James Colin's BLOG MONEY WIKI

I know, I know, I'm not stupid, I know a blog isn't meant to be abandoned like that.

I let it down for reasons I'll explain later when I'll post again.

Now today I just want to speak about why I transfered my blog from WordPress to Drupal and how.

I bought the domain on october 2007 in order to install WordPress and MediaWiki and start using them in collaboration to see and show that money can be better made by using a blog and a wiki working together.
In fact I went as far as installing WordPress, then I blogged a little, I learned about plugins, and installed a few.

I had this avatar on EntreCard since over 2 months when today I received this message:

Greetings, Your avatar has been changed. We are implementing a rule against "exploitative marketing" which includes using an avatar of scantily clad females when your site has nothing to do with scantily clad females.

The recent surge in avatars of scantily clad females is devaluing our network and we are taking action against it. Thank you for understanding.

I'm happy that finally Drupal 6 is out, about a month after Joomla 1.5 has been released.

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

It was a rather long wait since last summer I was expecting Drupal 6 before the end of the year, but now it's done... I only have a dozen sites worth upgrading to do!

About 2 months ago I read a blog because it was somewhere on Entrecard and the blogger was saying that his blog contests don't have much success and that he's trying to do another one, the closing date was close and there was only 2 persons who applied for 16 prizes.. I said, how well, all I have to do is subscribe to his blog by email? OK.

And surely I won and have my ad on his blog for a month ;-)

After a while, I received an email asking if I would like to sponsor his next blog contest, I said ok I'll send worldwide my harmonica DVD to a winner,even if he/she doesn't like harmonica. And now his contest is live, see the information below and decide for yourself:

Contest Duration - 1/11/08 'til 1/31/08 (11:59:00PM PST)

Prizes

There are going to be 12 different groups of prizes, which means there are going to be a total of 12 different winners.

You don't understand the above sentence? Hahaha! If there are some words you don't get I'll explain briefly, but if you get all the sentence's words then you might want to try Drigg right now on a new Drupal install...

Update: my Harmonica DVD is now available on Entrecard's shop for 650 EC and still at my music site for $30.

Entrecard is opening its shop, where you can buy (with Entrecard Credits or ECs) several items such as T-Shirts, Stickers, Ads, Reviews and more from other blogs, and upgrades to your Entrecard account as well! It's a great idea to really transform ECs in a currency. They're looking for bloggers like me who are ready to sell "something", anything, in their shop. I could sell ad spots, or other digital services, but I want to sell something close to myself and that's a DVD full of videos I recorded while playing the chromatic harmonica..

You know, most of the time things happen in the english speaking part of the internet. Since I look into the french web too, I can tell you that not much originally happens there. Innovation comes from the US, UK and north of Europe countries.

Well there's probably the most successful buzz on the french web since a few days, it's because naked pictures and a video of a famous french swimmer and olympic gold medalist have been leaked, so lots of searches from everybody in France make a lot of small blogs hosted on shared servers go down. The buzz is called "Photos De Laure Manaudou Nue". Laure Manaudou has a muscular body and is often seen in swimming suit, as you can imagine it is not the most concealing outfit...

I'm reporting today on the Metabolic Surge diet and training program I've been following and the fat loss results I got. I'm definitively happy about it if you want just a quick summary, I'm happy of the results, it's boring to do because eating anything whenever I wanted was way funnier, but that's life, I now get my kick out of thinking about how lean and muscular I can get if I put my mind to it, it's just a switch of perspective, I'm not there yet but I'm confident I can do it because I know have a recipe for success...

Quick reminder: Metabolic Surge is a 46 days fat loss program, including 36 days of specific diet / training and 10 days of "rest" with a more relaxed nutrition and lighter training schedule with no cardio.

In the month of september 2007 I followed the preparation program in order to get my body up and running and then I started Metabolic Surge on 5th october. I started the Level , the "light" version of the program, so that the workout exercices were less demanding than the full program. I then finished the 36 days of diet on 9th november and after 10 days of rest with only strength building workouts (2 days on, 2 days off) I started Metabolic Surge again, but this time the full, more demanding, program.

If you want to lose the fat and tone your muscles, there's only one way: eat clean and train hard. You don't have to, people can be fat and obese, if you don't think about all the health issues, the daily inconveniences of being overweight, it's all good. A pizza will always taste better than plain tuna. Those who make sacrifice everyday don't do it because they like it, they do it because the happiness derived from being fit or even lean and muscular, outweighs the pleasure of food, or so I read. I recommend the program I've been following for over a month, Metabolic Surge.

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award 2007 is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to the Packt website which has been promoted by the different open source projects communities. This category of Best PHP Open Source CMS was clearly my favorite because it is where we could have a clear competition between Joomla and Drupal, obvious category leaders in my opinion. In 2006, the award had been won by Joomla, what about 2007?

The total prize fund is $20 000 but for this category of BEST PHP OPEN SOURCE CMS only the winner of the five finalists gets $2000 and the other projects get nothing. Here are the results...

1. Joomla www.Joomla.org
2. Drupal www.Drupal.org
3. e107 www.e107.org

CMS Made Simple www.cmsMadeSimple.org and PHP-Fusion www.PHP-Fusion.co.uk are also worth checking out since they were finalist projects in this category.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! is possibly one of the biggest success stories in open source of late. Its first release came in only September 2005 and since then has grown to be one of the most downloaded Content Management Systems on the web.

The judges noted a number of factors that helped Joomla! secure the Award. Most notably its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box. Once again, judges commented on the size and responsiveness of the community, which translates to potential problems being dealt with quickly.

Let me tell you that I disagree strongly with the judges, Drupal is clearly better than Joomla but once again like last year they gave the award to Joomla, this is so unfair!

But... congratulations to Joomla, the winning project of BEST PHP OPEN SOURCE CMS 2007!!!