Chris Curtis Web Site

I had Tigercolor’s “ColorImpact” on my old computer but as I have not needed it for ages, I did not reinstall on my new one. Following some comments, and because I felt my web colour schemes were in a complete rut, I went to download and reinstall, entered my licence and was told it was invalid – there is a new version. A little checking on the website gave me a place to ask for a new licence code, and warned it would take 48hrs. Within 20 minutes I had a new code, via a personal email from the software writer, and the new version was up and running.

I have tried a few colour schemers, but ColorImpact is the one, at least for me. It creates sophisticated or simple colour schemes by playing, but it has deep power, all based on very sound colour theory, if you want to use it. The new version contains web templates so you can try out your new palette “in situ” and allows you to export the schemes you have made in lots of different ways – to your graphics program or as a style sheet, to name two. Look for subtle and not so subtle changes here as I experiment.

I liked the styling and it has promise, but I could not get FreeWPS to deliver. It is simple, which is good, but probably too simple. I could not create a page (I kept getting errors) and I could not see how you could really manage content – e.g. organise menus etc.

It may turn out to be great, but not yet.

It was not too difficult to lose the ghastly green freeWPS default and replace it with a more tasteful blue. I am becoming a bit fed up of blue colour schemes, but blue is the school colour and a lot of what I do is school-based. See the result here

In the search for a “user friendly” cms that can be used to build a “real” site as opposed to a nuke-style chatty blog/forum type site, and which can handle a variety of authors with different levels of access, I am looking at FreeWPS. You can see my installation here

First impressions are pretty favourable. It adopts the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) philosophy, which is a very good thing. The template system could not be easier and it works – really very well. It seems to serve pages quickly and I can see it being well used by non-techies. I hate the green “default” design, but it should be easy enough to change it. I need to experiment more before I know whether it is good for setting up links etc.

More later…

okansas.blogspot.com

I really enjoy reading this site. This is a guy who really thinks about the sport. Well worth dipping into from time to time.

There was a small photo gallery on this site run with the simple and reliable “phportfolio”.

I wanted something a little more sophisticated and slick so I have adopted “coppermine”. This was very easy to install and works like a charm. The only sticky moment was trying to find out the location of the “imagemagick” installation on the server, but fortunately the default worked fine.

So far, I have only put up the photos of Catherine’s first communion, but more will come when I have time. You can visit the gallery here

If this works it will be the first time I have been able to write
something, email it to my site and have it appear automatically. I will
send it now and see what happens.