Quantumodo

Hi, welcome to my first ever console review. I’m not an authority on gaming consoles so I’ll keep this pretty general; maybe someone out there who doesn’t already own a Wii will find this article informative.

The console in question: Nintendo’s Wii.

First Impressions

The console itself is small, sleek and white. Really reminds me of Mac branding and style in terms of physical console design, package, and even the Wii operating system, to some extent. The Wii remote is simple and intuitive, as is the Wii menu and the default channels. The only really ugly part about this console is the power adapter; it’s gigantic - however the cord is long enough that you can tuck it away, out of sight.

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This is actually a test post published using a Nintendo Wii but decided it may aswell actually say something, so here goes…
The first thing I gotta say is: this isn’t easy. Typing on the Wii is like typing with one finger and with one hand tied behind your back - still it is ‘neat’.
What is great is that you can do this at all. Opera is the browser for Wii. If you get the chance check it out, and if you are a web developer like me you will probably want to make your sites compatible with this considering the number of units Nintendo has sold. Posting blog entries with the Wii is a chore but browsing with it is a pleasure. With that in mind I’m back to browsing.

What does 980 pixels get you? 4 nice sized equal width columns or 2 nice sized sidebars and one decent sized main content area. Any way you slice it, 980 pixels is nice. It divides evenly and provides enough horizontal resolution for great looking 3 or 4 column layouts. The math is nice for people like me who were never very good at it and require a calculator to do their CSS; working like this, I need to pull it up a lot less often. It’s easy to remember 245 + 245 = 490 + 490 = 980… or if I do happen to forget this, I can at least figure it out without my calculator (whew).

So, why the heck does all this matter? Read on good patron, and you shall not be spared the hoopla.
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Suppose you’ve got a large website, with hundreds of pages of content… maybe even thousands. Suppose also that you have several different user groups and several sections of content requiring varying levels of access. Site content is edited by and contributed to by non-techies, and furthermore, we don’t want them to have to worry about protecting each page they create… we just want them to publish and not have to think about access control.

This is a pretty tall order… but thanks to Drupal, and some great third party modules, it can be a piece of cake.

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Hey people. Welcome to Quantumodo, yet another blog about about web design.

Well, I wish that I had something super to serve up for my very first post, but instead all I have is this… this little blurb about how Quantumodo came to be. A while back I created a website, bamboostudios.com, to publish all the ‘cool’ stuff I create and think of. As it turns out, I have a lot of things on the go. I wanted to publish artwork, design work, a projects portfolio and a web design journal all in one place. The trouble is that it just didn’t go together; the technical ramblings did not sit easily alongside the art and design work I was trying to feature. I’m sure you can see where this is going…

Earlier this year I created this domain with the intention of using it to publish my especially ‘geeky’ content. At first I wasn’t very set on what platform I wanted to base Quantumodo on. That is, I was trying to decide between Drupal and Wordpress. At the time I was heavily entrenched in the development of a large website based on Drupal, businessabilities.ca, and was leaning in that direction. I knew that Wordpress was probably the more suitable platform for what I needed at this website but I lacked the knowledge to really make Wordpress do what I wanted. As I completed development on businessabilities.ca I was able to finish up a new version bamboostudios.com that I had been developing in Wordpress. In order to complete that project I had to learn a great deal more about advanced functionality you can get out of Wordpress; understanding the loop, how to use custom fields, etc. So now, equipped with a great deal more knowledge about both Drupal and Wordpress, I was finally able to make a clear descision about which platform I wanted to publish my technical thoughts on. The choice was obvious; Wordpress it is.

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