In case you have not come across the term before, CMS stands for Content Management System. The idea is that a central store of data is held, or often automatically gathered, from which a system can present the information in different ways. If we take an example of this blog, if I were to use static HTML pages, in the way many web sites used to produced, I would spend all day simply moving data from one page to another, and end up with a lot of duplicated work. This is obviously not ideal. However, each post I write, or image I upload, exists in its own right, and each page you read here simply extracts the most recent posts (seven in this site’s case), and creates the front page from them. After this is done, the second page is created with the next oldest seven posts. Similarly, if I want to use an image I have previously posted, rather than fiddling about too much, I can simply direct the site to display the same image again.
Whilst this saves me a great deal of time personally, can you imagine how many work hours would be lost if a company tried to use static pages to present their information to staff and customers? The scary part is, many companies still follow this method, leaving their staff tied up with mundane repetitive work, when they could be earning the company more money.

epazz’s portal software ensures that almost any of your staff can produce professional looking pages, without scripting skills, and that not only will the result look professional, but you will also encounter a great deal of flexibility as to how exactly you present your information. If you need some sectors of your audience to be actively informed of changes to your stock, business methods or staffing structure, rather than relying on those people to visit your site, you can become pro-active and send them e-mails or documents automatically, again, all from within the Portal Software CMS system.
If you would like to learn more, click the link above, and consider whether utilizing the company’s offer of a 30 day risk free demo of their system could do wonders for your business.

When I first started this blog (see yesterday’s ‘Happy Birthday’ post), I knew a little HTML, Pascal, Visual Basic from my Uni days, the basics of C++, and of course BASIC (from my spectrum days, and a little QBasic programming, from my DOS, pre-Windows 3.0 days.).
Since then, I could not honestly say I have learnt PHP and CSS scripting, however, I now know enough to hack about other peoples work, with a reasonably large amount of confidence that I will eventually get what I require out of the script I am bodging. A good example of this is Alex’s Blog - Dryad Musings. We got the theme modified to the stage it looked good enough in FireFox, but Internet Explorer still displays a few quirks.

Anyway /dream.in.code (apart from having a mildly confusing name - I would personally interpret that name to equate to END dreaming in code, but that could just be my lack of knowledge…), has a great deal of information on many languages, so whether you fancy lending a hand to newbies to your area of knowledge, or you have some questions to ask experts in a field you are still picking up, do make sure you check out the forums, before you start making random Google searches in your quest for assistance.

Given an opportunity, I would like to get a handle on Ruby - it certainly never harms any to have good solid foundation of knowledge across related topics of information. Anyway, check out what is on offer, feel free to leave a comment, or perhaps more suitable in this post at least, leave your query on the forums directly.

I think.
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I need to write a quick note on, and big thank you to the author of, wp-headlineanimator. To go straight to the plug in pages, check here and here.

I had a few problems with the configuration of this plug in, and contacted the author, asking for a little assistance.
A few days later, he contacted me via Skype, and explained the mistake I had made in defining the path to the font file I wished to use. We then hit another snag, apparently, my server doesn’t support EXIF detection. Oh no I thought, I’ll have to find an alternative (ha ha) plug in. NOPE!!! As we were chatting away (once I’d remembered to re-enable AGC in the mic input ) he re-wrote the plug in code and sent it to me. I was as happy as a pig in muck. (He’ll be including the modifications in the next release I believe)

For a demonstration of what the plug in actually achieves, see the graphic below.

OK, looks pretty, but I could have (eventually) knocked that up in PhotoShop, right? Wrong, that file isn’t static. That is to say, each time I add a new post, that picture will reflect that, and show the new post.
OK, great, but the point of it is…. ?

Well stop thinking about your own site, and think of the applications this image could have in the wider cyber-world…
e-mail signatures, forum sigs, anywhere you can refer to a URL, you can now have an enticing image that shows the readers your most recent posts. Whilst RSS feeds can achieve something simlair, most forums wouldn’t allow the sort of code required to be used in a sig, and this approach, once setup, works really well.

Although putting your site in a forum sig/mail sig is hardly new, having so much information packed in should certainly help your image&hyperlink to be noticed quicker than any other posters.

Stargazer kindly displays the code you need to use to show the graphic, hyperlinked to your site, in terms of HTML, and if you are using it in a forum sig, it is pretty much the same, you just need to remember to swap out the HTML tags for their BBCode equivalent.
so,

[a href="http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/"][img src="http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/wp-content/animator.gif"][/a]
(you’d need to change the square brackets [ ] for pointed < >, I swapped them to prevent WordPress from misinterpreting the text as script, can’t figure out how to tell WP to just plain ignore HTML tags right now)

becomes

[url=http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/][img]http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/wp-content/animator.gif[/img][/url]

I chose to add a small border to my template image, as the forums I use vary in colour themes, and without the border, the white background contrasts to greatly on dark-themed sites. I’ve still not figured out using a transparent PNG and keeping the transparency in the resulting GIF file, but I’m going to try and work on it a bit more before bothering the author again, quite so soon.