Occasionally, I answer a question and I think, hmmm... maybe I should turn that into a blog post...In response to a question on the best web authoring tool for someone just getting started -- under consideration - a content management system (CMS) such as drupal as well as creating individual webpages.

So, I've been trying to figure out if I want to move to wordpress.com or use wordpress.org on my domain, or do something entirely different (I'm running drupal on my domain). Occasionally, I have considered moving over to wordpress.com as well... I like wordpress. It's not so much that I hate blogger, it's ok, but I've been wanting to do something with all of my baby* blogs for a long while. Anyhow, back when I created the baby* blogs, blogger didn't offer labels or categories (well, they still don't offer true categories). Wordpress.com wasn't available.

Overview

• What we are doing

  • IM

    • External (Chat Ref)

    • Internal (Serials, Ref)

  • Blogs

So you want to create an online newsletter, a magazine or e-zine? What should you use?There are many choices, some of which depend on budget size. My budget size= ZERO dollars.My investigation actually began in May with Drupal. These were reviewed as of August 2007.System requirements for most of these (but not all): Apache or IIS server; MySQL or another db server; PHP ; also: installation experience; templating; CSS, patience

• Drupal => Opensource. Largescale CMS (content management system); hosted on your server.

1. Have a vision.Check. I had that one a year ago (a regional arts magazine with topics both about art and by artists)2. Funding.The amount of $ you have to spend will affect everything else3. Hosting? Find a place to host it.I used some extra webspace I have.4.

I answered a question about metadata on a list, and I thought I'd post my answer in an abbreviated form:Yes, it is still important. ;-D

• Focus on the most relevant terms for a website. At various times, depending on their algorithms, some search engines have truncated keywords at a certain limit 25 words, even 250 characters. Any other that = seo spam So, choose keywords very very carefully and weight the most important ones at the beginning of the keywords list ;-)

• Use all of the metadata FIELDS that you can.

a little progress with drupal. I can't say that I've actually been working on this for 2 weeks. More like 2 days max total.Anyhow, I loaded the drupal zen template which is designed to be css templating. Whew! I might actually be able to have a site that is not a cookie cutter. Funny, I've stumbled across a few drupal sites that are so obviously running it (garland template anyone?)Secondly, I had a heck of time getting the tinymce (wsywyg editor) for posting, etc. loaded.D'oh! Should have read the install.txt instead of the forums.

Ok, I realize I haven't done a project update here in a while. so here goes (in addition to managing staff, project management, resolving complex problems, etc. in other words the day to day):

Continuing work with the CRDL (Civil Rights Digital Library) in the portal design. I think the metadata issues have been resolved which now means it's time for me to get busy on helping generate metadata.

This is a little bit old but still a good short overview of the new MS Expression Web Designer (think a much improved version of FrontPage):http://webstandards.raquedan.com/?p=107

Until IE becomes more standards compliant and all browsers began adhering strictly to the w3c coding standards, it will be nearly impossible to create one set of coding that renders beautifully across the various browsers. Many people do use one style sheet, but then include code specifically to work around junky IE.