Tech Talk

with Bob Gilson and Lee Hall

Bob: The holiday shopping season is upon us. Its a time when many ask for outlandishly sized gifts.
Lee: And through the “magic” of credit card debt, some receive them.
Bob: You may not have heard ,but Lee works for Santa. He gets the letters requesting reliable and secure Microsoft Windows systems.
Lee: I’ve resigned three times, but he keeps sending the letters.
Bob: The week of Thanksgiving, I was asked to deliver a Santa sized gift for my customer, Jim Cook. He runs Victoria Sailing School. Jim has a new line of business getting started: E-Learn To Sail(http://elearntosail. com). It,s the same classes he has been offering for years but now you can take them over the internet.
Lee: I’ve heard many “Bob-tales.” Some of them are believable if you have a flux capacitor hooked up to your machine. But there is no way I will believe you managed to push a sailboat, two humpback whales and the water they require over the internet using your modest computing facilities.
Bob: No virtual reality required. Leave the transparent aluminum to fiction. E-Learn To Sail teaches courses in coastal navigation, celestial navigation and weather for the mariner. It,s a lot of charts, compasses, and parallel ruler work.
Lee: Do you say “Argh” a lot?
Bob: In celestial navigation you do. You make so many mistakes that you run out of erasers. Coastal navigation is more fun. You skirt around dangerous shoals and glide into harbors for rum punch.
Lee: Does this have anything to do with Tech Talk? Make a connection, please.
Bob: Today’s topic is content management systems. CMS for short.
Lee: Huh? I’m reaching for the keyboard....
Bob: Hey, put that down. I’m not going ultra-geek with this. Its a perfect Tech Talk column because it dispels some misconceptions about the difficulty and expense of building web sites. A CMS is a Lego set for building websites.
Lee: Very well. But I’m keeping the keyboard ready in case you spout gibberish.
Bob: The project was to build a shopping website for elearntosail.com.
It was supposed to be a leisurely paced project. Jim placed an ad in Sail Magazine giving the project a deadline of the end of November. Sail Magazine published early. Jim received a call the Tuesday before Thanksgiving from a Sail Magazine reader looking for the completed web site.
Lee: And then he placed a call to you.
Bob: He said “Mush!”.
Lee: So how far along was the site before Tuesday?
Bob: I’d worked on it less than a day. I’d completed the underlying building blocks. I’ll skip the list of components. Its just the stuff no one cares about so long as it works. Also, credit card processing was working. No point in running a web store without credit card processing.
Lee: That’s a pretty good start. What work remained?
Bob: Everything a customer would see. The web site was almost blank. The web store needed products to sell. The videos that demonstrate Jim’s teaching style and classroom environment were missing.
Lee: Is this when you raised your bill while complaining of the rising costs of time travel?
Bob: Nope. The effort had two advantages. First, Jim and I had worked on Victoria Sailing School’s site(http://victoriasailingschool.com) together. This gave us a working design to emulate and a source of text and images. Second, Jim is a very practical guy. He understands a CMS can combine components very quickly. But they don’t always fit perfectly. The trick is to adjust the design to meet the business goals rather than get fussy about the site working EXACTLY as you’d like.
Lee: No Steve Jobs inspired puritanism allowed.
Bob: Steve Jobs could afford puritanism. Jim Cook can’t.
Lee: So you made all sorts of dirty hacks?
Bob: No. It looks nice. It flows well. It was complete and running by midnight.
Lee: What features does the site include?
Bob: Course descriptions including video, a sample lesson with video, sample problems with video solutions, instructor introductions, company introduction, customer recommendations, course catalog, and shopping cart with credit card processing. And the back office facilities include order management, catalog management, content editing, and web site usage tracking.
Lee: I’ve seen a similar feature list from those companies promising a “web store in 5 minutes.”
Bob: Stay clear of those. Sure, the features they promise work,  but they aren’t tuned to your business. For example: Jim has me working on a teaching aide that simulates lighthouses, buoys, and other aides to navigation. It,s just another plug-in to the CMS. If he signed up with those “all in one” solutions, their tech support would say “you can’t get there from here.”
Lee: Never say that to a navigation guy.
Bob: He’ll make you clean the bilge.
Lee: So the web store looks nice, displays video, sells classes, processes credit cards, and was completed in 2 days. The CMS allows new features to be added easily. You never griped about the pressure? Never asked for more money?
Bob: No need. I was a bit wired at the end, but no super-hero moves were needed.
Lee: That’s a little anti-climactic.
Bob: If you want drama, learn the value of Jim’s classes by dropping your GPS into salt water when the fog rolls in. 
Lee: Before we close, how does Lora feel about your new video technology? Any upgrades in the future of the Lyons Recorder’s web site?
Bob: “Lust” does not begin to describe her position.

Tech Talk with Bob and Lee

Lee: How are disk drives and warm waffles similar?
Bob: They’re both round, easily spun, and more enjoyable if you don’t fling them across the room.

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Tech Talk with Bob Gilson and Lee Hall

What is a NetBook?

Bob: Suppose you want to purchase a new computer and decided it should be mobile. You go shopping and discover there is now a division between laptop computers and something new called a netbook.

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