Makeover time

Site makeover, of course. I've no plans for cosmetic surgery or a new wardrobe!

This site has been static for about ten years, so it's overdue for a look at new possibilities. First, the decision where to move hosting to, then the how.

Web hosting for a monthly price is available everywhere you look. I also considered getting a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for a bit more money and a lot more possibilities. But for the amount of traffic I'm likely to get, far and away the best value has to be www.nearlyfreespeech.net (unless you know different?). Besides, I like their no-nonsense no-hype attitude. Though they would certainly agree that they're not for the faint-hearted. If you don't know what geeky acronyms such as SFTP and SSH mean, if the command line sends you running for the hills, then you probably need more hand holding than their business aims to provide, so don't waste their time (or yours).

I opened an account. You don't even have to fund it, they give you 2 cents to try it out! And 2 cents can last quite a long time (it took me about 6 weeks to use my first dollar).

But then the fun really started. So many choices. If you want to program your site in Perl, PHP, C++, [snip long list] or whatever, it's all possible. Previously I couldn't even use SSI (Server Side Includes) and needed to resort to writing some little utilities to achieve the same thing locally before uploading the site (otherwise every time I decided to change the look of the layout I would have had the boring job of doing the same edits on every page).

These days, that would be NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). The better solution is to use a CMS (Content Management System). There's hundreds to choose from, perhaps 1000's even. If you fancy spending days evaluating their merits and suitability for your needs, try http://www.opensourcecms.com/ where you can explore live demos of loads of them. After looking around far too briefly and also talking with friends, I decided to simplify my decision by looking for the most popular ones. As far as I could see, they seem to be Joomla, Mambo, Drupal and Plone. The first two are related and seem to be highly recommended if you want a balance of power and simplicity and you're not a programmer. Whereas Drupal can be modified to a greater degree, if you like getting your hands dirty. Actually I don't quite understand that assessment -- Drupal looks highly usable to me out of the box, but admittedly I'm attracted by a system that claims it doesn't lock me in, even at the cost of a steeper learning curve. And then there's Plone, the most powerful of those four, but I eliminated it when I found it's heavy on resources and one of the few systems you can't use on nearlyfreespeech.