Content Management Systems

A Content Management System, or CMS, is the software that keeps a site running. It’s function is to make sure that your site does what you want it to and allows you to update, add or remove content easily and effectively. If you have a site that requires membership, then it probably handles that as well.

Just a few of the popular systems include Drupal, Joomla and even WordPress. They work in different ways but each has a community of dedicated people that swears by them.

WordPress as a CMS? Isn’t it a blogging platform?

Didn’t think of WordPress as a CMS? A lot of people don’t, but the ability to easily modify an installation of WordPress along with the huge amount of secondary functionality provided by plugin authors makes Wordpress very flexible. For smaller sites, Wordpress may be all they need.

Even as a blog, WordPress is still functioning as a CMS. Handling the posts and making it easy to upload different types of media. WordPress is a CMS, and one of my favorites.

With all the different options available there’s just one more question to ask…

What’s running your web site?

The first step is figuring out which side of the keyboard your target is on. Is the site for your visitors or for yourself.

If you’re building a site for yourself, for whatever reason, then the only person you really need to answer to is yourself (Within limits of the law and your web host’s terms of service of course). There are a lot of possible reasons for building a site for yourself. It could be a hobby, a way to practice your design skills or even just because you enjoy the work involved.

When your visitors become your target, things get more complicated. You have to start taking other people into consideration when making your decisions. Which people? Unless you plan to be the next Google or MSN, whose target is everyone on the net, then you need to find the group of people you’re working for.

Finding Your Niche

In our example from the previous article Jennifer wanted to start a site to discuss the Three-Toed Spotted Short Hair Hamster. That makes things simple for her because her site is for people interested is a very specific breed of hamster.

Unfortunately a lot of us start with a general idea and that makes things difficult. The wider the range of your subject, the more diverse your visitors could be and that makes it hard to know what to put on your site. Too many options can be a bad thing. That’s why a lot of webmaster decide on a niche.

Jennifer’s niche is a breed of hamster. The site may be manageable, though more work, if the focus was broader, such as hamsters of any breed. It would become less manageable and with more work when the focus broadens. From a hamster breed, to hamsters in general, to pet rodents, to pets of any kind… the workload increases with the subjects’ range. At least it does in theory.

That’s why niche sites are so popular. Targeting a smaller group of people with something in common, and making that common thread the focus of your site, is the basis of building a niche site.

1. Who is the site for?
This is probably the most important question on the list. The answer to this will affect everything you do afterwards.
• Example: If the site is only for adults or for kids then you’ll have to look into the legal ramifications. There are laws setup to protect children on the Internet that you’ll have to become familiar with.
2. What kind of site is it?
This will go a long way to helping you decide how the site is set up.
• Example: A social networking site will need far different software running it than a blog or family genealogy site.
3. What features do you need/want? (and how you can tell the difference)
You know what kind of site you want to build and who your intended readership is, now you need to figure out what tools you need to get the site running.
• Example: Jennifer wants to build a site for her hamster. she’d like to get in touch with other owners of rare Three-Toed Spotted Short Hair Hamsters. She’ll need a way to allow other TTSSHH lovers to post messages on her site, maybe even a way to let them post pictures of their hamsters in cute outfits.
4. What do you need to make the site work?
Now that you know how you want your site to function, you need to figure out how to get it to work the way you want. This can be an easy question, or a hard one. It really depends on how flexible your needs are and how you want to implement them. Chances are that you’ll be using a Content Management System of some sort. Whether it’s a blog, a membership site or a wiki, you’ll need a way to easily manage your site once it’s up and running.
• Example: Jennifer’s needs are simple. She wants to be able to post messages and let other people do the same. She considers a blog, but that seems like the spotlight is on her when she wants everyone who loves Three-Toed Spotted Short Hair Hamsters to be a part of the site. Jennifer decides to build a Message Board.
5. Do you need help or do you feel comfortable doing things yourself?
This can be a tough one. It’s very important that you be honest with yourself about your skill level with computers. Check out some sites that professional webmasters hang out at. If you can’t understand what they’re talking about then you might need some help. Don’t be afraid to ask people you know for help, and don’t be afraid to learn to do things for yourself. If your expertise isn’t on the technological side don’t worry. There are a lot of ways to find people who can handle things under the hood for you.
• Example: Jennifer knows a lot about hamsters, but not much about web sites. Her brother Paul is very good with computers. She hires him to build her web site, she just has to do his laundry.

Those are only a few questions you’ll need to answer before you ever register the domain name. The more you know before getting started the better your site will be in the end.

Come back later when we’ll go into more detail on these questions as well as yours.

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Severe storm cells came through North Georgia Region this evening. AtlantaNAP experienced an over current fault outage on one of our 2 main feeds. The feed is the original feed that has the most load currently connected to it. The amount of systems connected to the load is the amount of lightning and over current that will try to be passed to the system – i.e. if you don’t have very much load on it - like our new feed is currently only at 1/6th load - then current does not try to flow to it very much. Our first system is currently at 65% load so it tried to absorb much more of the lightning strike than the other one and hence the main breaker going into over current fault.

I have spoken with all of our key electrical engineers associated with the building at this point. According to Georgia power / our PSSI and Cummins engineers – we likely took a lightning strike to the utility very near the facility which caused an over current fault on our main incoming breaker on our first set of switchgear. The breaker is designed to trip in the event of this kind of fault to protect the gear (your computers) inside the building from being burned up by the lightning strike.

When this type of fault happens - the computer will not start the generators until an engineer verifies where the fault is. This is because a fault inside the wiring plant could also cause this kind of over current in the event of a main short if a feeder wire of main current in the building were to become damaged.
In that case it would be very dangerous to turn the power back on manually or to force a manual start of the gen sets and push current to the system with a fault remaining. Lives and machinery could be lost.

We dispatched several of our staff visually to inspect for faults – (we did not want to turn something on and have it fry everyone’s gear) and found none and verified it was likely a lightning strike and manually started the generators to restore power. Unfortunately the ups system is only designed to carry that load for 10 minutes which was not enough time for us to safely verify and do a manual start.

This is apparently a rare event – to get a direct utility strike like this – that close that does not get dissipated before it hits us. The farther away from your site the strike occurs - the more other load and grounds it has to dissipate before it gets to you.

The good news is we did not burn up any equipment.

Some of you did not lose power because you were connected to the other lightly loaded feed coming in and it was not enough load source to overwhelm the breaker since it is only 18% loaded at this point.

Some of you lost network connectivity because downstream feeder switches that your computers are connected to are only single power supply units.

We are in the process of examining a facility wide network upgrade that will move to a newer chassis based solution throughout the facility - we started looking at this as a way to offer new services capability that many f you have been asking for - it is a costly upgrade and will bring redundancy but also brings some pitfalls as well since you have more connections into a single chassis. We are still looking at this currently and will keep you up to date as to the direction we decide to move.

They have told me that under normal operating conditions there is really nothing we could have done and we should simply be glad we had good equipment installed that kept our computers from being fried.

I am thankful that I am not looking at a lot of damaged equipment that could not simply be turned back on - that would be a disaster I do not want to deal with. At this point it seems like the new switchgear with over current protection was a good investment.

All services have been restored.

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