After reading the comments about WordPress on this blog and on Split-Visionz, I decided to try to develop a version of my personal website using WordPress.  It was a good learning experience.  In looking for a theme for the site, I discovered Artisteer and created several themes using the program.  I also learned more  about WordPress and found some useful WordPress plugins.  You can view the site here.

Earlier this month I wrote a post titled, “I Guess I’m Not A CMS Person.”  In a comment on that post, Mike, a web designer/developer in Michigan, noted:

“I think it depends on the specifics of the project. As you are using wordpress for your blog I am guessing you feel similarly to an extent.”

Mike made a good point.  I use WordPress for my blogs, but I didn’t think of WordPress as a CMS.  However, WordPress is a CMS, and a very good one at that.  In fact, based on my limited experience with  Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, if I were going to use a CMS to develop a static site, I think I would choose WordPress over the other two.

Last May I wrote about a Lightbox implementation called GreyBox and I described it as the best general purpose Lightbox implementation I had found.  GreyBox is very versatile; it allows a modal window  display of almost anything from single images to complete web pages.  If you use WordPress, there is a plugin called GreyBox Integrator that makes it easy to add a modal popup to a blog post.  For a demonstration, click here.

A couple of years ago another developer told me he was using Jooma, a popular content management system (CMS), for all his sites.  I tried Joomla on several sites and decided that I could develop sites easier and faster doing my own coding.  I recently saw a site done with Drupal and I decided to give it a try.  After a brief exposure to Drupal, I had the same feeling that I had with Joomla.  I’m going to continue developing sites on my own.

I’ve been using markup languages since the 1960s, and I’ve been developing web sites since the 1990s, so it may be a case of “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

From August 10, 2009 through August 31, 2009 (while supplies last) Costco online has the following Dell Studio XPS system (no monitor) for $1,099.99 after $400 OFF.

• Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz processor
• 12GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz
• 1TB 7200RPM SATA II Hard Drive
• 16x DVD+/-RW
• 19-in-1 Card Reader
• 512MB ATI Radeon HD4670
• Windows® Vista Home Premium 64-bit (with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when available)
• 2-Year Warranty

You can get more information here.

I would guess that Firefox is the default browser for most Web developers.  However, I would also guess that if we check the browser stats for our sites we would find that, in most cases, the majority of visitors are using a version of Internet Explorer.  It can be difficult to test pages in different versions of IE because Microsoft makes it difficult to install more than one version of IE on a system.  There are several installers for multiple versions of IE, but none worked well for me.  You could use Virtual PC or multiple systems with different versions of IE, but there is a better way. IETester is a free Web browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE8, IE7, IE6, and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista, as well as the installed IE in the same process. IETester will also work with XP with IE7 (Windows XP/IE6 config has some problems and the IE8 instance does not work under XP without IE7).

IETester is easy to use. You first select the version of IE to be used for testing:

Notice that you can choose to test pages with IE5.5, IE6, IE7, or IE8, and there is an option to test a page in all IE versions where each version is displayed in a separate tab.

The next step is to enter the URL of the page to be tested:

In the above example, the option to test in all IE versions was selected.  Once you enter the URL and click OK, the page is displayed in separate tabs:

IETester is still in Alpha release and it has some bugs, but I have been able to use it to test  sites and it has alerted me to some problems.  You can learn more about IETester and download a free copy from http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage.

A couple of months ago I wrote about Visual Lightbox, a program that makes it easy to generate Web photo galleries that are based on the LightBox2 script.  The same company has just released Video LightBox, a program that makes it easy to add YouTube videos to a website.  It's literally as easy as 1-2-3:  1) Copy and paste the URL of a desired YouTube video, 2) Select a template and, 3) Publish the generated page to a website.  Video LightBox generates an image thumbnail for the video, and when a visitor clicks on the thumbnail it expands and displays the video in a lightbox window.  You don't have to use the HTML page generated by Video Lightbox; instead, you can add the code to your own page.  I used Video LightBox to generate the code for the Video Clips page on my personal website.  You can see the page here.

UPDATE:  Now, in addition to adding YouTube videos to a site you can embed FLV, MP4, and 3GP video files as well as adding Google Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, and MySpace videos to your site.

Like Visual LightBox, Video LightBox is free for non-commercial use and a license for business use is only $25.00.  I purchased licenses for both Visual LightBox and Video LightBox because I plan to use the programs for commercial sites.  You can learn more about the program and download the free edition or purchase the business edition at http://videolightbox.com/.