Modern Website Building

The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

  • These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
  • Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
  • The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
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Case Thermistors

Mine were mis-located. I moved them as shown in the picture.

Case Thermistors

CPU thermistor on the back of the liquid cooling block.

SYS on the metal plate backing the motherboard.

That’s just my idea.

I don’t know anything better than Scotch Brand tape. Don’t use the cheap stuff since I’m guessing that eventually the sticky will come off and the thermistor will fall off.

– windy

TurPunkenClaus – For the Lazy Holiday Decorator

I like to decorate for the Holidays, but I’m a lazy decorator. I’d like to have a single yard ornament to put up before Halloween and remove after new years. I’ve designed the perfect thing. You might call it one of several things and you might make it in various ways.

TurPunkenClaus

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CoreHeaterQt Program

I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

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New Tires for XTerra

I got my XTerra in the fall of 2005. I only have 36K miles, and the tires aren’t bald, but I didn’t feel comfortable in the snow with the original tires. For some odd reason, probably to save money, the original tires were not really suitable for Oregon in the first place. I’m much happier with my new tires. They have an aggressive tread and are “siped” to increase traction in the rain. Siping [Seyeping] is a pattern of small slits in the tread.

One of the pictures below is a demo of siping at the tire store where two samples of rubber, one siped and one smooth, are dragged across a smooth surface that has water on it. It take much more force to pull the siped sample across the surface. Siping is not a new process and you can see some very minor sniping in the original tires, some of which is picking up gravel chips. But you can see the new tires are much more aggressively siped.

Click on a picture for a larger view.

Bad Laptop Hard Drive

Here’s a bad laptop hard drive I recently replaced. Since the drive is dead, I took off the label and removed the screws and cover to see the platters and arm. Don’t ever spin this drive up again, of course. Click on a picture for a larger view.

Seapine Surround SCM – A First Look

I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.

I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.

While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.

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