I got my first computer in 1982 – an IBM PC 8088 (no dash-2), 64k of SOLDERED system memory, 2 full height floppy drives, a green screen with no graphics, and an 80cps Epson printer, with Graftrax…woo hoo!

I was guilted into starting my first BBS (bulletin board system) by my son, who had started his own, known as Druid’s Keep…a dos-based role playing game board. Mine had to be bigger of course, and ultimately sported 3 gigabytes of files, multiple CD drives, including CD-changers, all on a 3-node Lantastic network, running Wildcat Multiuser BBS. Wow

Fast forward a few years, and I needed software to go into the dialup ISP business. I prowled around, did not like the cost of what I saw (never mind the technical savvy required) and settled on Worldgroup, the newly named successor to The Major BBS, which had a powerful plugin available called Major TCP/IP, making it Internet dial-in-enabled, incoming telnet, ftp-able, etc. In addition, it supported Radius, so I could plug in my beloved Livingston portmasters…the year was 1995.

A few years (and several business changes and IT providers) later, I began testing out a new form of community software known as ecobuilder (e community builder)…unfortunately written in cold fusion. Running on Microsoft NT servers with SQL7, and requiring the cold fusion server, it never really took off. So I poked around and joined a merry band of miscreants who had shown the inventor of php-nuke the door and branched – into Postnuke, a CMS that, along with phpnuke, was largely responsible for the widespread acceptance and depth of features evident in the modern CMS’ we enjoy today. If you would like to see what some of the original cast of characters from Postnuke are doing these days, check out – Xaraya – it is not for the CMS newcomer, but what a powerhouse.

I have now moved on from Postnuke, and, contrary to half-hearted attempts over a year ago with the platform, am happy to report that the relatively young open-source fork project of Joomla – a breakaway from an older CMS known as Mambo, has a developer community literally on drugs, churning out high-value components, add-ons and themes, SEF (search engine friendly) URLs, and most important of all: MARKETING CAPABILITIES!

When choosing a platform on which to blog, I kept going back and forth between the towering open source giant in the industry: WordPress and the increasingly robust, though more complex true CMS – Joomla, before determining that it did not make any sense to pick between the two when I could use BOTH! Since then, I am finding all sorts of platforms doing the same thing – sticking with their old tried and true, and simply adding their WordPress blog to their Internet presence. The best of both worlds.