My weekly Warhammer Wrapup is up at WeekendGamer:
http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/the-weekly-warhammer-wrapup-5/
Also, Don’t forget to vote for me in the .eduGuru Blogger Contest:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DotEduGuru/~3/463906741/id1326-blogger-search-vote.html
Thanks!!
My weekly warhammer wrapup is up and ready for you’re viewing pleasure at WeekendGamer’s blog
http://waaagh.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/realm-war-changed-or-standing-still/
Check it out!!
I have been dabbling with the idea of separating my Tech/Work posts from my personal blog. Just as I was thinking of purchasing another domain, along came the .eduGuru Blogger(s) Search Contest.
So, I decided to jump on over and write a guest post to enter the contest. Head on over to .eduGuru and check out my post and don’t forget to vote for me:
http://doteduguru.com/id1182-xenu-broken-link.html
Thanks!
A little late in reporting it, but my Weekend Warhammer Update is up on Weekend Gamer.
http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/weekly-warhammer-wrapup-episode-3/
Due to the overwhelming reaction I received to my Twitter Post yesterday that I was going to vote Obama, I thought I’d post a few thoughts on why I voted for Obama and my thoughts post-election.
I am a firm believer that YOU are responsible for your own situation. Especially when finances are involved. If you are not happy with your situation, change it. Be glad you are an American and do it. So, no, I am not looking for Obama to “Fix” my personal financial situation. However, I think most people will agree that the U.S. Economy is less than stellar. I have heard countless “Joe the Plumber” rips on Obama’s plan to “Redistribute Wealth”. Here’s the deal folks, the republicans have been redistributing your wealth to companies that ship your jobs overseas for far too long. It is time to close these loopholes and start the flow back into the middle class.
I don’t know that Obama’s plan for health care will be fix we need. However, I certainly don’t think that taxing the little health care benefit I do get and then giving that money to pharmaceuticals and insurance companies will do anything but make it worse.
As you can see, those two issues, along with Education, were the major deciding points for me towards Obama. To add to the list, I did not like the thought that Palin could’ve ended up running our country. Yeah, Barak doesn’t have much experience either, but he does at least know Constitutional Law. That’s my personal opinion of her that was formed mainly from watching the Katie Couric interview. Feel free to disagree with me.
The hardest decision for me was abortion. I am against abortion. However, I have to look at the options. If Mckain was president, and he happened to get the “One More Judge” that they’ve been telling me about for the last eight years, and there happened to be a case that came to the supreme court to challenge abortion, what is reasonably going to change. The most I can see happening is stricter laws against abortion. It will be many years before they make it illegal. On the hand, I don’t see anything changing in the other direction with Obama. Like I said, it was a really hard decision for me.
I think that this is great time for our country. I have more hope than I have every had for our country. But, I have to step back for a moment and remind people to not put all thier bets in one jar. I am afraid that America is going to put all their hopes into Obama fixing her. Some news for you: It starts with you and in your own home, not the white house.
In Obama’s acceptance speech he put it like this “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.” I haven’t been around for many elections, but I share this Hope. I have never been more optimistic and hopeful than today. God Bless our new President!
I have been working with Expression Engine for the past couple of months on a website redesign for WhoIsGrace.com that we just launched last night. Having worked with a few content management systems in the past, including Drupal and Joomla, all the way to the big guys like DotCMS and RedDot, I was happy to take on the task of building a site in Expression Engine.
Expression Engine is a PHP-based content management system that I would put somewhere in between Wordpress and DotCMS. The focus for EE is mosting a site that is basically a collection of blogs. For the free core version of the CMS you get a fairly full-featured content management system. If you decide to pay the extra to get the personal licence, you get access to quite a bit more that makes EE a viable CMS for a small operation.
While EE does offer a Corporate Edition at a reasonable price, I wouldn’t recommend it for a large enterprise. If you have the ability to host a server that you have root access to, DotCMS is still free and has way more features. Though if your a smaller oparation or individual and are stuck with hosting your site on shared hosting plan, I would recommend EE as long as you have a little programming know how.
