Thoughts about life and software development
After a great deal of accomplishing very little on many different projects, I’ve decided that trying to build a custom cms for my church was overly ambitious. Now, I am planning on creating a new template for Drupal or another open source cms. I have used Joomla in the past but found it to be too complicated. Hopefully Drupal will provide the correct balance of power and usability.
As usual, my posts are at best coming in fits and starts. But, it’s my blog so I don’t care. Anyway, of the projects I had mentioned in my previous post, I’ve only been able to progress with my church’s website. It has been online for some time now but for the most part the content is static. This is mostly a consequence of the desire for more content quickly from the stake holders. However, again, as usual, I’m a bit lazy and life is life.
I have finally settled on using Python 3.0 for my software key management utility. The problem I keep facing is that there seem to be few decent IDEs for Python in Linux. Eclipse is the best one I have tried so far but that was for python 2.5 so more investigation in to 3.0 integration is needed. If you have advice on IDEs or a direction to start in I’d be happy to know of one.
In addition to the two larger projects my wife and I have embarked on a new collaborative project. We began work on this project in early January with the first deliverable scheduled for early to mid October. With God’s blessing we will see this project through. It will be a long term project, and it is one we are both looking forward to.
A great many things have happened over the past year; three relocations, college graduations, new jobs, etc. So most of the projects I had started before have either become lost, forgotten, or irrelevant. But now as the instability of college wears off and life begins to take on newfound structure the projects I start should see the light of day in the future.
The first project that I am working on in my free time is a website for my church. The current website is many years old and out of date. My plan for the site is to start out with a simple three column page with headers and footers. It will start out mostly static but as time goes on it will become increasingly interactive as administrative interfaces and database backends come online. Hopefully, by the end of the development they will have a fully modern, cms like, interface for managing content and communications for the congregation.
The other project I am working on is an application to manage and store software licence keys. Over the past year, my wife and I have combined our software libraries and increased the number of computers we own. Needless to say storing all of the software keys is a bit haphazard and error prone. At this point we have probably lost close to 100 dollars worth of software due to misplaced keys. I am still struggling over the scope of this project so we’ll see where this goes. Rest assured that it will be the subject of many posts in the future.
While pouring over the available themes for the revival of this website I cam across Unnamed Lite by Xu Yiyang. I loved the simple gradients and clean presentation of the theme. However, I have never been a fan of the right-side sidebar. So I have modified the primary stylesheet for this theme to put the sidebar on the left, and decrease its width and margins. Several other modifications were made to make the header text more readable (given my choice for the header image). Unnamed Lite is distributed under the GPL. In accordance with the GPL you may download a copy of the modified stylesheet below. A detailed list of all changes may be found on the Unnamed Lite project page.
After about a year I’m finally back to using my site for something other than e-mail.