m not gonna say, though, that’d probably be rude.
Found another framework called Drupal, which is actually what led me to Joomla. It’s another CMS, with a different paradigm. We’ll see which one I figure out first.
Started grasping the concept of web servers and managed to get Apache up and running on my system. I’d suggest if you’re a brand newby to web design and aren’t working in a Windows VB environment, you might want to check out Xxamp, as it bundles together basically every single open source gadget you’re going to need to build and maintain a web site.
Bought a domain, which will be the place I launch the early versions of all of this stuff to submit for your tinkering and inspection. I’ll let you know where it is when there’s something there to look at.
Sooooo, it’s been a busy week. Fortunately I’m back on the road now, in the sense that now I can catch up a bit on everything I have to do. I only wish that I’d had this idea a few years ago. I feel like I have an absurd amount of catching up to do. Last night’s show kicked ass, by the way…