FrontPage as a CMS

Microsoft FrontPage as a CMS

Yes - it can be done. You did not believe so. FrontPage can be used as light-weight CMS system. I have used FrontPage on my humor page for some time now and gained some experience using FrontPage.

First impression

FrontPage is easy to work with. And relatively easy to learn. Lots of limitations but you can live with most of them.

Features of FrontPage

• Easy to work with style sheets. CSS is cool. You can do lots with them,
• Spell checker in many languages. At least in the languages you have Microsoft Office dictionaries installed :) At least for me, the spell checker is used regularly. And I do misspell  lots of words.
• Powerful editor. You can do lots of stuff here like making tables. Most CMS editors only allow you to write text.
• Clip art with lots of art. If you are like me and like to have some graphics on your page you'll find lots of art here. The art in the table below is from the clip art.

How this CMS fits into my requirements

You can read my requirements here. Requirements in italic is not from my list but something I came out with when looking into FrontPage.

Requirement	Conclusion
Cache ability		As long as you publish your pages with the .htm extension all cache headers are set correctly. If you need to use .asp or .aspx extensions to gain additional functionality then you need to set the headers yourself. When you use static files IIS can even compress the files so you reduce your bandwidth requirements.
Scalability		You'll get the best performance IIS and your server can provide. And you can scale out without any problems using Squid.
Readable URL's		You choose the name (and location) yourself.
RSS/atom feed from articles		It can be done - but with add-ons. Read more here. The only bug I've found is that the date is written with the current locale (as seen from the FrontPage client I assume) and because of that new feed readers will not get the right publishing date.
Content editor		A WYSIWYG content editor where you get full control if you need that.
Menus and navigation		Navigation is separate from placement of files. You can move your menus how much you want it in the menus without the need to move the files. It's also easy to include navigation into your webpages.
Mobile content		There is no easy way to produce mobile HTML code.
Index and search		With FrontPage extensions it's easy to make a search function. If you require more features you can use Index Server, but you have to write code to make that work.
Web community		No web community except for MSDN. Not many seem to use FrontPage. At least if they have more than 2 or 3 pages on their site. You can program to FrontPage API's but no one seem to do so.
Blog functionality		For other to make comments you have to develop this functionality yourself.
Platform		FrontPage should run on IIS with FrontPage extensions installed. You can manage without but will miss out many features.
Templates		FrontPage got something called dynamic templates. You create a template (your HTML code) and make manageable regions where pages made from the template are allowed to edit content. If you change a template existing pages will not be updated unless you do so.

Links

Tags: IIS, FrontPage, cms

Umbraco CMS review

Umbraco CMS

I have for some time been looking into Umbraco to see if I can use it for my own CMS system. Unfortunately, my time is limited and thorough testing have not been done.

First impression of Umbraco

I downloaded the installation of Umbraco version 2.1 from their homepage. My first impression of the installer was that it was very good. It installed cleanly in about 10 minutes.

After the installation I looked into how to publish my templates. It's quick to learn the fundamentals of Umbraco. But it's not easy to do anything creative with it. You need to learn XSLT or program ASP.NET controls to do anything but publish simple content. Either way you have to spend some time write code for your needs.

Documentation and example code does not come easy. It's hard to get started and the documentation is at best half-done. The developers also charge money for add-ons to Umbraco. If you download the ASP.NET control document described above you'll see that. Because of this I'm not sure where Umbraco is headed.

How this CMS fits into my requirements

You can read my requirements here. Requirements in italic is not from my list but something I came out with when looking into Umbraco.

Requirement	Conclusion
Cache ability		This CMS set the cache-control headers to private. If the headers can change, it have to be done by a developer.
Scalability		I have done some tests with OpenSTA Umbraco seems to perform well.
Readable URL's		The filename (.aspx) are made from the title of the page.
RSS/atom feed from articles		It can be done - no problem at all. But you need to develop this feature.
Content editor		A WYSIWYG content editor with templates wrapping around your text.
Menus and navigation		The structure of the menus are directly related to how you place your document within the tree. You can move your documents as you want.
Mobile content		There is no easy way to produce mobile HTML code.
Index and search		Umbraco have their own site indexing tool in umbracoUtilities. (See links.)
Web community		I can't tell how good the community is. Umbraco is open source and published under the GPL license. But except for the developers I have not found any community.
Blog functionality		For other to make comments you have to develop this functionality yourself.
Platform		Umbraco requires .NET and is because of that limited to Windows Server 200x and Microsoft SQL Server. Umbraco forum mentions Mono support, but it's not straight forward at this time.

