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I used to like computers, I remember liking computers, now I just want to give up on the whole thing
Argh. All I ever post here any more is whiny complaints about how the world doesn't work the way I want it to. This is pretty much the state of my life the past few years, so I guess that's not that surprising. So anyway, me whining. Again. Dammit.
I'm trying to set up a new, professional domain for my math tutoring and petsitting businesses (which I should probably post about here at some point). I figure that a nice feature for the pet business would be if I kept a daily, password-protected blog for each overnight client so they could check on their pets while on vacation. Because I want to get this set up soon and don't want to spend a lot of time learning about various blog/CMS choices I was going to do this with Moodle, which is kind of like killing a spider with a 30-volume encyclopedia set. (Plus, I could then set up practice quizzes and such for my tutoring clients, and easily re-purpose the whole thing if I got a teaching job, as Moodle is a great platform for things like online math homework assignments.) However, the host that's my current first-choice (for reasons mostly having to do with a good customer service track record) will only support up through Moodle 1.9 on their cheap hosting, and the more expensive hosting needed to run Moodle 2.x is a big enough cost differential that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to spend that much more when what I actually need right now is, in fact, less than 100 password-protected blogs rather than a full-fledged learning management system. (Moodle 1.9 will lose even security-fix support next summer, so I'm not going go with that.) Of course, I don't know anything about the various blog-hosting systems. Wordpress is what everyone seems to use for blogging, but doesn't seem to offer much in the way of intrinsic privacy levels, so it looks like I'd have to spend a lot of time messing around with plugins. There are a lot of other blogging/CMS systems out there, but I have no idea where to even start researching which don't suck.
Am now tempted just to make html pages in emacs rather than use a blogging platform and assign each client their own password-protected folder on my domain. I already know how to do that, and it just sounds way easier. I'm pretty sure that's the Wrong Way To Do It, though. I keep wanting the 90s back, which is not the way to make websites not suck.
I wish I were wealthy enough to just hire someone to deal with all of this crap for me, but if I had that kind of money I wouldn't be petsitting in the first place. Computer stuff just changes too fast for me to ever understand what the hell is going on anymore, and I'm just so tired of trying to even find the right way to frame my questions.
I'm trying to set up a new, professional domain for my math tutoring and petsitting businesses (which I should probably post about here at some point). I figure that a nice feature for the pet business would be if I kept a daily, password-protected blog for each overnight client so they could check on their pets while on vacation. Because I want to get this set up soon and don't want to spend a lot of time learning about various blog/CMS choices I was going to do this with Moodle, which is kind of like killing a spider with a 30-volume encyclopedia set. (Plus, I could then set up practice quizzes and such for my tutoring clients, and easily re-purpose the whole thing if I got a teaching job, as Moodle is a great platform for things like online math homework assignments.) However, the host that's my current first-choice (for reasons mostly having to do with a good customer service track record) will only support up through Moodle 1.9 on their cheap hosting, and the more expensive hosting needed to run Moodle 2.x is a big enough cost differential that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to spend that much more when what I actually need right now is, in fact, less than 100 password-protected blogs rather than a full-fledged learning management system. (Moodle 1.9 will lose even security-fix support next summer, so I'm not going go with that.) Of course, I don't know anything about the various blog-hosting systems. Wordpress is what everyone seems to use for blogging, but doesn't seem to offer much in the way of intrinsic privacy levels, so it looks like I'd have to spend a lot of time messing around with plugins. There are a lot of other blogging/CMS systems out there, but I have no idea where to even start researching which don't suck.
Am now tempted just to make html pages in emacs rather than use a blogging platform and assign each client their own password-protected folder on my domain. I already know how to do that, and it just sounds way easier. I'm pretty sure that's the Wrong Way To Do It, though. I keep wanting the 90s back, which is not the way to make websites not suck.
I wish I were wealthy enough to just hire someone to deal with all of this crap for me, but if I had that kind of money I wouldn't be petsitting in the first place. Computer stuff just changes too fast for me to ever understand what the hell is going on anymore, and I'm just so tired of trying to even find the right way to frame my questions.
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If you are looking to something that manages "content", WordPress and Drupal are the ones that are best known, but there are also Joomla and Zope/Plone and a number of others. [Yes, I am quoting a lot from Wikipedia here, but I still think it's a good starting point. I'll admit bias, as I have edited some Wikipedia pages -- though not these ones -- in the recent past.] Wikipedia also pointed me to this PDF file from "Idealware" comparing the first four CMSs (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Plone) that I mentioned above.
Also, I did some programming in PHP this summer for the local con CAN-CON to set up a Registration Page. It wasn't perfect (and it was my first usage of PHP), but I may be able to help advise here.
The biggest irony is that the Content Management Systems were intended to make things easier than back in the 90s, when everyone was expected to code HTML manually. With the new abilities built into HTML v. 5 [What happened to XHTML 2.0? "Politics" is probably the best answer I can give you; it's dead, Jim], it's actually harder to do this without some help. I wrote HTML and CSS as part of developing that Registration Page, but not everything went to plan; such is life.
