Site Information

More than you ever wanted to know. (Preface)

This site started back in 2005 with a cool little program from apple called iWeb. It has since evolved into a Joomla! content management system or CMS (I guess technically a WCMS). More techy stuff in a moment.

When iWeb came out, it was one of the easiest and nicest ways to create your own web pages, galleries, and blogs. In order to do anything fancy on the web at that time, you really needed to know some things about web development, and then you had the whole "it looks great in firefox and safari, but internet exploder demolishes my site!" coding/workaround/hair-pulling problems. (If you haven't stopped using IE in favor of Chrome, Safari, Firefox or just about ANY other browser - you should stop reading this and go download an alternate browser right now, I'm not kidding, I gave you the links right there.)

If you don't believe me, have a look at this...

So iWeb was an easy and free but more importantly, a quick way to get content on the web, and it looked "ok" in IE. It even helped people with little or no experience (or time) with web stuff, to get a page on the web.  Here is a look at my original photography site. There were also some online solutions available - see my families personal site. Enter web 2.0 and things start to get better, with the ability to publish content to the web right out of many programs or applications. I published a ton of web galleries and proofing galleries like this, most of them out of Apples Photo editing application, Aperture. Imagine publishing 400 images to the web with a push of a button - I was elated! Here is an example, photos from my sons' Huskers Football game against the Mavericks.

Now, factor in; myspace, facebook, youtube, and the myriad of other places you can put content!

So as more and more information and content gets pushed to the web, It starts to get inconvenient to keep track of where everything is and link it all together, and no search, and speed becomes an issue - not so elated anymore.

Enter WCMS.

"Unlike Web-site builders, a WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators." (source)

But there is more to it than that. Without reprinting/posting the entire wikipedia article, here are the main benefits:

So one place to store and categorize and search and present and manage your content - that's actually fairly easy to use!

Why not just use Facebook?

Many people getting into the web wonder about this, as it is a super easy way to post content, pictures, stay in touch with people etc.

I actually suggest Facebook as a starting point for everyone - it's a great way to get "out there" (I use it too). Facebook is like the phone book of today. Everyone uses it. But if you are advertising, you may want be on billboards, radio, television and maybe even bus stop benches, in addition to the phonebook right? Those are all traditional ways to increase your presence, your consciousness in the minds of others. The web is the same way. Is everyone going to come to your website? No more than everyone is going to come to your place of business. But if someone did "find" you on facebook, myspace, google, or wherever, it would sure be nice to have a place for them to "come see it all". Why just be in the phonebook/facebook when the internet allows you to have your own mega-mall/website!

Your website looks expensive

My website costs $100 - a year!

Yeah, I had to do all the setup myself, but the beauty about choosing the right CMS and hosting solution is that after setup, it is really inexpensive to maintain.

How did you make your site?

I didn't actually make it, I set it up. Why reinvent the wheel? Hundreds and even thousands of people with way more design and code talent than I have already did it. Like my car, I want to drive, not futz under the hood. So I put together what seems to me to be the best combination of resources.

1. There are a lot of CMS's - I use Joomla! because I believe it is the very best one out there. It happens to be free.
2. There are lots of templates for Joomla!, many good ones for free, but I use RocketTheme templates. They happen to make templates for Drupal and Wordpress too if that's more your thing.
3. There are a lot of hosting companies, I use my own Boutique web servers on the backbone of the internet in Las Vegas Nevada. About the same price as go daddy, but much faster. (Think Hot Rod instead of family car).

Even if you made it this far, you might still want to skip the rest... (at least click the "our facility" link below and look at the pretty graphic)

Now for the Techy Stuff

at this writing*:

PHP Built on:Darwin Kernel Version 10.4.0: Fri Apr 23 18:28:53 PDT 2010; root:xnu-1504.7.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Database Version:5.0.88-log

Database Collation:utf8_general_ci

PHP Version:5.3.1 mySQL version mysqlnd 5.0.5

Web Server:Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 PHP/5.3.1

Web Server to PHP interface:apache2handler

Joomla! Version:Joomla! 1.5.18 Stable [ wojmamni ama wojnaiki ] 27-May-2010 18:00 GMT

RocketTheme:March 2010 Crystalline template with Gantry 3.0.7

2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - 4GB - 500GB Raid1

Mac OS X Server 10.6.4 (Build 10F569)

*software and hardware are continually updated, you get the idea. I won't bore you with stuff like nameservers, you can do an nslookup if you want that.

Where I host:

I use the SuperNAP in Las Vegas.

For people who know what it means, this quote and link pretty much says it all. (The "facility" link has a graphic that makes what they said easy to visualize)