Choking on Acronyms

You resonate

Like a harp

Left on

Apollo's altar,

Catching the wind

At the end of day

Giving forth music

As the westering sun

Turns the

Wine dark sea to gold.

I haven't been idle...really. Joomla has just put out a second Beta prior to coming out with a new release candidate. Supposedly the new version is much better than the old. I was faced with the prospect of using the older version or waiting until the bugs had been worked out with the 1.5 Beta 2. This new Beta version was "primarily for the developers and designers" which I decidedly am not. Also the more I read about such things, the more I realized that I really needed to know HTML, not to mention PHP, etc. Otherwise, I would just be blindly following directions with little knowledge of the subject.

So I have decided to learn HTML, CSS, PHP, and whatever; I am terrible at understanding acronyms. I have been reading a book on HTML and have just begun reading about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and have been surprised at how uncomplicated it looks. I hesitate to use the word simple, because it isn't, but it really does not seem that difficult to understand. Of course, I haven't gotten past the basics, so I should keep my astonishment to myself, because I'm sure I shall have to eat these words later. After I have learned my basics, perhaps then the new version of Joomla will be out, and I will be able to make a better decision as to the best way to proceed.

Joomla...I'm getting excited now...

I opened up Joomla the other free open source web maker that comes highly rated, and have been looking at the EXTREMELY well written directions! Thus far, it seems light years ahead of Drupal in the way that it is explained and the way that it operates. Everything is so logical and so incredibly well presented. I haven't finished going through the directions yet and have yet to make my trial web site, but I'm already many days ahead of my pace studying Drupal.

Drupal is "said" to be the most powerful and the most flexible, and where I am at right now I certainly can NOT see this. Joomla's user manual is so well organized and so clear in its presentation, that it seems to be inspired. The Drupal instructions seem to be so diffuse and disorganized that it makes the entire learning process a slow and laborous process--more than the content warrants.
So, I am sure that I shall be commenting further on the two programs in the future.

The weather here has been sunshine interspersed with rain--mostly rain all day today in fact. The wind is blowing the little paper-like cups that cover the growing tips of the Douglas Fir all over the place. As the twig tips grow, the little brown cups fall off. Many flowers, too numerous to mention now, but soon I would like to post some photos.

Drupal, drupal...bah...

I think that I have been wasting my time trying to figure out the basics of the web building program, Drupal. I have no idea why I attempted this time consuming project. My current website, texified.com, is run by a very easy and intuitive program. Supposedly Drupal is able to be expanded more and has an active community of people who are continually modifying and developing the program. So far though I have seen nothing impressive about it, and I think that I might try Joomla next.

After over a week of effort I have finally been able to construct a very basic site (not put onto the web yet--if ever!), but so far it seems cumbersome and non-intuitive. Now I am speaking as a complete novice as far as my knowledge about such things goes. I sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the directions which assume a modicum of prior knowledge at least.

I feel sorta like the non-mechanical fella who is trying to put some oil in in his car. The directions say to find the oil cap, remove and add the oil. The poor guy looks all over the car trying to find the right place before finally realizing that the the directions have failed to say to open the hood! There have been a couple of incidents like this for me in following the directions.