Category: "b2evolution"

18 years of b2evolution

I first started tinkering with the original b2/cafelog software in the end of 2002, as the original author, Michel V. had stopped maintaining it.

Then, in early 2003 it became apparent that I was going to fork it and start maintaining something of my own.

Later in 2003, I registered the domain b2evolution.net. Whois will tell you Creation Date: 2003-06-12T02:50:00Z (I guess I’ve always done my best work late in the night… ;)

So, well, it’s been 18 years now

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A web of broken links

A web of broken links

From time to time I do a little housekeeping on my blogs. Today I moved some old English posts from my French blog to my English blog. I'm not sure if it even matters, but it gives me some satisfaction to tidy things up. I do it as a distraction procrastination like you may browse an endless Facebook or Twitter feed...

Anyways, the reason I am writing this is because it struck me that 9 out of 10 old posts actually have broken links. Back in the days, we bloggers used to cite other bloggers on our blogs. Well... today all these citations lead to 404 pages and even non-existant domains.

All this interconnected blogosphere we collectively built for several years is now slowly degrading into a web of broken links...

Once I get past the nostalgia, I wonder though, why so many of the tech bloggers, and even the hardcore "open web" and "web standards" bloggers have dropped the ball on their blogs. I mean, I get it they don't blog any more, but why did they take them offline? The cost of keeping these old blogs alive would be practically zero...

Screw it, let's reskin it!

Screw it, let's reskin it!

I think it was about time I re-skinned this site! 

Since my last post pledging to get rid of the ugliness, I feel I’ve made some significant progress on b2evolution.net (especially the home page) but this personal site you’re looking at right now was really starting to hurt my own eyes! (I can’t believe I actually used to be happy with my old design :p)

So today I just decided to “screw it and re-skin it“.

I’ve been procrastinating on this for maybe two years just because I didn’t have time (or the energy) to actually re-design it – meaning: polishing a new design for it. Making it responsive, etc.

So I finally decided to take a shortcut: use another skin I like and make it fit as fast as possible. And sometimes I actually forget how fast this can be done with b2evolution. Once I had uploaded the new skin, it took me about 30 minutes to set up all the menu/navigation widgets so the site navigation makes sense. And voilà.

Of course, there’s a million details in this skin that need fixing but I think the improvement is massive already! 30 minutes of work vs. 2 years of procrastination. What a shame! :/

Now, there’s a couple interesting thoughts down the road:

  • I just made the 20% of the effort that yields 80% of the benefits;
  • I still have 80% of the work to do to get the details right;
  • Some day this new deisgn will probably feel ugly again… :(
  • How do I prevent letting it slide into ugliness again next time? hum… it feels like I have so many gardens that need constant care… :p

Anyways, Dear Reader, I hope you’ll enjoy this site in its new form! :)

Did I abandon my sites?

Did I abandon my sites?

2014. Time to wake up, eh?

First off, why have I been blogging so little in the last couple of years?

I guess it's a combination of:

  • Too much work
  • Having a real life (which I might not have had a few years back...)
  • Google did a great job at scaring me off posting "non-useful" content (Shall we call it "Panda angst" ?)

All of these are lame excuses.

  • Blogging is part of my work
  • Don't even get me started on balancing work and real life - there has to be a solution!
  • Sharing ideas, no matter how mundane they might seem at first, has been the beginning of many great projects in my own experience. Plus: it definitely helps to structure a lot of thoughts that would otherwise just swirl around in my head, without ever leading to anything tangible. Moving forward, even small steps at a time is far more important than a particular Google algorythm might think of it... especially on my personal blog (I'm still debating this regarding some other sites :p)

2014. Time to get rid of the Ugly!

The most vexing part in this wake up call is that so many of my (many) websites are just plain ugly... compared to the current web-design state of the art.

I don't recall exactly what led me to this realization but part of it was comparing b2evolution.net to its competitors. Ironically, it's not that the competitors (Free CMS tools) look good. It's actually that those competitors look bad compared to commercial solutions.

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How to install b2evolution on Mac OS X in 5 minutes from scratch

Tested with MAMP 1.7.2, b2evolution 3.2 and Mac OS X 10.5.7 :

  1. Download and install MAMP (Free) into the Applications folder
  2. Start MAMP and make sure you get the MAMP start page
  3. Download b2evolution and unzip it into /Applications/MAMP/htdocs
  4. Point yout browser to http://localhost:8888/b2evolution/ and follow install procedure
  5. When prompted for mysql username and password use "root" and "root". (the mysql host is "localhost")
  6. You're up and running, but with one caveat... when displaying blogs you'll run into incomplete pages and the php error log (/Applications/MAMP/logs/php_error.log) will give you a hint:

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted

It doesn't make much sense that MAMP would come preconfigured with only 8MB of RAM available to apps. I bet that's an easy settign to change if you buy MAMP Pro (39 ?). To fix this on the free version though, open the file /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini with TextEdit. Find the line that starts with memory_limit = and edit it as follows:

memory_limit = 128M