Edwyn Chan's Weblog

First day back in beijing. Beijing has been my 2nd home for the past 3 years. its good to be back even though its pretty cold.  I will be in town meeting up with people and attending the Annual Chinese Blogger Conference,  aka cnbloggercon 2007 and the Web 2.0 event organized by Orange. The Blogger conference is my personal favorite out of all the internet events in china as its grassroots and not too commercial.  This means its easy and relaxed way to meet other web 2.0 entrepreneurs in China as many of them are also bloggers. This is their third event and I have been to the previous two.  If anyone would like to join they should sign up here before the 28th (sorry only chinese link).

Its been open source CMS for me this weekend. First it was MT and WP now its Joomla. I heard Joomla was powerful from my brother, Erik, (i think?) and that his harmotion site was made with it. It sure does feel more powerful than WP, but it so much harder to use. My major complaints are:

• the sections thing is complicated. the WP widget function is much simplier. It lets me click and drag to organize the order of my content.
• somehow changing the template breaks all the links to the other pages? i have no idea how to re-attach them. WP makes adding new pages easy and i haven’t had a linking issue.

The only one feature that i feel they did well over MT and WP is the installation of themes and plugins. All these addons can be added thru the web admin page by simply uploading it thru your browser. You don;t neve need to unpack the zip file. This is alot more user friendly than needing to FTP stuff.

Likes:

• plugins are great, just like firefox, i can customize what additional functions i want to add
• free themes

Dislikes

• Errors caused by themes and plugins that aren’t compatible with v2.3

• Themes that aren’t widgetized.   why would anyone make a theme that doesn;t support widgets?

(Since i don;t know CSS yet, i can’t do much editing the themes)

quickly following my first movable type post, which is no longer available, this is my first wordpress post. I originally used movable type 4 to host my blog but was disappointed in the lack of plugins and the difficulty in installing and using plugins. Wordpress is pretty intuitive and not hard to install and manage at all. (Although i did and still am having some problems with it, but i think its coz i messed up the sql) It also helps that the ultra cheap web hosting i am using, Dreamhost, has one click install for Wordpress. Althought dreamhost is ultra cheap with those $97 off coupons but its kinda slow at times. I still it is a better deal taht using typepad, and i get to learn how to setup my own blog. it was a lot easier than i thought