Silicon Chisel

WordPress 2.5 was released this week and it was so nice that I decided it was worth converting my old Joomla installation over to WordPress for the main Silicon Chisel site. Another incentive is that my personal blog is also in WordPress - as well as a few other sites I manage, so it just generally eases the maintenance load.

The first cut over went pretty well, aided by the “MAMBO2WORDPRESS IMPORT WIZARD“ script by Rodney Blevins which - with some modifications for table names and the like - at least allowed me to get the primary content into WordPress.

It will likely take another week or so to get everything settled in, and finalize the plugins - but then I should be able to get back to writing about technology. Some topics I plan to cover soon include:

• Reviews of the Mac web design packages RapidWeaver and Sandvox.
• A look at the “big three” content management systems - well, at least as far as I see it, anyway - Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.
• Some of the new Web 2.0 sites I’ve been beta testing.

Many years ago I was a heavy Mac user, as well as a Mac developer. Then I was more or less forced to adopt the Windows PC - partly for economic reason, partly because I entered the PC game industry.

Recently, though, I acquired a MacBook Pro and am loving it. Not just for the fun of using a Mac again, but also for the fact that it makes a great development machine for web applications. So the site will be adding reviews and articles about the Mac, and using the Mac for software devlopment.

A new version of the successful psychotherapist directory - Find-a-Therapist.com - was launched this week. It features a complete rewrite from the ground up for speed, ecommerce support, and deployability across multiple platforms. A sister site for psychotherapy information - Find-a-Therapist.info - was launched as well.

I’ve added a nice CSS template for the StikiPad online Wiki service to the files area. It uses the “Classic” layout style - just duplicate that in your “My StikiPad”, then paste in the new CSS and update the reference to it in the Layout.

Last month I completed development work on NewOrleans.com, the site for the city of New Orleans. This was a massive rework of a legacy site, some parts of which had been around for many, many years. The new deployment’s core is the Joomla CMS. Supporting are phpAdsNew for banner ads, Gallery2 for photos, and Simple Machines Forums.

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I just finished a little project for a friend; building a site for his upcoming Indy movie (hey, I’m 5 miles from Hollywood, what do you expect). It’s fairly basic, but it does use Exposé for the various photo galleries.

[ Visit Site ]

LTN is a new local interest TV network for the Los Angeles area. With 9 shows broadcasting new episodes each week there’s a lot of content. The content team has 6 people creating articles and media. I chose Joomla as our CMS foundation for the site.

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This weekend I’m releasing a little Mambot for Joomla/Mambo that I built for a project at a TV station. It’s intended for sites which need to link out to adult content and puts up an age verification dialog before proceding to the link. The code is a little basic, there is no nice control panel to set the text for the pop-up. That can all be edited in the files - this needed to be done in a hurry so niceties were left for later.