Brian Corrales

I’ve just found out that for a limited time, Gospelink.com has a coupon page where you can get a 3 month subscription to Gospelink.com for only $9.99.  That’s about half off the regular monthly price!  You can give it as a Christmas gift subscription to a friend or keep it for yourself.  Here’s the link to the promotion:  http://gospelink.com/gift/employee, intended for friends and family of employees of DeseretBook.  If you want to learn more about Gospelink, here’s a screencast.  Gospelink is the world’s largest database for LDS-content, including the entire DeseretBook Online Library, BYU speeches, Ensign articles, old LDS newspapers like the Times and Seasons, Christian Classics, the Standard Works, other editions of scriptures, including Greek and Hebrew definitions for almost every word in the Bible, and much much more.

Check this out.  A real X-Wing Fighter straight out of Star Wars has been built.  Pretty cool launch.  Not sure if I’d spend $5000 on it though…

We need 400 people to pledge to attend a conference with Seth Godin next month.  The cost for admittance is $50.  I’ll discuss the details later, but if you’re interested, go to http://www.pledgebank.com/SethGodinUtah.  This is a great opportunity, but we have to act fast!  We need all 400 people committed in a very short period of time.

Winter Semester begins. It’s my last semester!

I finally moved my blog to a real domain! I used to be located at briancorrales.wordpress.com. I hope this new domain works out for me. I’ve really enjoyed learning the Wordpress API. I was really impressed on how user-friendly it is. You really don’t have to be tech savvy to create your own blog at your own domain.

Because of its ease, I’ve noticed that many people try and make Wordpress into something that it’s not. I’ve had multiple people come to me recently saying that they’ve created a site using Wordpress that was unrelated to a blog. One was an e-commerce site and another was a social-networking site. Both of these models do not fit the blogging model. For one thing, neither models have blog posts where chronology is the most important filter. Perhaps you can get away with that kind of sort with a social-networking site, but an e-commerce site should be sorted by type of item, brand, or price.

Though you may get away with using Wordpress for many types of websites, often developers spend too much time trying to tweak the open-source to fit their specific needs. Many times these tweaks take more time than it would take to create the site from scratch, especially if you are using RAILS or a similar framework that does a lot of scaffolding.

I haven’t worked long with Wordpress, but find it a remarkable open-source program. I put my website together in about an hour. There isn’t any other way that I could’ve set up a site that fast! The learning-curve was extremely small and personally, I don’t think it looks all that bad! For small, simple sites like mine, Wordpress is a perfect solution. If you are wanting something more, you should probably find a more custom-solution than an open-source package.