Author Archives: Jos Schuurmans

About Jos Schuurmans

Jos Schuurmans is a husband, father, Clog, Fimmigrant, blogger and the CEO of Cluetail.

Should I subscribe to 38 different YLE feeds, or just one?

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In an attempt to monitor YLE’s coverage of certain topics, I’m collecting YLE’s RSS feeds so that I can run a search query on them.

They are offering 38 different feeds in Finnish. I don’t want to miss anything, but I also want to avoid duplication where possible. Therefore, I’m wondering if the feeds with the format http://yle.fi/uutiset/rss/uutiset.rss?osasto=[category] all provide selected content that is also included in the feed http://yle.fi/uutiset/rss/uutiset.rss.

If that was the case, I could suffice with just http://yle.fi/uutiset/rss/uutiset.rss.

Would be nice to know :-)

Jogged 2.0 km with universal inlays. A new beginning?

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I got universal inlays from my physio-therapist after telling her about my knee and ankle problems. Today I felt like going for an easy jog on the Asics Gel Nimbus 13 with the inlays. They felt really supportive, as if the shoes would have had (anti-)pronation support. I ran only 2 kilometres, but without pain. Let’s see how it feels tomorrow morning, though…

I’m collecting my jogging stats on this page.

Switching from Google Reader to Feedly, Flipboard and Pulse

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Google pulling the plug on Reader is perhaps a blessing in disguise. It gets us to rethink news consumption in several ways.

It doesn’t feel bad to move away some of the online pie from Google the giant to something smaller. It was about time to re-evaluate RSS tools anyway. Feedly has come a long way. The user experience seems rather similar to Google Reader, so the transition is easy.

The visual presentation – of the Firefox plugin and Android app at least – is quite compelling. Feedly, Flipboard and Pulse are often mentioned together as being some of the most pleasing tools for consumption and sharing of aggregated news and other (social) media streams.

I think I’ll use all three for a while. Too early to tell which will prevail. Maybe all three, for slightly different use cases. Continue reading →

Joomla! or WordPress? It depends ;-)

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I’ve been looking into the pros and cons of Joomla! and WordPress as possible publishing platforms for a customer’s new project website.

Unfortunately I cannot be fully transparent and specific about the requirements, but I think you’ll get the gist if you read between the lines.

Joomla! (http://www.joomla.org) and WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org) are two of the most used content management systems (CMS’s) on the Internet today. Both systems can be tailored to enable all the functionalities needed for the project we are talking about. Both are mature, scalable, user-friendly.

Beer, speech and pop

Both are open source projects: “free as in beer and free as in speech.” Both are based on open PHP and MySQL technologies. Anyone can download and install either system on their own or rented (cloud) server.

(Additionally, unlike Joomla!, WordPress has a hosted version at wordpress.com, but that is not a requirement for this project)

WordPress is arguably somewhat more mature as it started in 2003, two years before Joomla! WordPress has a higher install base and is more popular. Google trends would suggest that interest in WordPress is growing (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=wordpress) while interest in Joomla! seems to have peaked in 2010 (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=joomla).

On Alexa’s global website traffic ranking, wordpress.com is listed at position number 22, wordpress.org at number 105 and joomla.org at number 432.

Versatility and extensibility

With a flair for generalization and simplification, one might say that WordPress is optimized for blogs and content-driven websites, while Joomla! is arguably more versatile, optimized for large websites as well as non-content driven concepts, e.g. ecommerce, and (large) intranets. Continue reading →

Joomla! or WordPress: how to compare?

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[UPDATE, February 27, 2013: I've written up some of my findings here.]

JoomlaA public-sector prospect of my company and me are running their website on Joomla but are considering WordPress as the CMS for a new project.

Their staff are used to creating and updating content on the Joomla back-end and their IT dept is used to supporting it. Therefore, adopting WordPress would involve some switching cost and a small learning curve.

Are there any compelling reasons why they should take the plunge? Or why they shouldn’t?

Let me disclose that personally I’m more familiar with WordPress and I’m a fan. I love the fact that it’s free as in beer as well as free as in speech. I admire the wordpress.org / wordpress.com business model. I sense that WordPress is developing very rapidly and I admire the energy with which so many developers around the world are pushing the envelope. I kinda believe that WordPress is on such a roll that – if it doesn’t already – it will soon outperform any other CMS out there.

Having said that, I want to keep an open mind and try to pull together an honest comparison of the two. What is it that Joomla has and WordPress doesn’t? And vice versa.