I’ve been thinking about moving over to EE for a while now, especially version 2 seems to be great considering it’s built using Codeigniter. Up until yesterday I didn’t feel like moving because of the price tag involved, and simply because I’m too lazy to recreate my entire website using EE. The reason I decided to move over after all was that yesterday I was trying to add a search box and only make it appear on the blog page. The problem? I had to install a widget in order to hide the search widget on certain pages. This isn’t something I want to do, as the widget is not only poorly developed (http://cl.ly/1S2L), but also an overkill if you just want to hide/show a single widget on a few pages.

However, plugins aren’t the biggest reason for making the switch. It’s Wordpress itself. Wordpress is great for a small blog or for someone who doesn’t do that much with their website other than posting cat videos. Its ease of use makes it the ideal system for both users and designers that have a limited knowledge of the things they’re working with. The problem is that as soon as you want to do something more than just blogging you’ll have to start hacking or installing loads of plugins, something I absolutely hate.

Hacks

The problem with hacks is that they tend to be buggy most of the time and might get broken when you update the system you’re using. Imagine patching your copy of Windows so that it no longer comes up with a BSOD - a day later you install a new update and the hack no longer works. Why? Well, windows thought it was wise to modify the file you hacked (or patched, whatever you’d like to call it) in order to fix one of its many issues. The solution to this is to modify that file yourself again, but the process will start over again whenever the file is modified by either the system or a third party.

Widgets/Plugins

Compared to hacks, widgets/plugins are a men’s best friend. They add functionality without messing with the core system. The problem with Wordpress is that in order to add extra functionality, you quickly have to install a load of plugins: 10 in my case. I just don’t feel like installing a lot of third party - and in many cases badly supported - plugins/widgets. I’d rather build something that has all the required options from the start and only have to install a plugin for that very special feature.

This is where ExpressionEngine kicks in. It’s not a blog tool or a regular CMS, it’s more like a platform that provides you with the features required to build what you want. This means that you have full control of pretty much everything, but it also means it isn’t something the novice would use. Installing a new theme isn’t as easy as it is when using Wordpress or other general systems. For me this is just perfect, I need a system that handles the management of my content but doesn’t restrict me.

ExpressionEngine is something I’m really looking forward to. It will take some time getting used to, but we’ll see where this train ends.

Imagine sitting behind a computer, ready to download some music for you iPod Touch (finally) and to view the pictures you shot earlier this week. Now imagine having to use Windows Vista with a sattelite internet connection, with a speed of a blazing 65 kilobytes per second. If you thought it couldn’t get worse, try downloading iTunes as well. All this makes me miss the modern world (and my Macbook) even more.

Anyways, other than trying to download some music I’ve also took some lovely shots of birds, crashed cars, killer whales (the real ones) and a bunch of other things. So far one of my best pictures is a photo of a hummingbird sitting on a feeder. Ofcourse, as with every location I visit I had to find some abandoned buildings to explore, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a gold mine. 3 buildings : A school, a fish factory (now used to store fishing nets) and an old house (full of asbestos :D).

The School

The school was probably one of the best locations, the building dated back to 1929 but was abandoned somewhere around 1985. Since then it had been used as a lawyers office (if I’m correct). In 2009 the building was abandonded again for some reason. The weird thing was that some rooms were relatively new, whereas others were in a really bad state. One of the best rooms is the office on the second floor. Everything was still in there, computers, documents and even photographs of two children. What made the location so great was that even though it had been visited before (a lot of writings on the wall said “XXX was here XXX/09”) it wasn’t damaged by vandals (other than the writings).

The Fish Factory

Not really a factory, more of a processing plant. The building was relatively small and there wasn’t that much to see, other than a lot of fishing nets and a lot of writings on the wall. It was more of an exercise rather than a real exploration.

The Abandonded House

The basement of this house was filled with asbestos (somebody was so kind to paint asbestos containing materials pink) and the upper levels didn’t had any furniture left. The only interesting was a sign saying “Locked out. The owner sent us home!” and a bunch of camping chairs.

Photos of my holidays (and the Urbex locations) will be posted once I get back.

Canada, a country where everything is huge. Hamburgers, cars, people and the Canadian superstores. Everything is 10 times bigger than in Holland. On top of that, everything is 50% cheaper than in Holland. There is only one small problem, you can’t do shit without a computer.

When we went to Canada last Friday I left my macbook at home since the insurance doesn’t covers anything overseas. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but try configuring an iPod without computer access. You simply can’t. I can’t even download apps from the app store since it refuses to use my apple id.

Essentially this means I can’t do anything besides using the default applications that are installed on the ipod touch, which sucks balls. I actually have to wait for almost a week before I can configure it at a friends place.

Other than all this Apple crap my holidays are a fab so far. I finally bought some decent sun glasses and some new underwear. The underwear is actually pretty fucking awesome (pictures will be posted soon).

And before I forget, here is a list of awesome holiday facts :

• I’ve slept for more than 70 hours
• I came up with an awesome birthday present for a friend, while I was sitting on the toilet
• I wrote my first blogpost using an iPod touch, don’t try this at home kids. It’s deadly.
• I figured out these facts suck, so this is the last one :p

That was the first thing I thought when I finished my new website a few minutes ago. It took me more than a few weeks to get things sorted and to figure out what I really wanted to do with my website. I have changed a lot, not just the WordPress template. The following has been changed :

• New homepage.
• Contact form that’s worth showing.
• New photography gallery.
• New webdevelopment gallery.
• New template for my blog

The new website supports the following browsers :

• Mozilla Firefox 3.0+
• Opera 9+
• Google Chrome 2
• Safari 4
• Internet Explorer 8 (No, 6 and 7 are not supported)

In case some parts of the website aren’t working (which is possible), please report them as soon as possible.