Relevant links

• Umbraco documentation at Wikibooks.
• Umbraco official homepage.
• How to change content-type for specific documents. The package umbracoUtilities is the package that you need.
• My requirement list for a CMS.
• Umbraco blog.

Tags: cms, umbraco, .Net

Sony Ericsson k800i battery compartment

How hard can it be to open the battery compartment?

Well, with the current task at hand - the Sony Ericsson K800i - this actually was a problem.

The story begins the other day when my girlfriend buys herself a brand new mobile phone. She opens the battery compartment and inserts the battery for charging. So far so good.

Two hours later she decides to insert the SIM card into the phone.

That was easier said than done. Even how hard we tried - me, my girlfriend and a friend present at that time - we could not open the lid. We pushed so hard on the phone that we started to worry about breaking the phone.

We went to Lefdal to ask for some help. At the service department we talked to the man behind the counter. He looked at the phone for a second, and then opened the lid on the phone...

The conclusion

I'm not sure if there is any good conclusion to this issue. What we did wrong was how we tried to open the compartment lid. We used the thumb as shown in the documentation. Lefdal used the palm of the hand.

There are three locks to keep the lid closed. The yellow mark the one you have to push down. The red marks are locks to keep the lid in place. Just slide left (given the picture) and you are set.

Easy or what? :)

Dinner at home

I had guests from work for dinner today. 10 people in total. It for sure takes time to make food, but it takes longer to clean up the kitchen after the guests went home.

 

First impression of an Xbox 360

A friend of mine offered to borrowed me his Xbox 360 when he went away for a business trip. I decided to try the unit out, as I've been thinking for myself for the last few months if I should buy one. I got the unit with two wireless controllers and one headset. With the unit I also got the following games:

• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
• Amped 3
• Project Gotham Racing 3
• Hitman - blood money
• Perfect dark zero
• Lara Croft - Tomb Raider legend

My favorite is Ghost Recon. I've played that lots of times. Hitman is a game I probably will try several times. The other games are of no interest for me. They are not my kind of games.

The first thing I had to do was to go to the store and buy a 5 meter TOSLINK cable and the advanced SCART cable. This so I could get surround sound and better picture quality than the composite signal I got from the HDTV cable that came with. (I did not have the right connectors...)

Xbox 360 impression
First of all - the unit is noisy. Very noisy. The solution is to turn up the volume on the stereo :)

The menus are somewhat hard to figure out. When I downloaded content from Xbox Live I had to look several places to find the content. But this is of course solved after a day or three with navigation and searching...

The sound is good - but it's TOSLINK or analogue output. Not a big problem for me, but I miss RCA plugs as I only got one TOSLINK connector on my amplifier.

The picture quality is good - unless you play Xbox Live Arcade games. Then you get the same crappy resolution we had 10 years ago. Trust me, Pac Man is not worth playing on Xbox.

Xbox Live
The first thing I did was to make a profile and connect it to Xbox Live. As you all know the autumn update just got out.

I really wanted to see for myself what Xbox Live is. So I downloaded lots of demos, movies and the update from Microsoft. I even bought myself 500 Microsoft points just to have something to start out with. I have not yet found anything I want to spend the points on. I hope that change as the points are non-refundable...

Since my friend never connected his box to the Internet I also got with one month of Xbox Live Gold membership. I could not opt out on this one - I tried. As a result I have to buy my friend one month of Gold membership :)

I have played Ghost Recon several hours now - most of them online with other users. My impression of Live Gold is that it adds value to my gaming experience. It's much more fun to play with others than with the computer.

I usually have not had any problems finding someone to play against. A couple of times we've been 2-4 players. Some times 16 players. But most of the time 8-10 players.

