My name is Steve and my wife is Stella. We live in Cohasset, California, a little town Northeast of Chico, 100 miles north of Sacramento. We have three grown children, Ben, Becky and Pina. Ben lives nearby in Chico and we get to see him frequently. Becky lives in North Dakota and we don’t see her enough! Pina lives in Chico with her wonderful husband Sean and we get to see them often.
I retired in 2005 as an IT professional and work part time for a local non emergency medical transportation company.
We spend our time riding motorcycles, taking pictures, messing with computers and enjoying our Boxer dog, Rocky.
I hope you enjoy poking around our web site.
- Rocky in our front yard
Welcome to my new WordPress web pages. As a retired IT professional, I stayed away from computers (other than paying bills and exchanging emails) for a couple of years after I retired. A couple of years ago I started “fiddling” as my wife calls it and built a couple of new computers for the shop, including a Ubuntu Linux machine and an XP machine. About that same time I thought I should update my old web page so I started looking at various ways to accomplish this. I came up with a Drupal installation hosted on a server somewhere out there in the ether and had lots of fun learning the ins and outs of a Content Management System (CMS). Since I live in the boonies, my internet access isn’t very fast and I am unable to host my pages on my own server. Recently, I heard about Squarespace and checked out it’s free trial. What I found was a less powerful solution but with a shallower learning curve than Drupal. Whenever we get high speed Internet I will probably switch back to a standalone CMS and host it on my own server. It’s still a work in progress but here it is.
Here are a few pros and cons that I have discovered with Squarespace…
Pros
- Easy to use
- Hosting server is included in the package
- Faster response than my other hosting server
- Still able to create complex pages
- Very prompt customer service
- Easy to include captions on pictures in posts
- Can use your own domain
Cons
- I like to open pictures in posts in a lightframe but still haven’t figured out a satisfactory way to make this happen
- No FTP access
- No command line access to the server
- PHP scripts in posts aren’t supported (At least I haven’t figured out how to do it)
- Forum module seems pretty weak
- Haven’t figured a way to transfer my Gallery2 photo gallery pictures to Squarespace’s Gallery without downloading them via my slow connection and re-uploading to Squarespace (see the second bullet “no FTP access”)
Since I wrote the above stuff, I started messing around with WordPress. Similar to Drupal but easier to use, I think it’s a good happy medium between Drupal and Squarespace. It’s main advantages are.
- Easier to use than Drupal.
- Large support base – seems about even with Drupal in this regard.
- Hosted on a server where you have access to ftp and shell access – If I decide to move it to my server it’s a pretty painless operation.
- Upgrades are a piece of cake