Hey, it’s been a while since i’ve posted. I’ve been busy working on the new Xtreme Radio website, over at xtremeradio.org. I’ve installed Joomla and done some integration stuff, and I have pretty much come to the conclusion that Wordpress is the best CMS out there. Unfortunately it’s not quite suitable for a radio site, but if it was more ‘CMSey’ i’d use it in a shot. Wordpress is so well designed, it’s so easy to integrate into a site, the back-end looks really nice and iis easy to use, which I cannot say for Joomla. Joomla’s backend is confusing and awkard, I really dislike it. In an ideal world I’d live without a CMS controlled website. I prefer to get more control over my site, no site i’ve made has ever used CMS (excluding blogs like this one of course, where CMS’s like wordpress make sense). I’ve had to give up quite a bit of control with Joomla, as I don’t fancy editing it outside of the themes folder, because it makes upgrading harder etc.
We’re aiming to launch it for the start of the new university term so look forward to that!

So Google Chrome came out this week then, in fact I’m actually using it to post this! Luckily Google has changed their EULA that made all content posted via their browser usable by Google, not that Google would want to use this for anything but still. I’m quite impressed with Chrome, it’s fast, very fast, it looks VERY sexy on Vista, unlike Firefox (well by default anyway), and even better than IE7/8. I like the minimalistic style, and the lack of Adblock and a few other extensions doesn’t really bother me. Especially because I was beginning to disable it for a few sites that I visit a lot, as you know I feel bad using certain sites pretty regularly and then disabling their adverts. But anyway Chrome is great, I’ve been using it more and more recently, it is very nice.

You may have noticed a couple of new external links on the left hand side. I wondered if it was the right thing to do to put links to sites that perhaps say are not related to me, because it’s kind of a CV style site, but I decided to put them in as they are two very good sites that perhaps some people that come here may be interested in. They are twit.tv and the supersite for windows. Both of these sites are brilliant in their own way. I’ve been on and off reading the supersite for windows for years, I usually visit it when expecting a big release, such as Vista, and reading up about it before it’s publicly available, or just before I can get it. Although recently I’ve been visiting it more often, because it’s a very interesting site. I recommend anyone who’s interested in Windows and the future of Windows, and other Microsoft products I may add, to visit it.

Twit.tv is not a mild insult, but actually a very good podcast network. I first found out about twit, from Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, where I found out that he did a Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. I started listening to the podcast quite late on, but when I did start listening I found it very interesting and informative. I didn’t know who Leo Laporte was back then, but after slowly over the past year getting into more and more of his podcasts, like Security Now (with GRC’s Steve Gibson) and This Week in Tech (where TWiT gets it’s name), it is clear that he is a legend! I’ve also recently over the summer holiday’s got into TwitLive.tv, which is basically a live video stream of Leo recording his podcasts, often with user interaction via the Chatroom, especially in-between podcasts. As someone who is interested in Technology and Radio, this sort of thing really interests me, and so anyone else out there who is also interested in this kind of thing might do well to listen in. He usually starts at 6PM British Time (11PM Pacific, where he’s based). He even did a live Interview with Robert Llewelyn recently, you know that guy who does “Scrapheap Challenge” and the excellent “How Things Work”.

I’ve now officially passed the first year of University, which is nice! Computer Science, while often interesting, is a very hard course! I await the second year with nervous anticipation!

Anyway thanks for reading, you must have the patience of a saint