But; I get disconnected all the time from the games. I'm not sure why not. Sometimes I play two or three matches in a row without any problems. Other times I get kicked out right after the game starts. I have to check out more on this issue. It does not seem to be a common problem (or a problem that many writes about).

Game availability
There are lots of games for Xbox 360. You can also play many original Xbox games - but check if the game you want can run before you buy it. Microsoft maintains two lists - one for PAL and one for NTSC units.

Most of the games are for adults. You can find a few titles that kids can play. But if you want to give a gift to your daughter go for a Nintendo.

Altogether
I am impressed. I like this box. I won't be too surprised if I find one of these under the christmas tree at the end of the year.

I posted an update because of messy HTML from Outlook

New stuff in Fortigate 3.0 MR3

I've just installed FortiOS 3.0 build 400 on my firewall at home. The upgrade went without any problems.

 

There are some new features that I like. They are as follows;

• Telnet (CLI) access from the WEB GUI. You can now access the CLI from the Status screen.
• Support for multiple sources, destinations and rules. On previous releases I had to make several rules if I wanted more than one source in my ruleset.
• Support for secondary IP addresses from the web GUI.
• Support for RDP and VNC connections from SSL VPN
• You can define interface to match for an address.
• There is something called VIP Group. You can create virtual IP groups to facilitate firewall policy traffic control. For example, on the DMZ interface, if you have two email servers that use Virtual IP mapping, you can put these two VIPs into one VIP group and create one external-to-DMZ policy, instead of two policies, to control the traffic.

There are probably other changes but I have not found them yet :)

Syndicating feeds

With the era of blogging new standards emerged to syndicate data. The most used protocols are RSS and Atom. This article is an introduction for new users who want to start with syndication. I hope with this article that you want to syndication your self and see what you can get out of this.

 

An introduction about feeds - for dummies

A feed is in simple words a list of publications with links written in an open format that other users (and programs) can read from to get the lastest additions on the site. A feed usually contains the 10-20 last publications added to a site.

 

Beacuse this is an open format, anyone can read the feed files and present you with the information you want.

 

In the old days you probably read 20 newspapers on the net to see if anything new catched your breath. With feeds and syndication you can see all headlines from one place and just read the articles you find interesting. Now you can follow 40-50 newspapers a day :)

 

Many sites - not only blogs and newspapers provide feeds for their services. Also new publishing tools are starting to include support for this. Microsoft Office System 2007 (Sharepoint) is one big solution with all you need to publish data!

Did you know that Google use blogs as their primary communications channel towards their customers in addition to press releases? Google got lots of official blogs, probably covering each product and service from them. You can find them all by searching for the Google product you want on Google blogsearch.

Syndication - in short words

When you collect all those 40 newspaper feed into one place you syndicate the feeds. You collect them to a central place where you can read it in a way you find convenient.

 

Many products and services are built with the basis of these protocols. Some services are listed below.

 

Google blogsearch

This is Google search pages for blogs. This index is updated within minutes of an article beeing posted. It can take weeks for Google to index blogs in their normal search engine.

 

Google blogsearch also provides an RSS/Atom feed for searches, so you can receive all updates with given search words. This is cool - it gives you the ability to see what other bloggers write on the net.

 

FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a cool utility that burn feeds - whatever that is :) FeedBurner got lots of enhancements for your feeds. The most important ones (from my point of view) are rewriting of feeds for compability with all software on the marked and making search engines index your page quickly. Other enhancements are statistics and email subscriptions. This page is for the creative minds who write their own blogs.

 

Technorati

This webpage is a portal for blogs. A place where you can syndicate your feeds and search for topics. The site gives you lots of information regarding search words and let you search on tags, content or authors. If you write blogs and claim them you also get more statistics about your blogs.

 

Internet browsers

Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft and Opera can read feeds out of the box. If you read feeds occasionally this may be all you need. The author used Opera for years before moving on to Omea Reader.

 

Omea Reader

This is the authors personal favorite. This tool is a news reader, email client and RSS reader. With this I got everything I need into one tool. After I started out with this tool my surfing time went down by 60%.