The Inflatable Soapbox

I’m a self-taught web designer that got his beginnings on a Windows machine using first Frontpage (gag) and then Dreamweaver. Now, I love my Dreamweaver. It rocks to no end with all it can do. Add in Fireworks and Photoshop to the mix and you have one sweet set of tools that will keep you designing for years to come.

Well with my venture into Linux a while back, I was struggling to find suitable replacements for my favorite apps that I grew to be so fond of as well as used to. It was hard finding what I can now call my new favorites although I do still reserve judgement on The GIMP a bit longer as it still hasn’t quite won me over just yet.

For the Linux version of Dreamweaver, I use Kompozer. It doesn’t have the finesse that Dreamweaver has but it works very well for my purposes. Also, a nifty app called SciTE is an awesome text editor that resembles PSPpad on my Windows machine.

I prefer to do my site work in Windows still but that’s pretty much because it’s a habit and I’m comfortable with them but, I’m getting more and more used to using the apps on my Linux hard drive (I dual boot Ubuntu and XP Pro) instead of the more familiar ones on my Windows hard drive.

My reasons are this:

I want to be as M/S free as I possibly can by year’s end with very few exceptions. I’ve grown to prefer open source apps and software to proprietary apps and software due to the nature of them being much more stable, less apt to be corrupt, less prone to malware or virus infections which helps to free my wallet from the anti- this and the anti- that companies who’ve sworn their devotion to wiping the ‘net’s infections out.

I like the freedom to do what I want with the OS (operating system) of my choosing and not having to dial home (M/S) anytime I reinstall it on my computer and asking their permission to install the OS I already paid for a long time ago.

Now with the exception of my wife’s work having to be on a Windows machine and my new laptop I bought for some work but mostly for some gaming I try to fit in in my spare time (chuckle), I’m slowly working my way to more freedom.

So, in closing I’d like to ask the readers here what their favorite web design programs are or what their favorite apps period are in their distro of Linux. I’m open to new ways of doing things unlike M/S who prefers us to keep our heads in the sand.

I’d like to offer a weekly spot on the Inflatable Soapbox for a guest post. Anyone who’d like to share his or her views on an Open Source topic (Linux, WordPress, GIMP, MySQL, GPL, distro review, etc.) is welcome to submit a post. You must register first to gain contributor status.

Since I don’t have a guest lined up for today, I’ll tell you a little bit about the Inflatable Soapbox.

My friends and family have come to accept tolerate my style of communication: lecture. I don’t actually discuss an issue, I pontificate. I can frequently be seen standing at the virtual podium, left arm raised, index finger pointing skyward, “…and furthermore…”. You get the picture. I grew weary of lugging my soapbox around, so I did what any other pompous, didactic ass would do: I invented the Inflatable Soapbox. I carry it with me everywhere and can inflate it faster than Microsoft can pervert an open standard.

I’m currently running this on a ten year old Compaq DeskPro with a 500MHz Celeron, 384MB RAM, 10GB IDE HDD, from my home office on a Comcast high speed (1.5M down, 20M up) connection. This is far less expensive than a co-located setup, although my power situation leaves much to be desired. Thankfully, the ext3 file system and Ubuntu Linux (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, LAMP server) recover nicely from the inevitable outages here at the shore. The second drawback is redirecting the domain from my hosted space at Hostway’s Chicago data center to my static IP (six month lease) on Comcast. That is why you see http://timkissane.com/ in your address bar instead of http://timkissane.com/.

Finally, as an experiment in traffic generation, I’ll be posting a photo of Lindsay Lohan nude (don’t worry, as you can see, it’s safe for work, the kids, whoever) that I found on Alexa while checking site rankings. Do you think this will help?

Don’t forget to submit posts in time for next Wednesday’s guest spot!

Peace.

Today is the first in a regular weekly series, Tuesday Tech Troubles and Triumphs. I think I’ll probably have more troubles than triumphs to share, so let me start with one I’m having now. A client of mine wants his WordPress archives to be displayed in an expandable/collapsible format in the sidebar. He referred me to this blog on blogspot.com as an example. The code that displays the archives is a widget written by Google software engineer Lexi Baugher. I’ve been looking for a similar plugin, because that would be much faster (and cheaper for him). I’ve found several, including this one by Ady Romantika that would be perfect.

The trouble: they are all only available as widgets and his heavily customized blog is not widgetized. Unless I have a better suggestion from one of my readers, I’ll have to reverse engineer a widget into a straight plugin. I have almost no time to do this. Please comment with suggestions or WordPress plugin stories of your own. Hopefully by next Tuesday, I’ll have turned this trouble into a triumph.

I’ll now tag five unsuspecting techies and turn this into a meme:

Merlin, Merlin’s Minute

Ian, Failure is the Key to Success

Joe, JoeTech.com

Chuck, D is for Dad

Rob, All Things Seen and Unseen

Gentlemen, start your engines.

Today is my girl’s birthday. Because we are the silly geeks that we are, I thought she might like some silly “mag cover” pics. I got up at 5am and opened the GIMP on my new gPC (upcoming post on that), started playing with it and here are the results. Let me know when it’s your birthday and send a pic if you want the same treatment.

And, since it’s Madison’s birthday sometime this month, here’s our other birthday girl!