Bengfort.com

Well, it has been a while since I have put posts onto this blog- I’m sorry about that. Things for bengfort.com except standard maintenance and adding photo albumns have sort of fallen by the wayside- mostly because of my new job at the Oxford University Press.

But aside from that, I have been learning new technologies that will help me broaden the website and give greater flexibility while adding web applications to the site. Since I am new to the world of web application development, you must bear with me as I do a lot of reading- a lot of reading- and not much implementation. Plus the current state of the website (see below) has not allowed me the flexibility that I need. Right now I have fallen into the Microsoft trap- I am developing using Windows Server 2000, ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, and Visual Studio 2005. I was going to teach myself other technologies like MySQL, PHP, Apache, and XML, but only XML got picked up. The main reason for this is because of the Microsoft development I do at work- but also because as a would-be professional, I want to get developer certifiactions, and this is one way to learn them.

Needless to say, you won’t see very many changes to the website in the near future- at least not having to do with any of the technologies I mention above. Hopefully you will see continued use with the blog space, and recipe and album pages updates as we put them up. But for now, the basic plan will not change- with just one exception.

I am planning on changing the homepage of bengfort.com into a single page that will serve as a graphic for your homepages- see http://www.google.com, http://www.cengen.com, http://www.wikipedia.org for examples of pages that have a single graphic entry portal. These pages are single graphic with no news text, but possibly announcements and graphics changes. They include links to navigate into the website, as well as a Google searchbar to facilitate searches into the rest of the web. I want every time you load your webpage to have this page be your entry into the internet.

State of the Website

This is the state of the website as it stands on August 14, 2007. Right now the website is basic HTML pages (sometimes with the extension .htm) that are posted to Atlantic ASP’s server via ftp. I believe that the website has 5 GB of space allotted to it, I have no idea how much space is actually being taken up- but my backup of the website is 80.7 MB, so we aren’t using nearly as much space as we have- but 5 GB will run out quick! The problem with this provider is that I don’t have access to the server that bengfort.com resides on. This means that I cannot run scripts on the pages or run applications like Apache or MySQL on the server because I cannot config them- and therefore basic web applications that you take for granted on other sites cannot happen on bengfort.com (things like feedback surveys, and dynamic HTML).

We use third party providers to do most of that active/dynamic work on the website. For instance, we use Google’s blogger to provide our blogging functions. To write blogs, we navigate away from bengfort.com and sign in and use blogger’s applications to write and design the blog. Then when we hit publish post- blogger sends the blog as HTML via FTP to bengfort.com. We use Clocklink to host our clocks on the main page. Metric Conversions hosts the converter pages. Access Counter keeps track of all the site statistics on the main page. iWebAlbum creates the photo slideshows. And finally, Google provides the search boxes.

Unfortunately this provides limited functionality as well as poor performance on the website becasue many different outside sites have to work on the page, which causes higher traffic on your internet connections, and slows FTP work down back and forth.

Update Plans

Therefore, not out of vanity, but rather as a learning experience- the plan for bengfort.com is to switch internet providers (probably to a provider that costs money to maintain) that way I can have access to the server and actually host the applications that are on the website. I don’t plan on setting up my own server to connect to, because we are moving so much, this would be a waste of our broadband, and wouldn’t provide reliable service to the website.

The first step will be the single graphic homepage, I am going to need your ideas for the design of this! Let me know what you think.

Next will be the website migration- which might change the design of the site completely. During this process there will be a temporary loss of service to bengfort.com.

Next, the recipe application will be designed and put up- and the blog probably switched over to wordpress or some other software. Finally, all other applications will be run on the website.

This basic plan probably spans a couple years- so don’t hold your breath for these changes to happen soon! Hopefully we can grow this website together as we do more blogging, etc.

Moveable Type is the first of the five “pre-packaged” blogging solutions that I am going to review (see “Bengfort Blog Engine vs. Pre-packaged Solutions). In the near future, also reviewed will be ExpressionEngine, WordPress, TextPattern, and Blogger; as well as my findings to whether or not to create my own blog engine or to use one of these outside solutions.

Moveable Type was started in September 2001 (yes, infamous) as a personal blog solution for Ben and Mena Trott. They originally built the Pearl-based engine for friends and colleagues, but it quickly grew and was released to the public with great popularity. Six Apart was formed as a company to build Moveable Type and other blogging tools- TypePad and LiveJournal.

Moveable Type is built around Pearl- which was very popular at the time because its architechture allows Pearl developers to write their own plug-ins that can check spelling or turn the blog into a shopping site. And this, I think, is the main disadvantage for me, personally. While I do have some expierence using PHP (the now popular programming language that replaced Pearl) I don’t have any Pearl expertise or any desire to learn it really.

