by Andrew Mayfield
Wow check out these awesome graphs from gapminder.org, “free software that visualises human development”. Fantastic way of presenting statistics. Isn’t interactivity great? It makes learning fun!
While on the topic of sustainability, have you considered your Triple Bottom Line lately?
Well, this supports my claim that you really don’t need a car when you live in Wellington CBD. More workers in Wellington CBD than Auckland CBD. I didn’t know that.
On a related note, I really like how my gmail calendar (using ghs) sends me sms messages 15mins before my appointments. Just enough time to get to a meeting anywhere in Wellington CBD even if I’ve forgotten all about it. Better than phone calendar reminders, somehow much less irritating.
So after knowing the team at Silverstripe for years and thinking for the same amount of time that I should try out their CMS, I am right now giving up my Saturday to do just that. It suddenly occurred to me that I should blog about it while I do it. Please remember that this is not so much a review as my log of my first encounter, I may well be an idiot (but if that be true, I could hardly figure it out for myself now could I), and by the time you read this, there could be a new version of Silverstripe. I am using 2.01.
I am going to rebuild the Spikefin website. Currently it has no CMS although in truth that is no big deal when you are both the developer and maintainer of a site. Something I expect to change over time as I have been the maintainer of the Spikefin site in name only (the “mechanic’s car” syndrome).
First, lets start with the reasons I have taken so long to give it a go:
So why give it a go now?
Ok lets get moving.
INSTALLATION
First I downloaded the php-based installer and ran it on a linux server. I was highly impressed when it told me exactly what things were not up to scratch on that machine, namely I need to upgrade PHP and MySQL and allocate more RAM to PHP. These things are not an option right now on that box, so…
Second I downloaded the Windows installer and ran it on my XP laptop. All sweet (of course, I hear you say, but I am always wary of anything that installs servers, dbs and uses ports, presuming that I will end up spending hours scratching my head). I now have a default site accessible at http://localhost:3000/home/. My first question is whether I have to have that “home” bit there for the homepage? I’ll see about that later.
NOW LETS START USING IT
Log in using defaults. Not asked to change them, easy enough to do under Security. Tried to set up a name for my site and basic settings (whatever they might be) like that, can’t find where to do that though.
Everything looks very nice. The fading tooltip in the bottom right looks nice too, but it is a disparate rollover to which I am fundamentally opposed - good for status messages but bad for tooltips.
Went looking for presentation related settings. I guess I was expecting to find some sort of theme chooser. Clicked through the help docs but they don’t mention any presentation related topics in there. Found *a* theme on the silverstripe website and installed it. Having made no content changes the layout was screwy for the example homepage so I uninstalled it again for now.
Ok now following tutorial 1. Pretty much what I’ve done so far. Install the theme provided there. Looks the same as the default?
So I get that Page.ss is the template file. I’d like to have been recommended something to edit/view it with already and told how to configure that something so that I get code colouring. Presume ss stands for silverstripe. I thought it was stylesheet to begin with. I’ve chosen Notepad++ to edit the file for now. Added ss to the User Extensions for HTML under the Settings -> Styler Configurator and reopened the file. Colourful.
Making progress. Good tutorial btw. However, I have a problem. The home page has disappeared from the live site. I’ve made a few more pages and published everything, and visited with ?flush=1 to clear the template cache, but the Products page is behaving like the home page, actually it just seems like the navigation is screwed in general. AHA! I refreshed the whole admin page and found that actually the home page has become a child of the products page and some other page is a child of that in there. No wonder I was confused. How did that happen? Several pages now show as unpublished. Bit more drag and drop and now its ok. Is there no way to publish everything at once?
Getting my priorities straight, I am trying to make a page called Fish Fun where I want to put the Spikefin Slalom Game for now. Have put my swf in the assets folder and clicked the flash icon on the toolbar in the CMS. I’m told to choose a folder from a dropdown box but there’s nothing in the box to choose from. Stuck. Ok sorted for now, have just found the html button and put the flash object tag in there myself and that seems to have worked fine. Onward with the tutorial. New templates…
Having real trouble getting it to use my new template for the home page. Seems simple enough but it just isn’t changing. I’ve flushed the cache. I’ve triple checked my settings and the filenames. Stuck. Ok sorted now, it seems that I need to run the db build each time I add or remove .ss files (not just ?flush=1) which I didn’t gather from the tutorial, I thought it was just php code pages.
