Joomla!
March 27, 2009
So I’ve managed to jump on a Joomla! project in the local community on a volunteer basis as part of a website redesign for the Ottawa Talent Initiative, an organization that I’ve joined to help me in my current job search. As I mentioned before, I’ve built a lot of bad websites in my day, so here’s a chance to be part of a team that might actually make a nice one.
What exactly is Joomla!? Joomla! is a content management system for building websites and developing online applications. It’s open source, fully extendable, and has a lot of people out there using it. This means there’s a lot of fully functional extensions already written that you can just download, install, activate, and see on your page in minutes.
When I first joined up on the project, I was hoping to brush up on some of my php and MySQL skills, getting right in and doing some coding. After playing around with Joomla!, it looks like the power of the extensions makes a lot of that unnecessary. It’s going to be much more of an exercise in the software development process. Coding afterall, is just one piece of the puzzle, an ends to a mean, a set of instructions to get something to do what you want it to do.
RRRoll up the Rim, Canada’s Economic Stimulus Package
March 20, 2009
Tim Horton’s annual “RRRoll up the Rim to Win” campaign is certainly something that all Canadians can relate and look forward to. It combines the cheap thrill of caffeine and gambling. Cheap is certainly what a lot of us are looking for these days.
One of the more common “penny pinching” tips is to examine your monthly double espresso soy non-fat venti frappa cappa latte budget from your local Globo-Indie-Organic-Fair-Trade-Save-The-Whales coffee shop. While I certainly appreciate a good cup of coffee, I’m not above shelling out for a regular Timmy’s with pocket change rather than running up my credit card, especially when there’s a chance to win a new car, or you know, a doughnut. It could be a leftover piece of lettuce from the sandwich bar, I just want to win something!
My prediction is that Tim’s is having a banner year with their campaign in spite of the current R-word. I know for some people, it becomes a game of seeing how your odds stack up against the rest. Whether you brag that you’re 0 for 32, or the lucky one beating the odds batting 5 for 5, there’s plenty of people out there throwing down a loonie and change hoping to score the ultimate: the free coffee, which gets you more caffeine AND another rim to roll.
First Post
March 13, 2009
For years I’ve left random bits of myself scattered around the web, whether it was choosing horrible colour schemes and graphics on my first GeoCities website (remember those?), tracking my hockey team’s stats on the old NBnet personal space, playing around with some stuff on UNB’s people pages, some half baked ideas done in Dreamweaver, neglected blogs on msn spaces and blogger, and the general public/privacy debate with Facebook. I decided it was finally time to attempt to bring together something more professional and permanent.
I’ve been impressed by what people have managed to create within the context of wordpress without it degenerating into some awful mess like myspace, so I figure I’ll park my name here for at least a little while. Anyway, it’s about time I bought up my own personal domain. I have a pretty unique name, so there wasn’t much threat of it being claimed by someone else, but you never know. Cybersquatters are a pain. So there you have it. The humble beginnings of ianhaya.com.
