The winners of the IIA Net Visionary Awards were announced last night at a black tie event in Dublin. Some of the nominations, and indeed the eventual winners, are very interesting. Congratulations to all involved, and in particular to Blacknight for picking up two awards!
The first winner that caught my attention was Pixie. I heard of them before, but I never actually visited their website. It seems to be very user friendly, and I happily browsed through random photos for a while. I think that they are in a very competitive market, especially if they want to have a global audience rather than an Irish audience.
The other winner that caught my attention was lichens.ie. Yes, this really is an entire website about lichen! The website is well designed, and it is interesting to look at, even if you are not a biologist! I really like the magnifying glass cursor that appears over the photos on the top of each page.
Of course, I am not saying that the other sites are not worthy of a look either!
There are several other similar types of awards during the year in Ireland, such as the Irish Web Awards and the Irish Blog Awards. I think that both of these are the brain children of Damien Mulley. I am not familiar enough with them to know the differences!
Tags: Blacknight, Damien Mulley, IIA, Irish Blog Awards, Irish Web Awards, lichens.ie, Net Visionary Awards, Pixie
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I think that it is appropriate that my very first post in this blog should explain some of the reasoning and choices that were made in getting to this point.
The first decision that I had to make when I decided to start this blog was where I would host it. There are many guides online giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options, but for me this was a fairly simple decision. I decided to host it with my current hosting service provider Blacknight, because I like having complete control over it.
The second choice was to decide which bloging software to use. Blacknight offers three possibilities:
I did not have any previous direct experience with any of these, but I understood Drupal to be more of a CMS, so I immediately eliminated it. Initially I was leaning towards Movable Type because it seems to be favoured by Blacknight. Apparently it is significantly less resource intensive than WordPress due to its use of page caching.
I then started reading some of the many articles online that compare Movable Type and WordPress, and in the end I decided to go with WordPress. The main advantages of WordPress to me are:
- WordPress is open source, whereas only some versions of Movable Type are open source. Therefore, I expect that there will be more plugins and themes available for WordPress.
- WordPress seems to be more popular.
- WordPress appeared to be easier, and more intuitive, to use. This is important to me, because I wanted to start blogging fairly quickly!
- The WordPress implementation seems to be cleaner, since it uses only one programming language (PHP). Movable Type apparently uses a mix of Perl and PHP. I am not a fan of applications written using several similar programming languages!
There are also many advantages of Movable Type, but since these are not relevant to me I have not covered them here.
So now we are here! I will keep this blog updated with my opinions and experiences of WordPress. I also will cover plugins and accessibility in future posts. Now I think that this is enough for my first post!
Tags: Blacknight, CMS, Drupal, Movable Type, Perl, PHP, WordPress
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