Tutorial 1 now complete. Time for a coffee.
Ok Tutorial 2 has gone without a hitch. Great news. Makes me think my father could be using this himself to build his new Mayfield Audio site that he’s been wanting for years… Looking forward to the blog plugin though. It seems a little silly to create a page for each news entry.
Tutorial 3 has been going well, except that I ticked “Email form on submit” which has given a bunch of problems. Guess I’ll leave that for now. Definitely want a contact form to be sending messages through as email though. Racing a bit now. Skipping the poll creation, looks pretty cool though.
Tutorial 4. Site Search.
There we go. I now have the basics of a new Spikefin website. Better write some content!
Conclusions thus far:
I’m thinking of officially changing my weekend from being Sat & Sun to being Sun & Mon, or maybe Sun & Wed? Can’t decide. I do know that having a day off per week when everybody else has a day off is great, but having a day off when everybody else DOES NOT have a day off is possibly even better. So clearly, I want both, but do I want two days together, or to break the week up some more? The main push for this is that working on the weekend is so very productive (no distractions, its amazing how much gets done), but for reasons of sanity and variety it is very important not to miss the weekend entirely.
Yesterday my little (taller) brother Matthew started his own freelance graphics and photography company. He rang me to find out what to put on an invoice. The invoice is the first thing he did (well, other than study photography for years, compile a portfolio and contemplate setting himself up multiple times). Of course, sending an invoice is every company’s core business really. Its pretty much the one thing that all service businesses have in common.
Anyways, Matthew is very talented in design and photography so I can’t wait to see more of his work. Here’s an old image I just found.
Started a new enterprise with two acquaintances last night, brewme.co.nz. It involves beer, branding and technology. Great. It is also based on a very interesting business model, 49% customer ownership at all times (yet to sort out the legal mumbo jumbo). Each customer will be promised a share point of that 49% each time they buy. Its going to be great fun. So we bought the domain name, set up some Google infrastructure for online international collaboration, and started a blog. We’re off. If you have a scalable small brewery and are keen to work with a new and exciting distribution model, get in touch.
On Thursday evening I went along to the Hitwise Online Performance Awards. I leave off the word “ceremony” quite intentionally, there was none.
I observed a number of things at the Hitwise Awards:
Then, on Friday night I went along to the Marketing Association Direct & Interactive Awards Ceremony by invitation with Calcium, who were nominated or had clients nominated in several categories.
Again, I observed a number of things at the Marketing Association Awards:
I just received my third update to the Agile Web Development With Rails book from the Pragmatic Programmers. I really like this whole beta thing that the world has gotten into, getting hold of things when they’re nearly ready is great. I get it earlier, I see the updates often and appreciate the little enhancements as they go in.
Rod Drury states that the ideal model for an early stage business is Design, Fund, Build. This sounds sensible to me. What I’m wondering is whether it’s ever too late to apply this simple logic. I suspect that Design is not just about the technology (or, the product), it’s about the Business too. So perhaps we should skip the Proof stage (right after/during Design) that so many get held up in (but don’t forget the research). It’s much more difficult to Prove something if you can’t Fund it. Stop at Design, or rather, Do the Design. Ever noticed how attractive architectural concept drawings are? I’d buy that.
Went along to the Deloitte Fast 50 Awards last night and had a great time. Really enjoyed seeing and meeting with so many talented people in one room. There really is a lot of interesting things going on in this country, and a lot of inspirational growth across a number of industries. There were loads of IT companies in the mix of course. Spikefin didn’t actually enter the awards, so I guess I was invited as a client of Deloitte. So I consumed a few pre-paid beverages and met some fantastic people. The winners are announced in the November Unlimited magazine (which we were all given last night), but are not listed on their website as yet.
The presentation itself was run very well, short and sharp. The interspersed voice overs and winner videos were somewhat amusing, reminding me of good old Lucky Luke cartoons when the narrator would say almost exactly what Luke would then say himself (Narrator: “Our lonesone cowboy was quite hungry by now..”, Luke: “I’m gettin mighty hungry about now..”).
All in all, a great event. I think we’ll make it an aim for Spikefin to enter and get a placement for next year.