All Things Cahill

Category: Blogging

  • Live on WordPress 2.5

    A very nice step forward for WordPress, but not without it’s issues.  Basically I’m liking what I see, but I think it’ll be another release before they really can sort it out and deliver on the real promise.

    What I like:

    • Finally an integrated photogallery that works.  Click my gallery link above.
    • The ability to put a photo gallery in a post.
    • Admin works nicely, and is a whole lot better to work in.
    • Tagging and categories that work.
    • They finally make it readily apparent that you can schedule posts.  I work with lots of people who really know WordPress and none use this feature save me. 
    • More widgets…

    What I Will Live With:

    • I’ve had trouble with posts getting hung up in the tube, typically when I add tags. I literally have to open another browser and pull them out of draft mode.
    • It’s nice that we have a gallery, but it needs a way to sort the photos, etc.  Also for some reason the default for the post page where you go to view the full size photo shows the image name as the title rather than the caption I gave the image.

    Stuff That’s Got to be Fixed:

    • Video posting is hobbled by file size and no embed feature (more  on that tomorrow).
    • Photo Gallery has file size issues, but it won’t tell you.  If you upload images that are too large, it won’t thumbnail them.  Hello, Youtube has set the spec for this type of operation…
    • Your sidebar is either widgetized or not widgetized, unless you want to rewrite the whole thing.  Not a huge deal, but this should work better than it does.

    Things they missed:

    • The time is here for widgets everywhere.  Not just admin, not just in sidebars, how about homepage widgets.  They  ones that let me pull an rss feed from here, show stuff from flikr there, or show my last 5 blog posts here, or my last 10 pownces there.  They do that and I’m out of a job…

    Read more and download here.

  • Sun Buys MySQL

    An interesting move – and for most of you thinking “this doesn’t affect me” I can tell you you’re dead wrong. You see over the past couple years, MySQL has become the back end database for a good deal of the web. If you’re CEO doesn’t have his own Gulfstream, chances are that some of your mission critical applications and quite probably your own website is using MySQL for something, if not everything.

    I’ll withhold judgment on the whole thing for now. There’s more important issues here.

    You see, we’ve come to the point that Open Source solutions, the LAMP solutions are winning out over enterprise solutions. The days when you needed an Interwoven or Vignette CMS system, constructed over an incredibly expensive Oracle database, running on servers the size of refrigerators are over. IBM realized this and embraced PHP. Sun has bought MySQL. The message is out.

    Back in the day, the open source stuff was consider the province of the bootstrapper. Now the bottom tier is reaching up and its pressuring not just the middle level systems, its challenging the staid old favorites of business. MySQL 5.0 has many of the features that had kept the earlier versions out of the enterprise, such as stored procedures.

    If you are running a business, you owe it to yourself to keep an eye on open source solutions, especially before buying any big, proprietary system.