New sites going live

I’m very happy to report two new projects going online. One is www.eightin08.com, another adaptation of Justin Tadlock’s Options theme. The other is www.friendsoffairness.com, which is, come to think of it, another adaptation of Justin Tadlock’s theme. Jeez, I wonder if there’s a message here!

The “Complete” Solution Is Dead; The Future Is Fractured

I frequently tell clients that the future is fractured. They usually have no idea what I mean by that and I’m not really sure even I know what that means. But I still believe it to be true. The future is fractured.

How many clients have I consoled who are stuck with “complete” web solutions, paying one vender for all the basic web needs: site hosting, email hosting, design and aesthetics, content management, site architecture, and email marketing campaign. In almost all cases, the company in question serves only one of these functions with skill and the others are always in some nightmarish stage. Your site looks great but it functions like crap. It functions fine but it’s ugly as sin, or your email never works, or you have no rss, or you can’t add social media links.

One of the biggest changes in the web economy over the past five or six years is the specialization of services.  More and more people are hosting a site on generic shared host, installing an open-source CMS, using Google for their email, and running email marketing on something like iContact or Feedburner. We can only expect this trend to continue as new multimedia services come online and existing open-source platforms are refined and specialised.

Indeed, we shouldn’t want it any other way. The beauty of specialization is that it becomes possible to use the best possible application for each function you need. The era of the “complete solution” is over. The future belongs to the consultant, who can pull all the pieces together to create “unique” solutions that fit your specific needs.

Wordpress v. Drupal

Ever wonder what the difference is between Wordpress and Drupal, and which you should choose. Well, as is always the answer: it depends. Performancing has a good expanation of what it, exactly, it depends on.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

I have about eight different Wordpress installations on several different hosts. As much as I look forward to new versions of WP, I dread updating every WP installation I own. It’s a boring and tedious process. It would be great if there was some way to automate the process … oh wait … there is! It’s called Wordpress Automatic Upgrade. I just upgraded this installation in less than 3 minutes. Sweet. Uh, just don’t forget to reactivate all your plugins after the installation is complete.

Update: I’ve discovered some bugs with this plugin. Specifically it seems to reset you character encoding to UTF-6 which will lead to all sorts of residule problems. You’ll need to change it back to UTF-8 once you’ve run the upgrade.

Joomla v. Wordpress

A debate I’m always having in my head is whether to use Joomla or Wordpress when developing a new site. I love Wordpress. It is definitely my weapon of choice. But there are limitations.

For one, the back-end still functions very much like a blog in that the primary content distinction is between Posts and Pages. While this is not really a problem, it can confuse some novice users into think Wordpress isn’t capable of accomplishing their needs.
[Read more]