EE handles blog-type content very well. It is very easy to set up multiple blogs and have them up and running very quickly. It also has a nice mailing list module that makes sending a newsletter fairly easy. Forms take quite a bit to set up if you want to do something custom, but there is a nice easy way to set up a contact form without too much hassle. Though this might sound silly, I actually thought that making static content was too much hassle than it was worth.
EE’s Template system is quite different than most CMSs I’ve played with. I think of creating a few templates such as: Homepage, One Column, Two Column, and Three Column. And then each page follows one of those templates. In EE each page is a Template of it’s own. Now, you can do things like create templates to embed in other templates. That way your you can reuse some content. But they way it all works in EE just left me scratching my head quite a bit. I found myself thinking .. “Now how am I going to hack EE to make it do this” … way too much for my liking.
One thing that I really like about EE is how it handles structured content. You can basically define your entries to have any feilds you want. It was a little hard to figure out how to do things like image fields and the such, but the upload file functionaility in the Editor is nice a feature. My users don’t have to worry about FTPing their images and documents to the system beforehand anymore which is really nice. I also tried to integrate TinyMCE into the system, but I didn’t have much luck with it. If I knew more about TinyMCE I am sure it would’ve been possible, but I had to spend my time figureing other stuff out.
Another strength of EE is in it’s modules and plugins system. I found it very easy to find and install modules to do a lot of the things that I needed EE to do. One set in particular were the modules anmd extension from Mark Hout.
Expression Engine is a good choice for anyone that cannot get their own server with admin access. It is as easy to install and use as something like Drupal or Joomla, but comes packed with a lot more features. For $100 it makes a great buy for an indivudual wanting to run their own CMS. I would definitly recommend using EE to those users. However, for the enterprise, I still reccomend using and Enterprise level CMS like DotCMS.
If you do plan on trying out Expression Engine, I would highly recommend reading some of the tutorials from Train-EE. I found his series on building a church website a ton of help when I was just starting out.
My Weekend Warhammer Wrapup is up and ready on WeekendGamer:
http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/the-weekly-warhammer-wrapup-2/
Go check it out.
My good friend at Weekend Gamer asked me to start writing a weekly post about my exploits in Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning. I was glad to pick up the challenge. So head on over to WG and read the post if you are interested:
http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/the-weekend-warhammer-wrapup
This year for my Mother’s Birthday we (meaning my siblings) decided to take her out to the Medieval Feast at the Riverside Inn. I have to give the credit to my Brother Brian for the idea.–not only the credit, but the thanks. I don’t get to do this kind of stuff enough.
The show starts out with your bar wench or knave introducing her/himself. These guys were the boon of the show. Everything is done in the setting of medieval England, hosted by the Queen herself, and the knave we had did an excellent job of making that setting come alive for us. After the drink orders are taken care of, they start the intro act.
The acting and singing were great. Hilarious. Then the first course is served. Soup, salad and bread. But one twist, No Silverware. The first rule of the Riverside Medieval Feast is no silverware. What a hoot!
The meal was excelent, the show was hillarious, and I’m really glad we went. Add to all that the beautiful setting at the Riverside, and you got yourself one heck of a night. I would greatly recommend anyone interesting in this kind of thing to check it out next year. They even have a few shows left for this year if you can get tickets: http://www.theriversideinn.com/theater/Feast_2008.html
Today will start what is for me the most anticipated opening of the past 2 years. I have been waiting for Warhammer Online, Age of Reconing to come online for quite some time now. In truth, I have actually been playing the game in beta for about 6 months now.
WAR has everything the casual to hardcore MMO player wants in game, minus a few things (A little about that later). They really do a lot for the “I’d kill my grandmother just to get 1 more hit point” peeps while keeping the game fun and engaging for the casual to mid-core gammers. Let me go over a few of the features:
Posting tweet...
