For a long time I’ve been thinking in updating my website. But this update is not a mere change in the design, as you may see. First, the site is now almost entirely in English – a few pages will remain in Portuguese, mainly the ones related to the classes I teach. Second, now I am using a Content Management System (CMS), more specifically WordPress. Therefore, now I am able to receive comments from people visiting my website, and I can also post some things in a blog. But why should I blog? Blogs are so 2000’s… Wouldn’t be better to micro-blog using Twitter?
Well… No! First of all, I still don’t see a useful reason to use Twitter. Sorry Twitter fans. Second, I won’t post here details about my life (thank God!). I will try to post some technical stuff – initially some insights about QVT (Query/View/Transformation) and Eclipse’s Graphical Modeling Framework. Therefore, 140 characters wouldn’t be enough for that. As every beginner blogger, I hope it may be useful for somebody. If not, it at least will be a harmless hobby.
Finally, someone may ask why I am using WordPress instead of other CMS. As a Computer Engineer, I’ve tested some other CMSs, considering that my host only accepts PHP or .Net (I would love to be able to use Java for a fair price…). I tried another two popular CMSs, DotNetNuke and Joomla!, but I found them to be more complex than I needed. I just wanted to be able to blog, receive comments, and integrate the CMS to my existing solution to manage the content of my courses. WordPress semed to have a simpler user interface, a bigger community for plug-ins, and an easier extension mechanism. So, I chose WordPress. I spent a few months working slowly to create this website – mostly at weekends. It was fun to play a little with CSS, PHP, WebServices (as my software to manage courses is written in C#), and jQuery. And here we are!