Welcome to my home on the Web. My site uses Drupal, a PHP-based Open Source Content Management System for most of the base content. This is a nice product, and I recommend checking it out. It's fairly easy to implement and support and is pretty light on system resource usage. It makes use of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and it pretty well supported. There are lots of modules and themes available and a strong community has grown up around it.

Getting around

Site navigation is pretty easy - on the left is a navigation menu that supports the actual web site including links to the Forums, the Photo Gallery (updated to v3), and Web Mail; and in the header area are the same links with an additional one to my Blog. On the right is an area with links to other features, some hosted on this domain, others just external links to destinations of interest. I also aggregate some RSS Feeds there, and the content displayed varies based on what page you are on. There is also a search facility for content hosted in the CMS.

Forums

The Forums are a popular destination on the site - there are over 50 active users (mostly family and close friends) and was created in 2003. Since its founding, there are already over 10,000 posts on over 1000 topics. Feel free to just visit and browse. Go ahead and register if you plan to be an active participant - you'll need to register to post.

The Forums are built on a PHP base open source project that is very popular on the internet: phpBB. It performs well on a pretty modest machine, and uses the mySQL database engine.

Photo Galleries

This is the section of the site where I host Photo Albums for select famly members and close friends (as well as myself). If you want an album hosted here, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

The software behind the gallery is an open source project called (wait for it....) Gallery! It's a SourceForge project that is PHP and Apache based.

Web Mail

I also host mail accounts for several people on the micksmothers.net domain. The software I use is the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a powerful and scalable open source collaboration platform that has rich e-mail and calendaring functionality. It can talk multiple mail protocols with mail client software (IMAP, POP3) and also has a built-in web client that makes extensive use of AJAX technology. 

I run the version 6 series of the Open Source package. There are some nice features, such as multiple, shareable contact lists and a shared document repository - a wiki-like feature. There are also shared calendars and contact lists, and a tasks feature. I highly recommend trying this out if you want to get away from Exchange and all the pain it can cause.

If you want a mail account hosted by me, just ask. I'm sure we can work it out.

My Blog

If you don't know what a blog is, look at Wikipedia's definition. This is where I keep a kind of rolling log of events and thoughts, with a mechanism for comments and trackbacks. The entries are categorized and in a reverse date order.

The software I formerly used to drive the blog is Blojsom (another SourceForge project), which is an open source J2EE application. I originally used Bloxsom which was Perl and CGI based, so porting all my entries from the old format to the new was quite simple. Prior to that, I just hand-edited an HTML page...wow - that really dates me!

I  switched to the built-in blogging capability in Drupal when I implemented it, so that is what you see on my blog page now.