However, For those of you who do have some familiarity with Pearl, and no desire to design your own engine, I would recommned Moveable Type to you becasue it has a large community of users, and therefore a wide base of support for you and your design issues. It is very flexible and a stable platform for you to launch a personal site- if you are the only one who is blogging.

My second reaction is that Moveable Type costs money: about $69.95 for 5 Authors and Unlimed weblogs. Or $99.95 for Unlimited Authors, and Unlimited Weblogs. You can also download an unsupported version for free that limits you to one author and three blogs. This means that it is not good for our website because I have at least 6 potential authors, and numerous blogs if I create community family blogs- and also I don’t have $99.95 to spend on a program that I hardly know or might not be able to fit into the scheme of my website (and server since I don’t have direct access to that either).

The nice thing about Movable Type and I think also ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and TextPattern is that they are applications you download and install on your sever, much like the blog engine that I would design and install using PHP. This means that creative control of the website would be completely in my hands- and all traffic on my website would be in and out of www.bengfort.com. Blogger is an external FTP site- basically users go to www.blogger.com when they want to create a post, change their templates, or adjust their profile. Then they publish their page which sets up an FTP transfer of an .htm document to www.bengfort.com. Readers will be on www.bengfort.com until they decide they want to add a comment, they will then be takin to blogger, where they will type their comment and publish- and it is sort of hit or miss when it shows up on www.bengfort.com (unless the author publishes fairly shortly afterwards). I would like something more inhouse for our blog.

Needless to say- I apprecaited Moveable Type as an interesting platform with lots of help, but it doesn’t fit my criteria for installing it as the engine for www.bengfort.com

For More information See: MoveableType

I have become a nerd- thank God!

Today I have officially (according to my wife and my sudden urge to watch re-runs of TNG) become a nerd, and not a moment too soon! (The picture below should explain all, note the CenGen shirt…)

Today I turned my Naval Academy computer that is five years old, suffering from all the various components (and video games) I have installed on it, into a local web server with Apache 2.0, php 5.1, and MySQL so I can have a testing environment to build the Bengfort Blog Engine.

Frankly, I am not sure it will survive the installation.

So far, I have desperately run to Staples to get an external USB hard drive to back up my computer in the face of ever impending blue screen doom. (Somehow, magically the computer came back to life… I don’t know what happened, but to this day the Computer sometimes will not turn off without physically unplugging it from the wall!) I can’t run multiple applications of anything more complicated than iTunes or Internet Explorer. And every time I turn the computer off, I do so terrified that it won’t turn on again (especially since my computer basically rejected the external hard drive!)

Well that is that, and even though my poor 90 GB Hard Drive is almost maxed out (remember when: “90 Giga-whats? Gosh, I won’t even use 90 of those mega-thingys, why do they give us so much space?”) I have still boldly gone into programming territory.

Today I have moved from simple web designer to web programmer.

With my successful installation, I hope to achieve what so few jocks have done in the past- to actually do something useful with a computer. And if my computer survives, I intend to design and install our very own blog engine onto the website. Step one complete: one small step for 10 year olds, one giant step for ex-Navy Lacrosse players everywhere.

And as promised in the past few blogs… it begins! Now the only question remains: does my domain have php, etc. installed on the server in Baltimore?

The girls have all managed to create their blogs! That makes me happy, and they are all so diverse, which is extremely nice. Now we need to get the readership up, which will involve facebook advertising, I’m sure!

But before I know Devi was online, and in a fit of ambition, I purchased a book called Blog Design Solutions in order to build my own blog engine. I know of course, that I am writing on blogger as I say this, but I am seriously thinking about moving www.bengfort.com to its own blog engine.

What does this mean?

It means that all blogging, publishing, etc. Would take place on www.bengfort.com without the help of an outside site like Blogger. You would log into bengfort.com, write on bengfort.com and the blog engine would be maintained by yours truly. It would be very similar to what we have set up right now, except without those pesky frames at the top of the page that blogger puts up.

What would change?

Well the style of your blog would change, it would have to be something that you and I work on together to get designed, but it could be more creative, but also has the possibility of being extremely more like the main site (good or bad, I don’t know). Also I may not have as many tools up at first like blogger does (profiles, etc.) but it would be developed to that direction.

What wouldn’t change?

All that you have written so far would stay, but perhaps not the comments, I would have to look into it. Also you would still have your own log in and ability to edit your blog as usual.

Anyway, it will take me a couple weeks to design the Engine, which will include a crash course in PHP and MySQL; so we will continue using blogger for the time being. If you have any comments, concerns, or suggestions about the switchover, let me know.