New charity portal - DEV

Well after a positive decision from the board I had the "Go" for the implementation of Liferay and duly set up an account. Those nice people at rimuhosting set up the basics and I spent some time hrtrust-ising the content. Liferay really is a great tool, hosting is loads more expensive than the PHPNuke, Drupal, etc. but I prefer it as a solution.

(http://new.hrtrust.org)

More Liferay..

One of the nice aspects to spending all this time learning/investigating/mucking about with... the web application technologies is that I can do more for my favourite charity. Today I spent another few hours setting up the liferay portal on my local server with a view to using it for the HRTrust. Once it is installed it is quite straightforward to use, even for someone like me who generally only uses the instructions as a last resort. There are few things which were not quite so easy to understand at first, such as the relationships between Content Management System (CMS), Journals, and so on. I need to resort to the instructions I reckon, nevertheless I did get the branding and the Enterprise info sorted out (luckily one of the standard Themes is just the right colour for the trust logos and curiously fitted the colour scheme of some photos on location at the 2006 Nikolas Symposium in Corinth, Greece). I also managed to work out how to display the information I wanted for Guest and "Member" users. I've now sent a recommendation to the Board of Trustees that we implement the system and commit a budget to the hosting with the Liferay recommended hosting partner. The next step, once I get approval is to try a backup and "Disaster Recovery" to see how easy that is.

Hence, my priority for the next few weeks will probably be to get the HRTrust portal working and then focus on getting the MediBlog version up & running with a Medys portlet into next year.

Registrars and Hosts and all that...

Just spent some time transferring the .com domain to another host. The main reason being that the current one (enom) whilst free and offering a perfectly good (very good, actually) free & simple web creation tools does not allow me to upload my own pages without paying. I now want to add it to my very spendid and worthwhile GoogleAnalytics account, and use the equally VSAW GoogleAds thing. Hence I just embarked upon the rather irritating and slightly scary process of moving to the new host, which allows lots of nice features for which I am of course paying some money. Some of these can be seen on my sandpit site of MediBlog.biz. Here you can also catch the blog of our poor old deceased cat (Basil) and his far more fortunate half-brother Biggles whose sad tale re-inspired me to get Medys/MediBlog started again.

The experiences of mucking about with the .biz site (PHPNuke, WordPress, etc.) convinced me that a Java based enterprise portal such as JetSpeed was the right way to go for what I have in mind. On the other hand, the PHPNuke site, or better still the TikiWiki application(mediblog.biz/tiki) would have been fantasic(o)-ally great for a small community. Check them out if you need a VERY quick mini-portal. Ultimately though, Liferay wins for a more grown-up solution I think.

[fyi, the very latest cat-blog can be seen at Basil & Biggles's s own Blogger Blog.]

Moooooore Gooooooogle

...interesting how once you find something useful on the web, e.g. the clustrmaps site, you find that Google have the same kind of thing only more excellent with loads of bells & whistles. I used to enjoy this aspect of Google but now its starting to get irritating - no one likes a smart-arse.

Check out "Google Analytics". Wow.

JSFs

Just spent a couple more hours getting used to the MyEclipseIDE. It seems excellent for $30 per year. This time experimenting with Java Server Faces at last, which are also apparently good - analagous to SAP Web Dynpro for Java in fact - which is cool although SAP has the edge somewhat (but its V expensive!).

Googlads

Just added a googleAds and clustrMaps to this site. Cute.

Saying hello to Isabel

I've recently been away from home at a training course so have been using webmail clients instead of my outlook/express/thunderbird clients. Yahoo's new webmail client is amazingly good - very slick. I gather they bought the underlying technology from oddpost.com and have been busy building it into their main offering, as someone trying to create a new consumer site its profoundly depressing as they have raised the bar quite a lot higher.

Anyway, as I was back in webmail-land I had a look in my old mail folders and re-discovered stuff from way back (2000-2002) and found some correspondence with www.isabel.org.uk when I was trying to get some support for Medys from fellow-travellers. Well Isable.org.uk is now www.isabelhealthcare.com ! and slightly slicker than it was back then. They charge a few hundred US$ to subscribe but offer free 30 day trials. I signed up and tried then out with some LCH symptoms. It did provide LCH as a differential diagnosis when I used "Professional" phrases such as "diabetes insipidus" and "otitis media" but didn't when I put in stuff in lay-terms. So - basically I think it was a success as it is a service for primarily for the professionals. I think, again, there could be some scope for providing links to their site and may well get in touch with them to see what's possible.