insky

I understand your point. And I understand the pain of file exchange. But if you made file exchange trivial between OSs then this wouldn't be so much of an issue.

Very thin on the ground article. It would be better written as a 'tools that I find useful for web design under Ubuntu Linux' article.

> However, there are some similar tools available for Linux that can be used in the web development.

What does this even mean?

What's drush got to do with web dev? That's pretty niche. Why Virtual Box? What is it, what would you use it for?

As others have said it's a little Ubuntu focused. And it's probably best to avoid the install instructions for applications, just link to the project pages/install instructions.

Bin or rewrite needed.

Getting consistent KDE/GTK2/GTK3 theming feels nigh on impossible under Linux.

I remember getting my Bigfoot for life email address. It didn't exactly last that long. But basically that was email forwarding. But you had to change your reply-to in outgoing emails, and it was a little confusing for recipients.

Email forwarding, doesn't stop Google reading the mail as it goes through transit. Which is a little unsettling. I'd be interested to hear/read their privacy policy regarding this.

Two pages with too many images and scant information.

Will there be a way to just configure/edit the DNS records?

What sets this service apart from other registrars?

Thanks for the clarification.

Ah well, I have issues with all the major OSs.

I was surprised after I installed Windows 8 (64 pro or business or whatever it's called), and found Firefox and Chrome to both be 32bit, haven't checked Internet Explorer yet. Now I'm not sure if it even that is even an issue or not? It bugged me anyway.

I've been running a 64bit Linux OS for years now, and the most irritating thing about it was Flash plugin support. Some people deem an OS that can't play iPlayer or some such, as unusable. Anyway flash support is reasonable for me under Chrome these days (didn't Adobe say they'd abandon 64bit support on Linux?)

The missus has Windows 8 on her lappy, and both Chrome and Firefox frequently crap out, she has just gotten used to it.

Perhaps that is what they already had. If they were to use your app, they'd still have to manage and carry the costs associated. That probably isn't their main motivation.

I remember a few years ago whenever you clicked on a Guardian news link in Facebook it would try and get you to sign up to their Facebook app/plugin, that would then publish on your timeline what you'd been reading, let alone commenting on. I thought that was a bit ghastly.

I'm assuming that when you make a comment through Facebook on the Huff post, it displays on your timeline or some such, providing additional reach for the story.

In some way it makes sense, as you ditch the whole dynamic part of your page generation, allowing you to effectively use a static dump for your website. You can then update that periodically. Facebook is left to pick up all the hosting hassles and expense. Also you tap into the Facebook ecosystem. Having said that I doubt I'd even leave a Facebook comment on another website, I haven't yet.

I don't get why these menus can't just appear as overlays.

I am not a fan of having to scroll to a menu it can be disorientating. Like on a web page: you read and move down the page, you want to glance the menu, you have to go back to the top (home button) and then try and find your place in the text again. Overlays, popup menus, would be better there also. In my mind a website should be able to register actions with the browser, and that would get tied in with the device/app navigation.

Yeah I'm a sucker for the news. I'm not wedded to cutting edge news though. I'd be happy picking up last month's paper. Occasionally I just drop following it, and don't really miss it. It's easy to cut yourself off or become very myopic. That's what worries me. Small things can end up having the same gravity as a hard hitting news story. I can become rather petty.

Wading through comments is hard work. But a little feedback and opinion from others is good. I only wish it was a genuine sample. My local newspaper's online edition is full of the same commentators who can't help but comment on everything posted, with their same negative replies and opinions/agendas. It can make you feel a little ill; you can start to believe that many people do hold those views. But, for all I know it's the same girl with ten sock puppet accounts.

A little real life interaction with others can be quite reassuring and calming, even if you may end up discussing trivialities.

I do find the radio offers a nice condensed more easily consumable news bulletin.

A few minutes later he's on Twitter advertising, and rabbiting on about Apples' new XXX. So the distractions remain.

I read it as a semi-aspirational piece, something not realisitically achievable but a target.

or just get yourself an android butler...

I wrote a quick shell one liner that aggregates text files and simple templates into resulting html files.

  find ./txt/ -type f -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 -I£ sh -c 'newname=$(basename £ .txt).html; cat templates/header.html £ templates/footer.html > html/$newname'

Each new page (html file) is a sandwich. The filling could be transformed markdown rather than plain text. A little find and replace for titles, and such like would make for quite an easy static site generator.

I even found a bash markdown transformer:

https://github.com/chadbraunduin/markdown.bash

Well it seems to me that you are very happy to write scripts so wouldn't be alergic to writing a little bit of code.

I'd suggest you pick out of your best languages the one you prefer. And go with that.

Write a few pages of text in something like Markdown or RST (python). Use a microframework like Bottle (python), that resolves a route (example.com/about/) to a function. In that function convert your micro-markup to html, that you then wrap further in a template.

You can find some free html templates available on-line.

Before that, plan the site, define what it is and jot down your expectations of what it will do. Look at similar sites. Note the ones you like.

Draw up how the pages will be connected. For what you describe, it sounds like you only need a few pages. With the homepage listing news/updates. When you add something to the site (news) syndicate elsewhere, with links back (i.e. Twitter, Facebook).

If I was a fan, I'd probably want to join a community. Perhaps a newsletter and/or fan forum would be a good addition. You may want to manage a mailing list and/or a web forum.

