Second Breakfast

I’ve been looking for a while now for a Content Management System (CMS) to help me maintain the various web sites that I produce for various folks. I’ve used Dreamweaver and Contribute in the past, but Contribute has the flaw in that 1) its not free, and has gotten expensive, and 2) you need the fat client in order to do the updates. I wanted something that was browser-based, simple to install and administer, and imposed relatively little overhead in terms of managing the site. The CMS should also be PHP-based (for ease of installation), and simple to install. And WYSIWYG editing would be nice (a la HTMLArea or something similar)

There are hundreds of CMS projects out there. Lots of them fall into the groupware category, which is not what I want. I’m not interested in blogging and photo gallerys and wikis. Those are all great, but the groupware systems tend to be really bloated, and get in the way of designing a clean web site that does a few things well. There are projects like Midgard which might do this well, but they’re difficult to install. The full release of Midgard is not possible to deploy in a hosted environment, and even the “lite” version is difficult to deal with and poorly-documented, and like many CMS tools tends to want to “eat” your site in a way that will be difficult to migrate out of. There are systems like Typo3, but it looks like it requires a lot of upfront work to get something useable out of it and it is really targeted at large sites with complex needs. Bricolage is a nice tool, but it has lots of dependencies as well, and a lot of overhead on the back end.

I’ve been trolling various directories and lists, downloading and installing stuff that might be a good candidate. I tried TikiWiki, as it seemed like it could be stripped down a bit. But TikiWiki doesn’t meet the “no bloat” requirement by a long shot. However someone in the support forum pointed me at Etomite. Its easy to install, completely PHP-based, simple to manage, and appears to impose only the necessary amount of overhead. It has a simple template language with only a few options (most of the extra work is tossed into Snippets, which are little executable bits of PHP you can supply to the system). Its a relatively fresh project, but appears to have interest.

I’m going to migrate 2 or 3 smaller sites into it and see what I think.

Geneveive is already four months old, which is difficult to believe. Blogging about one’s biological (although not legal) daughter is kind of a strange thing (it seems to trivialize such an important event), but Jeanette (her mother) sent me this picture recently, and it reminds me how amazingly blessed I am (which is definitely not trivial).

She’s definitely a “head of the class” child…top 20% percentile in terms of growth and weight, and she’s doing a lot of things that infants tend to do a bit later. She was standing (with help) at three months, and firmly planting her feet (which I’ve never seen a baby do that early). She’s sitting up unaided now at four months. She’s fairly fussy (as I was), and has lots of food allergies (as I did). I can see her mother in her features more than mine, but there are a few pics where its really obvious that I had a hand in creating this baby.

Our little church, my husband, and I all got mentioned and quoted in a recent article in the Ann Arbor News:

http://www.mlive.com/news/aanews/index.ssf?
/base/news-0/10987160985700.xml

The article, titled “Ballot issue has spiritual side: Amendment defining marriage seen differently among congregations”, looks at the impact of Proposition 2
on folks in various religious communities, and some of the theological and denominational issues involved.

Here is the section which quotes me:

[Northside's Pastor] Booker-Hirsch disagrees with the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s refusal to ordain “practicing” homosexuals, and believes it should make the marriage liturgy available to gay couples. (Commitment ceremonies are allowed.) So Northside uses the same standards for all marriages and makes the marriage liturgy available to all, regardless of sexual orientation.

Kiste and Spolarich exchanged marriage vows at the church, witnessed by many of its members. For the couple, it’s a done deal - a lifetime arrangement.

Even if the Presbyterian General Assembly “were to wake up, and their hearts were moved enough to rescind all the juridical crap from 20 years ago,” said Spolarich, “it wouldn’t change the fact that Alan and I have a religious marriage. It happened three years ago on Sept. 15. It’s efficacious; it can’t be undone.”

I’m curious what the reaction is and will be from other Presbyterian pastors and congregants in the area. This is pretty bold language (I was intentionally using “church-speak” with the whole “efficaceous” reference — I do believe that my marriage to Alan has bestowed grace on me and our life together), and is sure to push someone’s buttons. I wasn’t trying to be provocative, but those were the words that came to me when we were talking to the reporter. I was speaking from my heart (which often gets me in trouble).

Universe’s 6,000th birthday …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1333008,00.html

Tim Radford
Friday October 22, 2004
The Guardian

Britain’s geologists are about to celebrate the fact that the universe is exactly 6,000 years old.

At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (below), who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation.

Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC.

Actually, he put the date at October 23, and then pedantically realised that time must have begun the night before, because the Bible said that “the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The geologists selected the anniversary for a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries. “It’s not that we think Archbishop Ussher’s date was a fraud,” said Ted Nield, the society’s communications officer. “It’s just that it was spectacularly wrong.”

Dr Nield conceded, too, that in toasting the archbishop’s calculations the geologists were committing another error. More than 6,000 years have passed since 4004 BC. The symmetry is only apparent. The date is a mere numerological reflection. The real anniversary passed unnoticed, in 1997.

I discovered both Tolkien and Lewis fairly early in my love affair with books. I can remember the day at my grandmother’s house one summer (I must have been about ten) that I first opened “The Hobbit” and followed Bilbo on his journey to The Lonely Mountain and back. I can remember the quality of the light as it filtered through the big silver maple in my grandmother’s front yard (sadly cut down a few years later to build a dike to protect her house against a flood that never came), the smell of the paperback book, and the feeling of wonder and excitement as I pored over Tolkien’s maps. I remember reading “The Silver Chair” later that year, bundled in blankets in my great-aunts’ house, as Puddleglum and Jill and Eustace escaped from the giants’ house and released Caspian from his years of enchantment. Years later I wondered what these men were like who wrote these books.

My connection to Tolkien’s writings has remained strong through the years, although in college I became disaffected with fantasy literature, and uncomfortable with the racism and classism that permated his world-view. Lewis I discovered later as a writer of a little bit of interesting science fiction. And as my own faith has grown and deepened, I have grown to respect his theological writings, despite the fact that I don’t always agree with him.

There are fine biographies of both men, none of which I have read yet. But as I have learned a little bit more about these men, I was interested to discover that they were close friends, and very influential on one another. Colin Duriez’ “Tolkien and C. S. Lewis” sheds great light on the relationship between these two important authors, the depth of their friendship, as well as the struggles that they encountered as they each followed their professional and literary careers. This is a short book, and not an exhaustive study of their lives or work, and instead focuses on the connection between the two men, and how they impacted one another.

Duriez traces the early lives of Lewis and Tolkien, their first meeting, and their growing friendship. We learn that that Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity (as much an intellectual “convincing” as a spiritual awakening), and Tolkien’s strong disapproval of Lewis’ later enthusiasms for popular spirituality through his lectures and writings (he thought it unseemly for Lewis to practice “amateur theology”, and as a Roman Catholic thought that such activity should be left to priestly experts). The impact that each man had on the other was quite different — Tolkien was influential on shaping Lewis’ thinking about God and spirituality, which greatly shaped his writing, while Lewis acted on Tolkien more through encouraging him constantly, and Tolkien credits Lewis for enabling him to complete LOTR through persistent support.

I was surprised to learn that Tolkien remained largely unaware of Lewis’ relationship with Joy Davidman, as the two grew apart and Lewis and Davidman began to grow close (Tolkien disapproved of the fact that she was divorced), and did not know that they had married until well after the fact, and did not meet her both Joy and Edith Tolkien happened to be in the hospital at the same time. This explains something I had wondered about when watching the film “Shadowlands”: where is Ronald Tolkien? Lewis and Tolkien never regained their previous closeness after this period, although Tolkien was certainly supportive of Lewis during his profound grief after Joy’s death.

The book also gives some good insight into the dynamics of the Inklings, the informal literary group that formed around Lewis during his time at Oxford. The group centered around Lewis and his friends, and included Tolkien, Lewis’ brother Warnie, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield (occasionally), Robert Harvard, and other “critical Christians” who gathered to share companionship and conversation, and share their literary output with each other. I was surprised to discover that Hugo Dyson disliked Tolkien’s “elvish writing”, and the reading of LOTR at their meetings became a source some contention, to the point that Tolkien stopped reading from his writings for the last third of the book. Charles Williams’ relationship with Lewis also was a source of contention, as Tolkien distrusted the “occult interests” that Williams and Lewis shared, and the influence that Williams had on Lewis. I recommend Gareth Knight’s “The Magical World of the Inklings“, which provides good descriptions and summaries of the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and Barfield, but sheds relatively little insight on the relationships between these men.

This is a satisfying (if short) book, which alternates between short narrative scenes (including a moving description of Lewis’ funeral), and discussion and description, and I have a renewed appreciation and respect for these two men. For those interested in understanding more about these two important authors, this is a good place to start.