Personal CMS Page

Where CMS = Content Management System = "a database of information and a way to change and display that information, without spending a lot of time dealing with the technical details of presentation" (if you missed my presentation)

Hello! (Potential SIGUCCS visitors),

The 2005 conference was great fun. Here's a link to my paper in case you want to take a peek at it.
Is your clock a year off? Here's a link to last year's paper about Cameras in Public Lab spaces.
-Doug

Post-conference reflections:

Thinking about what I had time to say during my presentation, I realized I had to leave out a lot of details which anyone building one of these puppies will want to consider along the way:

documentation of how you build yours (so you can reconstruct it w/o struggling to remember exactly what choices you made)
thinking about how you want to organize your copious data BEFORE you type it all in
learning about making backups, in case whatever computer you have your data on goes down. OK, I admit _I_ never take advantage of my advice about backing up, but it IS important!
For me, and probably for you, if you build up one of these you'll have moments of confusion, doubt, despair. Lots of new concepts the first time around! Feel free to ask questions in the online forum of whatever package you select. You're welcome to contact me for whatever help I can offer (there's so many packages out there I haven't tried yet...)
Don't forget my motto: steal at least 1/3 of what you know!

Links referenced in my paper:

Home of Apache, the Open-Source Web Server Foundation
Installing PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin
Installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on SUSE Linux Professional
Drupal How-To Page
CMS Matrix Compare CMS features side-by-side
Open Source CMS Take any of many PHP & MySQL CMS packages for a 2-hour ride
Home page for the Drupal CMS (this is the package I demoed...)
http://www.mamboserver.com/Another PHP & MySQL package, perhaps more to your taste?
(This page you're looking at now)
The Plone CMS, using Zope for its script language instead of PHP; I hope to investigate this further before selling my soul to the PHP paradigm
Oregon State University Open Source Lab contains much information about open-source packages; the page itself is written using the above-mentioned Plone CMS

Yet More Potentially Useful Links:

Oh, so many! Let me know if you find something I could reflect here....
(Assuming you have read this far! Thanks for visiting. -Doug)

Please do write if you stop by; it's a long time 'til the next conference! :)

Doug Simpson
Academic Computer Lab Manager (Technical Services Manager)
University of Oregon Computing Center
Eugene, Oregon USA

541-346-1736 (Computing Center, Room 127)
541-912-9836 (cell phone)

Please send comments or questions to: dsimpson@uoregon.edu
The URL for this page is: http://www.uoregon.edu/~dsimpson/cms/index.html