All this great free stuff!
This site now has a blog, photo gallery, behind the scenes its running a database, I have a cvs repository set up … and all this software is free. Amazing! And the quality is not bad too, considering.
OK the usability is somewhat poor, with Gallery being the most mindboggling to initially setup, but then it has the double curse of being open source and running on the web where, without great cleverness, most interactions are pretty basic.
The supporting technology is good too. For example, there are a tonne of good quality free WordPress (this blogging software) themes out there, like the one I am using now. Why would I ever bother to learn CSS and all manner of complex technology only to design, after many many hours, a site that looks worse?
December 4th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Web application install technology is still a long way from the maturity of what’s on the desktop (and the best thing we’ve got *there* is InstallShield. ugh). The end result is that every web app developer uses their own install process, leaving us with things like Gallery. The sad state of affairs is that Gallery is actually *much* better than some other applications.