If you have a web forum, you might want to stick that on another domain (or subdomain). You should be able to find an off the shelf solution for that. It doesn't need to be in the same language as your main site. Or hosted in the same place.

Getting different web components (forums, etc) to match cohesively theme-wise is a bit of a challenge. But it's not necessarily needed in my opinion. Personally as a fan I'm more interesting in content. You could however pay someone to theme the site after you have it working. That's easier if you restrict yourself to a minimal amount of templates.

There are millions of frameworks out there to choose from. Start with something very simple like bottle, it will introduce concepts and if you want to take it further later on you can.

If you haven't written a web page at all before, then basic html is a good place to start (elements: html, head, body, head, h1, h2, p, a, ul) page is a good place to start. Compose two html pages, link them back and forth to each other and try and add an image and text to both. You don't need a fancy web server to do that, you can just open a text file and start writing, and test in your web browser.

A late trick I discovered, was that you can configure your php instance to inclued a file with every script. For example the following can be added to .htaccess:

  php_value auto_prepend_file 'before.php'

You can then use that for bootstrapping, front controller and to limit access. Can be a bit clumsy, but it's nicely divorced from simple page controllers.

It looks tidier with the global.

Which begs the question, how on earth do you choose one?

Edit: as in, which router do you pick and how do you pick one? Choice can lead to decision paralysis.

How does this compare with something like Slim?

+1 for being lightweight and readable.

I guess you are asking why not just use the filesystem one-one like mapping url to file?

A benefit of routing is that you can have a single point of contact in your app: a front controller. And you can place your route config in one place.

This router also has RESTful routing, detecting HTTP methods upfront that correspond to a predictable method name in a named class.

Are the headphones any good? Stylistically, they look like something that you'd pick up from Poundland (UK), for a pound.

They are pretty much the same thing though.

A comment on something like a news story page, is a conversation with the author about the article pretty much.

Conversations that take place without threading are tricky to follow without additional tools.

I'd prefer ontopic comments. Interesting conversation can errupt from interactions though.

My biggest issue with online comments is that there are just too many. cap amount of posts, or cap posts by author?

Some people hang around the comment sections and just can't help but post. And some just repeat what others have already said and bring nothing new. But I'm not surprised that people haven't waded and read through every comment before they comment.

My local online newspaper has the same small collection of people regurgating their predictable opinions on pretty much every article posted, and it's very tiresome, and puts off other people commenting. They are a negative and contrary bunch.

I understand the want to hang out in a particular internet locale (I do it on two forums, my online haunts), but people could do with holding themselves back. On one forum I'm a member I've postend about 400 comments, and I could probably boil that down to about 5 themes. If I had time it would be worth me whittling them all down. Less is sometimes more.

Name: Brief encounter.

I used to run a 700MHZ powerbook, and the fan used to whir away. One day I realised that having Firebug running wasn't helping! But I foolishly hadn't even considered it, as I was so used to running the extension. Adblock Plus I pretty much always install too, so would just think it was normal. It still feels much better than running the adverts!

I did try noscript for a while, but I got fed up having to turn it on for sites that just failed to work without JS, and got bored moaning about it.

Great question. Does that encompass the assets on the page? The recent cache, lookahead?

I'm always staggered on the flip side that serving a web page using something like XYZ CMS can use a staggering 50MB or more for one page load without caching.

Bizarre when you consider that you could get a small encyclopedias worth of text on a floppy disk.

Too many websites are drowning polar bears...

I can't think of any file dialogue that lets you select groups of files (at least native ones), so you are entering non-standard territority to do so, which is further afield than the drag and drop.

I totally get 'workflow': draft, unpublished, approved, published etc, and 'roles': creators, editors, moderators, publishers etc. I also appreciate the idea of having some version control.

With the demo it wasn't intuitive how the above applied to the post, or the creation process. Order mattered, but it wasn't straight forward figuring out the required process. Resulting in frustration.

You speak of a staging area, or some such. But how is the user to know about your version control system, or how it works?

Surely hitting save should be as good a commit? Or the save implies or triggers a commit? If the commit is that important to the publishing process, emblazen it across the bottom with the Save button.

I really just wanted to see how my page looked as early as possible. And be able to see the page before it was published. You should be able to preview content, but make it clear that the status/workflow of the page you are viewing: You could add a banner across an unpublished page with the page status displayed.

> A CMS must be able to display the same content in different ways, display content filtered according to relationships, and so on. Not to mention render in other content types than just HTML.

That's quite rigid. Good to ask the question: what is a CMS? It's pretty ambiguous.

That's the one thing I liked about Typo3, that it insisted on heirarchical placement of a page in the nav.

I think to understand the reason for the above is that those systems appeared before 'tagging' and loose content relationships.

Working with Drupal, I know it can become confusing when you mix the two. Menus,tags or both? What if content should appear in more than one place? It's an area that is can be confusing for site admins and users.

Drag and drop is popular. We are just less and less used to the paradigm, and don't expect it to work in the browser. I don't think there is much wrong with the approach, but there is a blur between app/OS interfaces and web ones. For example if that widget kit was a separate window like say the old Gimp toolset, it would feel okay to me.

The placement on the RHS is a little awkward, especially if there is scrolling required.

The commit process was confusing for me in trying to publish a page, but I found the CMS more intuitive than something like Joomla, that I feel out the box is a train wreck (it takes a good while to fit the pieces together/learn how to use).

There's scope for better CMSs that's for sure.