Archive for April, 2008

JoomlaEXPO 2008 recently registered its 200th attendee. To celebrate, fifty more seats have been added! Get them before they’re gone!

In case I haven’t already invited you through Facebook, the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition will be held 1pm Saturday at Georgetown University. All programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and social media experts: clear your Saturday afternoon schedule and show up. Keith has the details.

I upgraded WordPress this evening and decided to change the permalink structure. This is probably a bad idea in general, but I was having problems where you couldn’t link to an individual article. You would see all of the articles for a day, then get taken to an anchor for the specific post instead.

I promise no more hijinks.

Earlier this week, I had pain in the right side of my mouth, so I went to see a doctor. She diagnosed me with TMJ disorder and I’m currently waiting to see a dentist. I’ve been taking her advice by going on a soft foods diet where I can’t eat anything firmer than ground beef. This is rather difficult for me as I’m a reasonably adventurous eater and like playing chef. I’m having to get creative with the recipes and my diet. While cupcakes and doughnuts are certainly soft foods, you can’t make a meal out of them. Nutrition has been a big concern of mine over the past week as I want my body to have the nutrients it needs to help repair the joint. Here’s what I’ve been eating:

• Soup. Usually cooked down to a non-chewing consistency anyway, but watch out for vegetable and bean skins.
• Strawberries. They’re just coming into season around the country, so some fresh ones have been available.
• Milk (soy and dairy). Helps with the protein intake.
• Tofu. Made some soup out of this and had some at a Thai restaurant on Friday.
• V8. Raw vegetables are out of the question, so I’m using this to play catch up.
• Food processor. Taking favorites and grinding them up is fun, although not always as appetizing

Once upon a time, Skype was a great way of doing free voice chat and making cheap international phone calls. I remember surprising and impressing European clients with a quick phone call to clear up things we had discussed over email. I also remember using it for quick 3-4 person meetings and encrypted (if basic) IM functionality.

However, it started to get annoying when people would assume that my status of “online” meant “ready to voice chat for 20 minutes.” Your only other settings were ‘away’, ‘busy’, and ‘not available’; none of these really communicated what I wanted to say. I usually was available for text chat, but very frequently didn’t have either the equipment or time for voice. It didn’t help that Skype’s default double click action was “start a voice chat.” I stopped leaving Skype on and only pulled it out for scheduled calls. Still useful software at this point, but a little annoying.

Somewhere along the line, they added group text chats. These are like IRC rooms, except that they’re invite only and you can scroll back. Helpful for when you want a private meeting room for a group of people. All is good, right?

Unfortunately, Skype’s idea for these is a little less permanent than the way people actually use them. If you get invited to one of these chats, you’re automatically added and a little window pops up the next time you log on. It will even pull up a good long history of the chat to date so you can see what people have been saying. However, in order to stay in the chat room, you must leave the window open. If you close the window, you’ve left the chat.

If you quit Skype without specifically closing the chat windows, all will be fine and they’ll be there when you come back. But if the conversation is running very quickly and you want to concentrate on work, you have to somehow hide or minimize it to get it out of the way. You can bookmark chats, but this only seems to save the conversation to date. There’s just no good way of leaving the chat temporarily and coming back to it later. Correction: Bookmarking the chats does save them (on your local machine only) so you can come back later.

Worse yet, your chat rooms are kept client side while the transcripts are seemingly kept server side. If I get invited to a chat, log into Skype with my laptop, my desktop will have absolutely no knowledge of this chat (even though I’m using the same account). Since the transcripts are already kept on the server, is it all that difficult to keep track of the chat rooms I’m in?

I hate Skype, but I’ll use it every once in a while if I absolutely have to. The software has gotten to the point where it’s too difficult to manage the distractions for it to be worth my while. If anyone out there has figured out how to fix the issues I’m having, let me know. In the meantime, Skype developers: can we get a way of keeping a list of group chats and can I get a “text only” status?

After spending some time working with Drupal yesterday, I had a string of epiphanies. I now understand the power and simplicity of the platform; I will soon be dropping my Joomla! work. There are several reasons for the change:

• I’ve made too many excuses for Joomla!’s two-step categorization system. Nodes and taxonomies are more flexible (and have a nice ring to them).
• Joomla! has too many extension types and too many 3PD extensions are needed to run a real site. Most of the functionality I need should be in the core to begin with.
• I spend considerable time moderating my forum, so the next logical step is to go with an integrated comment system on all of my content. Drupal is far superior in this regard.

Finally, many of you are aware of my current license plate. Fortunately, the DMV also has my new favorite CMS available as well. It’s ordered and on the way: