BPRogers.com

Well, I just had a problem with my web hosting provider. On the upside they responded to my trouble ticket in less than 15 minutes! This may sound amazing, but this is actually the norm for this provider. I've been with dathorn.com for about 3 years now and the experience has been top notch. Before this I was with a company called featureprice that promised unlimited bandwidth and storage. Everything went ok for about two years and then the business fell apart and I was left with a huge mess as they presumably headed into bankruptcy. Lesson learned, cheapest != best. Dathorn is not the cheapest around but the service is great and the features are good.

I've considered moving because they do cost quite a bit more than the competition, but every time I have to use their support (which is infrequent) I think twice.

After talking with a friend about RapidWeaver and the possible creation of a new web site he mentioned having looked at content management systems recently. I was intrigued and proceeded to take brief looks at mambo, joomla, and drupal. All of these look very powerful and reasonably easy to use, but the setup up time is still much greater than with RapidWeaver. If you are looking to manage a large number of items or expect to blog five times a day they are probably worth your time. But if you aren't a tech geek and just want something simple you are better off with a simple client side WYSWIG editor imho.

In my very brief experimentation I liked them in the following order:
joomla
mambo
drupal

It's worth mentioning that joomla and mambo share the same codebase but mambo has some "interesting" licensing issues. Drupal looks like it is the best thought out of the three but it would also require considerably more time commitment to set up.

Well, its been a number of years now since I made any major changes to my website. This has been because life has been busy, but its also been the result of not wanting to deal with annoying complicated or simplistic web page design tools. Thankfully I've happened on a nice new tool through MacHeist called RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is a simple to use web page editing tool that is great if you are just looking to get a reasonable looking website up in a short amount of time (it certainly beats the pants off my old website that I put together manually with Mozilla and Photoshop). That's all for this first little blog test, hopefully more to come in the future.