Tandem Touring. Another site, about our tandem tours, initially hand built, thenJoomla, now WordPress.
IVCA Rally 2019. one of my recent sites, but now expired, using WordPress.
Open Source software is a big topic but this page should give a few pointers. If you are using a tablet, the web setting may be better. There are lots of links to more Open Source matters.
I like the background picture which suggests open spaces, appropriate for discussing Open Source software. I may even enlarge on my designing a bit more.
Design
Designing a web site can be done in a variety of ways from paying a commercial designer , through using companies who provide such a service, but what if you would like to design your own?
Again there are many ways to do so with much software available that will build a site for you, once you have mastered the essential basics. Some such software is mention elsewhere in these pages.
Young people are fortunate in that a program was specially built for them called Scratch. This has become very popular with its own online community across the world. It is now used by older people as a medium to learn the basics and to get into coding, so that must be a plus in itself. Click here to know more about Scratch.
When I started it was a case of opening up a text editor and writing all the code manually. Progression occurred, first with Joomla and now I use WordPress, as here, with other Open Source software.
Also there is the internet where you can learn much about the subject.
Open source
There are many changes taking place affecting computing and the internet. Open source is becoming more popular. Open source is quite a big subject and possibly the best way to finding out more is by using the links below, or watch the animated video from the Free Software Foundation.
The reason for my interest is that I have been using Open source software for several years, and all my serious computing is done with it. My current operating system is Linux Mint, but I do have other flavours of Linux installed alongside.
A much more recent development has been the dramatic increase in interest in the Raspberry Pi, an extremely powerful but small computer.
It is an amazing small computer, not much larger that a credit card, that is now being used in many ways, so many it is too much to describe here.
Extract from their site
The Making of Pi The idea behind a tiny and affordable computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, based at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.
In addition there are other small and cheap computers out there with a resemblance to Raspberry Pi which I will include details of, within these pages shortly.
School coding
Coding in School
Computer science has been added to the curriculum in schools in England.there are many supporting this but also many opposing. News item here.
Previously there had been facilities run by volunteers such as CoderDojo (World) and Code Club (UK). Another item in the recent news, March 2015, is that an astronaut has volunteered to take a couple of RaspberryPi’s and leave them in a satalite so that children can communicate using the satalite.
To be added to…
Operating systemThere are a few open source operating systems like BeOS, various BSDones and Unix of which Linux is the dominant one. Linux itself is the base upon which many distributions are built. Linux is found many places such as running the majority of servers on the internet, in embedded devices, household goods, mobile phones and also in satellites in outer space.
With regard to computers there are many different distributions in use such as Ubuntu, Centos, Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Slackware and a host of others, many of which are lightweight and fast or suitable for older slower computers. These very pages are being built using Linux Mint.
The software choices within Linux are enormous with thousands of applications available. Very recently a number of games manufacturers have started issuing their games to Linux.
There are other pages describing a small selection of open source software. Any newcomers to Linux have a host of resources available to them on the web and also through a worldwide network of Linux users groups. To be added to..
Content Management Systems
Content management systems are widely used on the internet as a presentation of interactive web sites.
Some of the popular ones are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Xoops, and Plone but there are many others including lightweight ones.