OSDCM

Design for less then a dime

Posted on December 6th, 2007 in Main

If you are a loyal reader of the OSDCM you may have noticed some big changes in the look and feel of the site lately. I must admit as a new site owner this was one of the first things that I wanted to do. Do to my lack of experience this took me some time to get done. Throughout the process I have picked up some tips that I feel any blogger on a budget will appreciate.

I just turned thirty last month so as you can imagine lots of my close friends are finishing up their degrees and heading out into the work force. In my conversations with the more creative types there seems to be an underlying philosophy that is overwhelmingly pervasive. I see it in two forms, one is that things that are free are in some way inferior the other is: Why should I learn this if this application does it for me?

I would like to state that things that are free of licensing restrictions, are not inferior.

Where does this attitude get impressed upon people? In fact, the testing and development models would suggest that distributed development is far superior to closed development. The reason for this is instead of fifteen to twenty people working on an application, the open source model could get code changes from the world. Alas perhaps this is just ignorance to the process that software goes through before it is released.

So I don’t want to fault them for what they don’t know or wish to understand.

But the attitude, I don’t feel I need to know this CSS stuff because Dream weaver does it for me, granted these applications are nice, they do make it easer, but I thought the purpose of education was to teach you how to think not just train you to use software. In fact some of them make fun of me for “doing it the hard way”. Outside I smile nod my head and say yeah maybe your right, but inside I feel like they have wasted their money on an education that has only been a training class. I’m not saying that I think all people should be CSS/PHP/XHTML coders, not at all, just that by not having an open mind and a solid understanding of the underlining systems at work you become a slave to the brand of tools you use.

With this I will get off my soap box and get to work on a new section. It will be all about the tools that I used to redesign the site. For those that are new to blogging and new to open source, I hope to show you some free tools that you can use to help you to create your own site free of licensing fees. So if I haven’t pissed off all my readers, and I hope I have pissed off a few so that they will comment, and give this blog some feedback, I will get started on the first post of the new design section called “The GIMP”.