Launches and Launches

Ooblech. I'm tired. I better get this posted and then get some sleep.

I'm excited to announce the two new site launches: this web site and a new Boomer.com. The latter has involved 6 months of my blood, sweat, and late hours. The former took me all of today to revamp and re-re-re-re-re-release. I'm also working on launching about three other web sites in the near future.

Home Site

As I stated previously, I'm going to start toning down the development I do at home. Well, at least that was the plan. It didn't really work as I thought. I've probably spent almost as much time in front of a screen at home as at work over the last few months. The reason is related to some work I've been doing with Perl and Java---which, incidentally, might be published on Perl.com in the next few months.

I've been toying with the idea of using a Java-based database engine called Jackrabbit with a Perl web front-end called Catalyst. While that was a fun project to work on, the results weren't quite as nice as I wanted. Rather than continue tweaking it into what I want (which would probably only take another month or two of effort), I'm going to take what I've learned and move on to using Drupal again instead.

Why back to Drupal? Well, I was using WordPress, which is a pretty decent blog app. However, it's just not as easy to hack as Drupal is and I know that if I have a blog, I'll still want to tweak it, but that's not so easy with WordPress. Furthermore, I'm webmaster for the extranet site at work, which is Drupal, and our church web site, which is Drupal. I figure I can maximize my ability to maintain all these Drupals. Drupal is an excellent general purpose CMS even if it's a little bit of overkill for a blog.

I'm also starting to contribute to a number of different web sites and I'd like to have one central location to collate all those contributions and I hope to make this the place. With some enhancements, I think either the built-in or one of the other aggregation modules available for Drupal will come in handy for this. I also have a kiddo on the way and plan to share photos here. That is to say, this isn't going to be just a blog for long.

Finally, as I mentioned I did learn something from the Perl/Jackrabbit integration and I plan to use some of that to improve the user interface of Magnolia (see below) and/or Drupal. I'll probably write a blog on what I learned in the next few days so that these thoughts aren't quite so nebulous.

Boomer.com

Boomer.com is another interesting beast. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about what we've done. It looks pretty good. Though, the look will never look as good as either Eric or I want it to. Being so close to the project, I know all of its blemishes. Like home remodeling projects, when you fix something, there are inevitibly a few mistakes that bug you, but when you look at project by someone else, you never even notice them. It's the same way here: I will always know what isn't quite as nice as it could be even though almost no one else will notice.

As for the technology, we've actually built a hybrid of Magnolia and Drupal. That's mostly interesting because Magnolia is written in Java and requires a Java-based application server, while Drupal is PHP based and requires CGI or an Apache module to run. There are some tools to help PHP and Java communicate server-to-server, but we haven't used any of them, mostly because we couldn't get them to work correctly within our timeline.

However, I'm pretty happy with how well the integration works. The most interesting project related to this so far has been the implementation of single sign-on, which required some interesting redirect tricks. It works pretty well and I'm confident that our customers will be completely oblivious to the nuts and bolts of the process. I'll probably blog on the single sign-on process in another blog coming up, so look for it! ;)

Just because we launched, though, doesn't mean we're finished. There's a long list of new features to add. Since I'm not sure how much of that list is safe to tell, I'm going to just say that we hope to sell more stuff and hope to add more multimedia and hope to put up some additional web-based applications to facilitate our consulting; that ought to vague enough. :P

Other Sites

I'm also working on a few other projects. A couple of them I don't really want to talk about except to say that I'm working on them. ;) However, our church web site is one of the biggies I'm currently working on. This is another Drupal site. First, the web site is currently running an old version of Drupal (either 4.5 or 4.6, I don't remember which and 4.7 is current). Second, the church has been redesigning the look of our logo, letterhead, signage, and web site. The web design has been chosen and Eric and I will be putting that together as soon as we can.

Anyway, I'm excited about that and the fact that the church will be starting a monthly newsletter to help drive new traffic to the site. I hope this will improve communication for our members, which has been a historical problem of our church (as it is with so many).

That's what I'm working on. As I said, I'm tired and now it's time to sign off.

Cheers.