Outside The Box blogs, Autodesk University anecdotes, articles, blog digests, and product news in chronological order. See Writing for the same material by subject.
(continued from Part I)
The kind of web site I wanted to create is usually built on top of a Content Management System (CMS) that becomes the administrative user interface as well as the framework for web pages that get served to web site visitors. The first thing I learned is that there are thousands of CMS products floating about the internet, from simple “guest book” type scripts to full blown corporate extranet management systems designed for use by tens of thousands of employees and customers. I’ve also been looking for an excuse to learn ASP.NET, so I decided to narrow my search to CMS software that was based on ASP.NET. Finally, the software had to be free or very inexpensive.
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I’m sure that by now all of you have heard about the latest “chain letter” circulating about the blogosphere. It sounds suspiciously like bloggers patting each other on the back. To wit, I’ve been “tagged” by Evan Yares (http://www.evanyares.com/display/ShowJournal?moduleId=399489&categoryId=31338). On principle, and just because I like to be contrary, I refuse to pass this one on, but I’ll go part of the way since there is some redeeming social value to the premise. The five:
I was a difficult child. I ran away from home routinely before I started Kindergarten. I still have memories of the summer just before my third birthday of almost daily forays with my dog “Shep” into the woods adjacent to my parents’ property. Sometimes, after a dispute with my parents, I would take off deep into the woods plotting revenge. One day, after some altercation or other, I narrowly escaped my whip-wielding mother by diving under a barbed wire fence and racing into the woods before she could catch up. My mother spent hours searching for me, and finally spotted me hiding under some brambles. After rounding me up and taking me back home, mom tied me with a rope to a post outside our workshop until my father came home from work. When my father came home, he didn’t have the heart to punish me further.I was raised Amish. When I was 12, I installed a battery operated radio tuner in my basement workshop, and wired the output through a hidden network of wires (that included our hot water heating pipes as one side of the circuit) into a recessed wall outlet beside my bed so that I could listen to the radio discreetly from my bed through a small earpiece. Later I did something similar when my parents bought my first horse and buggy, by hiding the guts of a portable stereo under the seat.Amish children are expected to quit school after the 8th grade and begin working (traditionally on the family farm, although farming is becoming less common these days). I chose to continue my education by going on to high school while working evenings and summers to support myself. For this, I was ridiculed and called names in school, and my parents caught a lot of flack from their church elders for my actions (which they had very little control over). I chose not to go on to college after graduating in the top 5 of my class in high school.My first full time job was as a brick mason, following in my father’s footsteps. I did masonary and other construction work the last two summers of high school, and full time for a year or so after I graduated. One day a family friend called to ask if I would be interested in a “computer job” programming a CNC punch press. The company had unceremoniously fired the previous programmer and had nobody with the skills to replace him. My interview went something like “Do you know anything about computers?” “Yes.” “Can you start tomorrow?” It was at that company where I discovered AutoCAD, and the rest, as they say, is history.A few years ago, I played poker on a show broadcast across the United States on Fox SportsNet. The show was sponsored by UltimateBet.net (http://www.ultimatebet.net), an online poker site. The winner received 10 thousand dollars and a chance to play again for 200 thousand dollars. I got there by beating several thousand other players in a series of online tournaments. I placed third out of the six finalists at the table, so I walked away with nothing more than an all expense paid (and lavish) weekend in Los Angeles, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing my kids got to watch me on national TV.Go Buckeyes!
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I’m one of those throwbacks that learned HTML by typing it in Notepad. I’ve since moved up to using the Visual Studio editor; it does syntax coloring, error highlighting, and has a “design” mode for previewing the page, yet it’s a very utilitarian editor that I feel comfortable with. I do use FrontPage when I need to manage connections between multiple HTML pages, but mostly in raw HTML mode. When I use WYSIWYG design mode in FrontPage, I inevitably end up cleaning out a lot of unnecessary junk that it includes in the generated HTML. I think it’s fair to say that my obsession with clean HTML results in utilitarian, functional, and standards conformant presentations – but with a decided lack of graphic appeal.
The ManuSoft and CADLock web sites are examples of this utilitarian approach. The ManuSoft site uses no fancy graphics and relies very little on client side scripting, and it supports a hierarchical navigation system using only standard hyperlinks. I like that minimalist approach, but the price for clean HTML being served to clients is a lot of work on the server to maintain the site. As a result, I don’t update the site very often because it’s just too difficult.
This blog was the first step toward realizing a goal of making it easier to add new content. After all, the raison d’être of blogs is to minimize the latency between the writer’s stream of consciousness and words on the web by making it irresistibly easy to add new content. This is precisely why blogs have become so popular.
Unfortunately, I soon found limitations with my blog. Tabular lists of data still require manual HTML input, it is difficult to customize the content area outside the individual posts on the blog page, and most aspects of the hosted blog software are outside my control. I wanted more.
The Autodesk vs. Open Design Alliance lawsuit gave me an excuse to take the next step: implement the “blog” concept across an entire web site with software that I control. So, I decided to swallow my pride and learn how to create an entire web site that would be so easy to update that I would actually update it frequently – even if it meant messy HTML code. Stay tuned for Part II, choosing a hosting service and deciding which software to use.