andreamorgante.com

I believe this is the fourth time I switch to a totally different website layout. I started with a very simple html page hosted by Geocities (maybe in 1998) which never really became a website. Tommy opened ferigo.it and I followed him with my morghi.com with a bit more complicated html layout (2003). By the way, I felt it was taking to much time to edit and the layout was not that nice after all. One evening Piero introduced me to CMS (content management system) opensource softwares. I realised it could be the way to go. I selected Mambo and in 2005 I created andreamorgante.com, while morghi.com survived as a redirect to andreamorgante.com. I liked Mambo very much, but after a while I felt again I was spending more time tweaking the system than writing. So I moved to WordPress, which is the current stage of development.

Obviously I like challenges, but in this case I feel everything started some years ago with Tommy showing me how nice is to express yourself. Year after year I tried to reduce the “customise your system” approach to a minimum, focusing more on the content. I feel now I’m closer than ever to find a balanced solution.

I had my new computer working less than two weeks ago. I will cover the “making of” soon, but for the time being I’d like to point out a couple of issues I had to fix.

The weirdest was the Belking USB WiFi adapter driver error. I had a spare WiFi adapter and I decided to use it. I knew it was outdated, but I wanted to save some money so I installed the drivers from the original cd and plugged it in. XP informed me that the driver was non certified. I agreed and continued. The adapter started working flawlessly.

So what? Why am I writing about it?

The driver was outdated. I did not like it, neither I liked the software I had to install to get the driver working. I checked on Belkin website, found a new release, unistalled the old one and installed the new one. At this point troubles started to pop-up.

Error code 10. No way I could continue.

I googled my model: Belkin F5D7050. I found many posts about this issue. It seems that Belkin is very bad in driver optimization. I was not alone! Some smart guy had the perfect idea: checking the chipset manufaturer website. So did I. I went to Ralink support page and looked for RT2571W/RT2671 + RT2500USB driver. Downloaded it, installed it, located the newly created XP driver folder, copied it to my desktop, uninstalled the Ralink software. Next step was to edit the inf file in order to change the pid and vid with those of my device (you can find them from XP control panel>system>hardware). I plugged in the adapter, selected the modified files when asked and … it worked!

Click here for further details

I just got my new LCD, an ACER 2021, 20″, 1600×1200 (UXGA), 700:1, 178° H/V, VGA+DVI, integrated speakers.

I bought it on eBay for less than a 19″ (<300€!). The price was so good that I was worried about the real quality of the offer. Instead it proved to be great value for the money! Planet.biz (eBay nickname: foto-grafica) processed the order in no time and after 2 working days I got it delivered to my apartment.

The monitor is well packed and protected. It comes with all the cables, manual on cd and a quick start-up guide. I connected it to my office laptop and it worked flawlessly. After a bit of tweaking, I was browsing at 1600×1200. Colors are good and the image is crisp and clear. I can’t tell yet if the response is good because I did not try it with a DVD movie or a game, but I expect it to be as good as it is in the other areas. You can find an old review from PC World here.

Mambo is a great CMS, perhaps too much for me. I’ve been using it for more than a year and I liked it. Flexible and powerful. But I used 5% of its functionalities. I can definitely migrate to something smaller and faster to update. On the other hand, I’m not sure yet about what mixture of services I will be using for my next website: WordPress+Flicker+Kaboodle?

Every now and then I change my mind about how my website should look like. During the last year I saw lots of new services coming up, the development of web 2.0 idea, ajax etc.

I decided to start re-building my site as a collection of external services, instead of struggling with loads of applets and modules trying to improve my website. In other words, as it happened for many companies, I realised that it is much easier to concentrate on what it is very important for me - i.e. the content - while outsourcing the rest.

By the way, it won’t be that easy, ’cause I’m used to customise everything, but this time I must stay with the standard tools, templates etc. to benefit from the change… we’ll see!

Stay tuned!

Andrea (morghi76)