I've converted the site from my former hand-coded version to Drupal. The reason for this is simply because it's easier to maintain and exponentially more flexible. I've also switched the Wordpress blog for Drupal and in fact they're both run from the same codebase so everything is unified now. I'm not sure if I will attempt to port my old stylesheet as I am no longer as satisfied with it as I once was and I find Drupal's built-in theme to be excellent as it is. I've tweaked the colours somewhat but otherwise the layout is the same. I'll be archiving the old site in a new location sometime soon.

I've put the finishing touches on a website for a local scale modellers club, IPMS Hamilton. The site was setup in about a week with the help of Drupal 6.0, an excellent open-source content management system that I have not used before now. I will certainly be using it again in the future, I am very impressed with it. The site itself is simple. The client was happy with a variation of the default theme so my main job was configuration and training. And yes, I know it's been a very long time since I posted here, but I'm hoping to be posting more now that I'm back into the webdesign business. I had taken a break from bringing on new clients but I am once again open for business!

Verisign, the company that controls the .com TLD (top-level domain) has announced that they will be increasing the wholesale price to registrars (the companies that sells the domains to consumers) of .com domains from $6.00/year to $6.42/year, a 7% increase.

With their recently renegotiated contract with ICANN, Verisign will be allowed to hike up the price 7% per year pretty much indefinitely. And with roughly 65 million .com domains currently registered, they stand to make about $27 million extra this year.

TechCrunch said it best: "It's good to be a monopoly."

Via TechCrunch

Let this be the beginning of a series of posts I'll be making every now and then to sing the praises of the many great open-source programs I use almost daily to do my job.

To start with, for no reason in particular other than it being the program I was using at the time I got this idea, I'll focus on Inkscape, a vector-image drawing program. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator.

The second in my series of downloadable templates, enjoy :)

Download | Demo

Minimal is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. You are free to use Minimal in any way you like as long as you preserve the license, and link back to me.

I've just created the first of (hopefully) many downloadable templates for anyone to use.

Download | Demo

Red 2.0 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. You are free to use Red 2.0 in any way you like as long as you preserve the license, and link back to me.

Recent dealings I've had with my most recent client have certainly shown me that what the world lacks right now is a decent PHP gallery system. Seriously, everything out there right now is overly-complicated to use, and difficult to integrate with a website needing more than just a gallery. Why can't there be a gallery as easy to use, integrate, and customize as WordPress?

Looks like the wait is finally over, a major vendor is now going to support Linux. That's right, Linux preloaded on a Dell Optiplex, Latitude, or Precision workstation. And it won't even be all that hard for Dell either; I have a Latitude D820 (work-issued), and Ubuntu Linux works very well on it "out of the box". If that's any indication of their other hardware, then they'll have an easy time adapting Linux to their computers.

I know, it is Dell we are talking about here... but honestly, Dell is one of only a few major companies that could pull this off, so I think this is definitely a good thing, despite their shortcomings.

Source: PCWorld via bit-tech.net

Just an update on yesterday's post, looks like getautomatix.com is back up and running now. The server move will occur soon, but you probably won't notice, if I do my job correctly :)

And to my recent influx of additional visitors: feel free to keep checking back here, I'll be sure to keep posting interesting content.

Seems that the Automatix website is down, and I happen to get a lot of traffic from people looking for it. Arnav and I are currently trying to contact the host to find out why and get it fixed. Soon as we have access to it all again, we're switching hosts. At this time I have no idea when it will be back up, and when we will move it.

UPDATE - 03/10/07: Looks like the site is all back up and running now, forums, wiki, repos and all :) Many thanks to the folks at Invision who restored our forum and upgraded it to the latest version.