For many years I thought it was so cool to write my own software to manage my websites. I thought it gave me some sort of weird nerd street cred. Then I had a daughter and got married and have a real job and, well, I think you get the point.
Late last year I had a friend come up with a pretty good idea for a website. I really wanted to help him out so, I started looking at software to help me create a quick site. A friend of mine told me about some software called RapidWeaver. It's basically DreamWeaver for Mac's but it did allow me to quickly get a basic site up on the InterWebs. About a week after the site was live something cool happened...people started to visit the site on a pretty regular basis.
This made me have to rethink using something as simple as RapidWeaver for the site management. In steps Joomla. I had heard of it before and dabbled just a bit but this time I gave it a real test drive. I created a test database on my hosts server and made a test directory for Joomla on the site. Within a week I had a very professional looking website, with a great forum and some amazing tools to create things like a marketplace and contact forms. I was blown away by how smooth it all went and how many add-ons there are for it.
After that experience I've decided that I am going to be using Joomla for quite some time for most all of my websites. It just has an air of simplicity that I need but is powerful enough to create some great websites. I encourage anyone reading this to checkout Joomla.
I've also started using more and more computers to get work done. I'm working on PIC microcontrollers and that is most easily done on a Windows box, I'm working on Python/GTK/QT stuff and that is most easily done using Linux (Ubuntu for now), and I normally run on a Mac for day-to-day stuff. I do enough coding to keep myself busy in my spare time but I'm also doing quite a bit of documentation, schematic work and PCB design that I needed a place to store all of this data and be able to get to it from anywhere.
I kept hearing of Dropbox and I knew what it was but never looked into any further. I never had a use for it; I would just use a thumb drive and call it a day. Then my wife accidentally washed my thumb drive. Granted, I didn't lose any data. I just let it dry out before plugging it into anything but, it got me thinking, I need to have a reliable place to keep this data.
I installed Dropbox onto all of my computers and it works phenomenally well. It's fast and gives me peace of mind knowing that my data is almost always accessible and backed up. I'm not saying it's perfect and some of you may have problems with storing data on someone's server other than your own. For what I'm keeping there...it's perfect. Check it out here.
I've also moved my email hosting to Google using Google Apps...that's for another article though.
