Last night I upgraded from WordPress v2.6.1 to WordPress v2.6.2. You’ve heard me extoll the virtues of WordPress. Free, open source, easy to modify and customize, highly secure and… updated (infuriatingly) often.
If you see any weirdness, please let me know so I can take a look at the issue.
If you’re at all curious, I’ve written about four eight of the plugins for this website. WordPress was specifically written to allow users to create their own plugins. A “plugin” is a little piece of programming code that will modify how a program behaves.
I’ll discuss them later on, but for the ravenously curious my plugins include:
Looong story short, after Dell lost my Windows XP laptop they replaced eventually it with a new laptop (hooray!) with Windows Vista (boo!). Sure, I got used to it – but its a constant struggle. Once you strip down Vista, yanking out all the features that make it different from Windows XP, its not that bad. But, then again, there isn’t much good about it either. More than 18 months after the release of Vista, here’s my reason to not use it:
In this day and age, there is exactly one reason to have Windows – Microsoft Office. If you want to play games, you’re better off with an XBox or PlayStation 3. If you want to surf the web, you can use your phone. For anything else, you can use a Mac or Linux.
A friend of mine confided that when her copy of MS Office 2003 didn’t work with Vista she bought MS Office 2007. This exact problem, my copy of MS Office 2003 not being able to run on my laptop running Vista, is why I turned to OpenOffice. Here’s the vicious cycle I perceive:
I absolutely refuse to believe Microsoft is incapable of figuring out a way for their newest operating system to work with the world’s most popular office productivity software. The only possible explanation I will accept is that Microsoft is using the manufacturer’s theory of LRR. ((Lather, rinse, repeat.))
In my never ending quest to build the world’s best workers’ compensation website, I’ve made a few upgrades:
Using open source software can be a two-edged sword. On the down side, anyone with the ability to read the source code can figure out the security vulnerabilities. The plus side is that people are constantly working to improve and eliminate those very same security vulnerabilities.
Since people are working on WordPress all the time, it will need to be upgraded all the time. Doing so allows me to take advantage of the latest features and security updates. So far I’ve used WordPress 2.3.2, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, and now 2.6.1.
The theme (the “look” of this website) is completely user configurable. Since this website’s launch I’ve been constantly tweaking the look. Minor changes to the color scheme, menu at the top of the website, and how many posts are shown on the blog page.
I work on the theme in order to (hopefully) make the website more aesthetically pleasing and easier to use.
I’d like to make the free registration process as quick and as painless as possible. I’ve had the opportunity to watch a few people go through the free registration process for this website. What I saw was that people were logging in for the first time and were sent to their user page – which looks totally different from the rest of the website. Unfortunately, this caused no end of confusion.
I modified an existing plugin to override website’s default settings to send users directly to the calculator page as soon as they log in.
I recently gave a brief overview of my permanent disability and workers’ compensation benefit calculators. In that post I wrote a little bit about how my online benefits calculators work. Since then I’ve posted about my use of javascript, PHP, and AJAX in creating these permanent disability and permanent impairment calculators.
As I mentioned in the prior post in this series, my first few versions of this website and its workers’ compensation calculators did not use MySQL. The initial versions of this site only saved information – which meant I only had to use PHP to open a file on the server, add an extra line of information, and then close the file. This had several problems:
MySQL is an incredible tool for storing, organizing, and retrieving a large amount of data. Like PHP, it is also open-source. This means it is:
So, why did I avoid MySQL? I didn’t want to have to learn a whole new programming language. I had to learn how to set up a database, tables within the database, how to search for information in a table, how to put information into a table, and how to change information which was already in a table. There was a lot of trial and error. I ended up doing some pretty cool things in the process of learning this language. Some examples:
The end result of learning this language is a more interactive website. One of the last incarnations of this site was a version that would show different color schemes, advertisers, and messages depending upon the user. All of this was made possible by large amounts of data stored in MySQL.
Thus ends my technical overview of my workers’ compensation permanent disability calculators! If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below!
