varjohaltia: (Eye)
varjohaltia ([personal profile] varjohaltia) wrote2004-12-15 09:57 pm

Another day at work

Scene:
Me walking into the office with a steaming cup of tea, Joe bumping in at the same time.

Joe: "Remember those pages you got this morning about chemistry?"
Me: "Yeah?"
Joe: "Well, I went to check it out. Turns out they started demolition work on the building."
Me: "Oh."
Joe: "Would've been nice of them to tell us."
Me: "Yeah."

So, we spent the next hour going through the chemistry building, which had overnight been transformed from a grad-student-ville into a hard-hat zone full of big burly guys tearing things apart. And pulling out cold metal boxes, without gloves. Brrrr. But at least I got to feel big and burly.

Seriously, though, I really like the weather. If anything, it makes me miss winters in Finland. Everything's crisp and clear and sharp.

Other odds and ends:

Do any of you have experience with freeware content management systems? So far I've looked at Contenido and Typo3, but I'm not horribly happy with either.

Anyone in need of 1) a DVD-ROM drive? (Not writer, just reader) 2) a small digital pocket-sized radio (the kind that doesn't have a speaker but needs headphones.)?

The Snow Leopard in Me

[identity profile] hyanan.livejournal.com 2004-12-16 03:30 am (UTC)(link)
Likewise, I sometimes miss the crisp and clear and sharp feeling of a nice friggin' cold Boston winter.

But only sometimes. ;)

Re: The Snow Leopard in Me

[identity profile] varjohaltia.livejournal.com 2004-12-16 02:55 pm (UTC)(link)
I'd love to visit, I don't want to put up with it for five months ;-)

[identity profile] yotogi.livejournal.com 2004-12-16 01:28 pm (UTC)(link)
SCSI or ATA drive?

[identity profile] yotogi.livejournal.com 2004-12-16 04:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Let me get back to you after work on that :)

[identity profile] cinzazul.livejournal.com 2004-12-16 09:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Ooh DVD-Rom would be nice. I don't NEED one. But I'd like one.

[identity profile] chipotle.livejournal.com 2004-12-17 03:13 am (UTC)(link)
Define "content management system."

Claw & Quill uses a freeware one, Textpattern, that most often shows up as a weblogging tool, but it's far more flexible than things like Movable Type or WordPress are. Textpattern includes some relatively nifty features and has one of the nicest templating systems that I've seen (all XML-based, and you can write "plugins" in PHP that provide new tags). On the downside, it doesn't have a lot of features whether or not the ones that are there are verifiably nifty, and documentation primarily consists of people puzzling things out on the Textpattern forums, hoping that every so often the developer will emerge from his cave in France and throw out a patch.

CMS

[identity profile] varjohaltia.livejournal.com 2004-12-17 04:33 am (UTC)(link)
Well, good documentation is a must. If I have to figure everything out by trial, error and newsgroup searches, I might as well start writing my own.

Templating is the most important feature: Separate content from presentation so that when the university decides to update its style, the pages update with minimal effort.

Page trees and navigation: I want the system to automatically generate navigation panes with links to documents "beneath" the current one. Essentially something to help us see with a glance what categories there are, what pages are beneath all, and makes sure that they have respective links. (So the above really applies both to user navigation and site administration.)

Some form of a news system that lets us post announcements which then automatically age out.

Finally, the ability of giving a fairly simple interface for non-technical staff to add articles would be swell.

If it had some form of gallery or media file management that'd be even better.