Hoping this helps ...
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There is probably some other kind of thing that I actually want - a Customer Management System or something. I don't even know enough to know what to ask. I'm just used to dealing with Course Management Systems, online gradebooks, and other kinds of student record systems, so it's easy for me to see how to twist something like Moodle into doing what I actually want and I have no idea if there already exists something designed for what I want. (I've been a staff trainer and/or building support person and/or a system administrator for several during my teaching career - such things tend to roll downhill to me because I'm good at twisting whatever thing the district already has into doing what I need it to do somehow.)
What I pie-in-the-sky want is for each client to have a login that they can use to access a private site with a blog that I update each day I'm overnighting with their pet, a calendar that shows any future bookings they have with me, a bill/payment history, and an interactive form where they can tell me the things I need to know to take care of their pets/house (most of my clients currently leave me several printed pages of information about things like when/how their pet eats, health concerns, and which plants need watering when - I'd like to offer a dropbox option where they can attach these files as well as a form they could choose to fill in instead). I am confident I could make Moodle do all of those things well by making a separate "class" for each client, but I am also well aware that Moodle is not designed for that task and has a lot of other features I wouldn't be using, so I kind of wonder if there is something lighter-weight that does what I need and wouldn't require as high-powered a host.
I could do all of that except for the interactive form/dropbox with totally static pages I create offline and upload and just assign each client a different password-protected directory, it just wouldn't be nearly as nice of a system as proper integrated logins and a dynamic site. It would also be a pain to code properly and probably end up full of mildly invalid HTML and break in weird ways over time. On the other hand, I could get the initial setup done in about an hour.
I'm also aware that I really need to get a domain and get business cards up places this week rather than spend the next six months building a beautiful site that does everything well. I can attract clients with a static website that just lists service area and prices rather than my dream website, so I need to just make a decision and go with it. I'd like to structure that static site in such a way as to make it easier to build the Site of Awesomeness later without breaking links, but I really need to not have this turn in to a programming project that doesn't actually advertise my business because it's not done yet and have it sit that way for a long time while I whine about how I hate computers and threaten to build it from scratch.
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On the one hand, I made my static site with html hand coded in emacs, on top of which I used hand coded css, along with a bunch of css snippets and javascript that I found in various places, and when it got complicated enough that I needed to generate the files from templates, I made templates with PHP and used make to build from them. It works for what I want it to do, which is look like a site from 1998 instead of 1994. It's also a somewhat ridiculous way of doing things if you aren't incrementally improving your site starting from what it was in 1994, and it doesn't do anything fancy, and I expect if I tried to make it do anything fancy, I'd end up curled up on the futon and gibbering.
On the other hand, I just used wordpress when I needed a blog. (Well, there have been a couple of plugins and a tiny bit of manual tinkering.) The world is full of wordpress plugins, and you may be able to cobble some together to do what you want. The world is also full of other systems that are not wordpress that I don't know anything about.
Anyway. I suppose I should just wish you good luck with this thing, and not try to be helpful.
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There is probably some other kind of thing that I actually want - a Customer Management System or something.
At a guess, that sounds like a "customer relationship management" (CRM) system, particularly one that has customer service and support features. I found this list of CRM systems (in Wikipedia :-), but that list seems to only include one or two with a customer-service orientation, and only a few of them will run under the Free BSD OS (as "cross-platform"). From what (little) I know of them, there should be at least one or two that support this kind of configuring, though you may want to encourage the customer to fill out the form rather than attaching a file. [Natural-language parsing, even for limited subject "domains" as house-sitting and pet-sitting, is still *hard* for a computer to do; the form also may implicitly detect or prevent omission (or, perhaps, over-specification) of the information. In a different subject domain, I am reminded of the house seller who specified a house siding of "CBS", to the total bewilderment of would-be buyers. It turned out he meant "concrete-brick-stucco," but I'd bet most people were baffled what a building siding and a TV network had in common.]
Given that I need to keep looking for work, I probably won't be able to help much beyond this, but I'm perfectly happy to send you some more details for free if need be. [I have been out of the computing biz for years, and miss it badly.]
It's after 2:30 PDT [5:30am local], so I should be fading out here ... :-/
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I made templates with PHP and used make to build from them.
That trick (of using Make paired with PHP) is not something I've tried, though I can see that it might work. IMake (used in the X11 project) might go even further, though getting those "cpp" macros running together with PHP might prove awkward.
There also are programming tools such as Cake-PHP, but I have not yet used those.
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I think I'm just going to set up a static site for now because I can see that I have to give Actual Thought to what kind of dynamic web stuff would make sense and I just don't have the time right now. My competitors don't generally have very elaborate web presences, so it shouldn't cost me much business if mine's pretty basic. I just need something to put on the damn business cards so I can start putting them up on local bulletin boards and such. One of my competitors says she gets most of her new business through newspaper ads, even, so I may go that route.
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