January 2008 Archives

i described my way of keeping up with my daily stuff in this post earlier. my dad read this post and made me a fantastic present. a new notebook. more, a notebook kit. the basis is the famous and really very perfect atoma notebook system. i combined it with my already tested post-it sliders and extended it in some ways. but before i go into details, have a look at the exceptionally nice notebook.

the huge advantage of the atoma books is that you can take any page out of the notebook at any time at any position and either insert it at an other position or archive it. the kit itself looks like that

just a pack of pages and some alloy rings. it is really stunning when you assemble them to a real notebook and after the first some rings it gets easier to fiddle them together. the system is stunning and so easy and pretty that it makes simply a perfect tool.

i decided to never ever change notebooks again. i just archive out the old projects and always keep a current notebook with me. the current setup has three categories: the main project index ...

... a calendar (as you have single pages you can simply print on them) ...

... and a knowledge base. as i don't have to change notebooks anymore i can assemble a nice little knowledge base in the back of the notebook and never have to copy it again.

a nice thing to mention as well is the fact that my much loved Faber pencil fits in like a charm (at the bottom)

this notebook will remain the optimal setup for the coming time and will be improved over time by probably more categories and other handy things.

thanks again to my dad who had the right idea and the right place to search for this fantastic tool.

I played around with CMS systems recently for projects at work and for different projects at home and tried to find a system that is easy to use and easy to setup.

the last time i tested CMS systems is some years ago when CMS systems still were portals and nuke and its clones were state of the art. I distinguish between consulting ware and community ware. i tested php based projects as i love the RAM on my server and therefor JAVA was not an option. there are no nice perl based CMS systems though so i went with php.

i started with silverstripe as i know some of the guys and liked to play with a real kiwi product ... i somehow found out the hard way that it is consulting ware. it looks really promising but for a really simple webpage with just a couple of pages and some dynamic elements it was not the tool of choice.

next was the much hyped drupal and i have to admit that some concepts are nice but in the end it was too hard to fiddle a gallery in there and the millions of plugins and add-on projects were way too confusing. i gave up and went for the next one

joomla, well, thats the one i tried next and had a start to finish home run for a first rough version of the page. there are some strange concepts but in the end i was able to set up a page with a small gallery and some sub pages in about 2-3 hours. done that i am now lost in the CSS hell ...

i tested those with the goal to have a small page up in a short time and have to admit that none of them convinced me and in the future i will simply write pages of that size as a small catalyst project or i might have a look at rails again. it really looks like the faster way to simply write the stuff you need for the job.

one last word to JAVA based CMS as i tested some of them for work. i can't get over the fact that a CMS might take up to 10 minutes to start. that is not only bad design that is a nightmare and there is no excuse for it. JAVA programmers seem to assemble every lib they find to a huge monolithic beast and then just blame the slow hardware. hardware is no excuse for bad (missing?) software design.