RasterWeb!

I’ve been working on this application that manages content. I guess you could call it a content management system, or CMS. What another CMS? Don’t worry, I’m not out to compete with with anyone in the CMS space, it’s something I need for my own purposes. I did look at a number of open-source CMS’s but none fit my requirements at the time. At some point in the future I might release it under an open-source license, but I’m not too worried about that yet. It’s pretty specific in what it does, so don’t worry, you’re not missing anything special.

As for the code itself, it’s nothing brilliant, it’s written in Perl, and uses a few simple tables in MySQL for storage, but it works, and I understand every line of code… on a good day anyway. While we (we being myself and the other person involved in this project) discuss features, I find myself saying:

We could do that, technically it’s not that difficult, and I can think of a number of ways of doing it, but the hard part will be building a good interface to manage it.

And that my friends, is the holy grail, as it were, of application building. It’s not an amazing revelation, we’ve known this for quite a while, but I’ve been thinking more and more about it lately. The key in all of that is the word “good” which is why I emphasized it, I didn’t just make it italic, I emphasized it…

While developing, I’m spending more time dealing with the interface issues than anything else. I too am promoting web standards, I mean, who hasn’t needed a CMS that works in Lynx? Seriously though, I understand the importance of creating valid pages that work, and I also understand that building tools that are easy to use, and powerful, is not always easy. That’s OK, it’s just the sort of challenge I like.

As noted on Scripting News, all the cool kids have their birthdays today, Sheila, Andrea, Paul McCartney…

Today just happens to be my birthday as well, just in case, you know, you were wondering…

What’s that? You didn’t get to send a gift yet? Please send your credit card number to pete@rasterweb.net and I’ll pick out a nice gift for myself. Thanks…

Keep an eye on WordPress, it’s a descendant of b2, which I looked at a while back. WordPress is making good progress, it appears to be a nice clean system that focuses on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. It’s also a PHP/MySQL thing, and is released under the GPL. All good things indeed.

I know we’ve all been told at one time or another to RTFM, and I usually do, but due to the fact that we’ve lived in four different houses in the last six years, we’ve, um… misplaced a few manuals along the way. I’m sure you’ve done the same, unless you’re a real bureaucrat who enjoys filing everything in triplicate.

So, due to the fact that I’ve not always been able to find the fine manual needed, I’ve hit more that a few web sites looking for the manual, and let me tell you, a company that manufactures consumer products, and wants to improve the customer experience, would do well to provide easy to find PDF‘s of all of their manuals for download.

I’ve managed to get quite a few manuals for our major appliances, and it’s quite helpful to have them around, even if you still have the original dead-tree version. When the female asked me how to program the speed dial on our phone, I said “What’s the model number?” and had the answer, and the manual, within a few minutes. Hooray for companies that get it!

Remember those commercials with the Maytag Man, and how he was so lonely because he never had to do any service, because their machines were so reliable? Well that’s all changed…

Our Maytag washing machine started acting up, blowing the GFI circuit, leaking water everywhere, and not spinning properly, so we called for service. I knew I should have expected trouble when we got the machine, as it’s the ‘Performa’ model. (Long-time Mac users are chuckling right now…)

The Maytag Man managed to do a quick-fix with some electrical tape, and said he’d return again with a new part. What was the problem? Seems a hosr developed a leak, and was ‘peeing’ (his term) water onto the motor, causing havoc with the normal wash cycle. He said that the used to use a hard rubber hose, but switched to a corrugated plastic hose at some point, speculating that perhaps they found a different supplier. I think what he really meant was that Maytag wanted to save a few bucks by using a cheaper part. I could go one step further by saying they used chaper parts so that you’d have to call for service and be billed for that, but I won’t go that far. Yet. (Hmmm, looking through the owner’s manual I notice that they will replace parts at no cost, but you will be charged for labor, mileage, and transportation.)

The good news is that now I know how to repair a washing machine. Well, some washing machine problems. Add this to my garbage disposal autopsy a month ago (yes, it was successful, and that works fine now as well) and I’m racking up the home improvement points. Slowly, anyway…