I'd recommend Spip. This is widely used in France but little known elsewhere. For example, the sites of Le Monde, the French Government and the French Post Offic are all Spip-based. It is superb for hierarchical sites (e.g. a magazine divided into sections), is fast and very highly configurable. I have tested out all kinds of CMSes and Blogs (for a blog, by the way, I recommend Pivot www.pivotlog.net - much nicer than WordPress). I nearly decided to use Joomla but when I discovered Spip, I knew that was the one! I've just put my first Spip site online at www.sapphiresteel.com and shall be adding a Spip sub-site to www.bitwisemag.com soon.

You can download Spip from www.spip.net . It has excellent documentation in English (and many other languages).

best wishes
Huw

Good work getting that software!  I wish I'd thought of it first  . As mouser knows, I'm going to be reviewing screencasting software in Bitwise soon, starting with the new release of Camtasia 3 this week (btw, later on, I may give some backward links to the screencasting reviews here which I must say are extremely professional) so I won't give my final verdict on BBFlashback just yet. However, what I will say is that the company responsible (Blueberry Software) has been very fast to respond to my enquiries and very helpful too. I'm glad to know that they are supporting DonationCoder. My main criticism of BBFlashback is that the current release doesn't support multiple monitors. To be honest, that's not a huge problem as you're only going to be recording from one monitor at a time. Even so, it would be nice to get this fixed in a future release. There are some things (such as the ability to re-record and edit mouse pointer movements and effects) which surpass the features even of Camtasia. At 50% off, it's definitely a bargain.

all the best
Huw

Help!!!!!

Well, it's been a hectic few days and I've been a bit caught out by the success of the thing! Which is why I'd appreciate your advice.

I had vaguely thought that I might add a forum to Bitwise if we ever had enough visitors to make it worthwhile (i.e. many months, I had assumed, after launching the site). Well, in the first four days we've had more than 3,000 visits (which is about 2,950 more than I'd been expecting or hoping for  ), which is abviously great news, of course, in one way - but, a lot of people have been asking for some means of leaving feedback. At the moment, they're all emailing me. For now I'm going to be assembling a good old fashioned letters page for next month. However, I'm starting to think that I may need to move forward my plans to add a board of some sort....

OK, so I have two basic questions (sorry to pester you rather than post the question to visitors to my own site, but, erm, well, like I was saying, I haven't got any forums to post the question in  )

1) Which software? I've run a small board before (not on computers) using phpBB and I also modrate another (nope, that's not about computers either) which also uses phpBB. Apart from the pain of updaing the software fairly frequently, I'm pretty happy with this. I notice DonationCoder uses different board software though, and I've heard claims that the commercial system, vBulletin, is the bees' knees. Now, other than personal preference, is there really any significant reason why I should choose anything other than phpBB (which has the benefit of familiarity)?

2) There are already loads of technical/programming/computer boards going. I don't see any point in copying them. I would prefer to have a small number of well targeted forums (as you have here) rather than a huge list of forums for C#, C++, Java, Delphi, VB, Perl, Python etc. etc.  I wondered if anyone had any ideas about suitable forum topics which are relevant to the general areas covered by Bitwise but don't just duplicate all the forum subjects that are already found on so many other boards....?

Although I'd like to get a board online soonish (as people keep pestering me!) I want to make sure I get it as close as I can to being 'right' at the design stage, so any help and advice would be much appreciated.

best wishes
Huw

C++ ....aaarrrgggghhhhh.....!

This is one language I've never grown to love. I get the feeling that Stroustrup just doesn't know when to stop. It's like he keeps wanting to add more and more and more stuff into it. Far, far too much syntax for my liking. C# I'm happy with; Java I'm happy with (though I'm not wild on the class libraries); Object Pascal (Delphi or Chrome) I'm happy with; even VB .NET (though not VB 6 and earlier) I could live in peace with. But I must say that "happy" is not word that springs readily to mind when I have to code in C++   

all the best
Huw

okay, i'm intrigued. is mentalika available to non-mentalists? 

-nudone (May 19, 2005, 04:26 PM)

Not yet. I'm currently working on an updated version which I shall probably make more generally available. As I said, I'm thinking of writing some articles for Bitwise explaining how to program some features (e.g. how to attach rich text notes to the nodes of a tree view and save and restore these to and from disk). The entire program is far too complicated to explain in a few articles but selected features such as the above would probably be of interest to people.

I'm also thinking of doing a .NET version of Mentalika (the present one is Win32) and may recode some things in C#.

all the best
Huw

I've written just such a program. It's called Mentalika and (to date) I have only distributed to a small number of people as it was originally intended to be a note-taker and learning tool for mentalists (this is getting complicated, but in brief a 'mentalist' is a 'psychological entertainer' like Derren Brown and this happens to be a hobby of mine). I may think of releasing a version of the program more widely though. It has a tree structure for note headers with a separate note-taking editor (with full formatting) plus a popup word processor. You can move and copy tree nodes, and (naturally) save and restore the tree and associated notes to and from disk (something which can be tricky if you've never done it before!) Each note can be assigned a category and the notes can then be sorted according to categories and viewed in a tabular structure instead of on the tree. You can flip between the tree and the table instantly and carry on editing the selected note.

If anyone thinks this sounds of interest, let me know, and I may think of writing some articles on how to do it.... 

all the best
Huw

Incidentally, we now have our own theme tune! Download and enjoy..... 

First, I promise I'm not spamming the board ( honest  ).

Your beloved admin, mouser, dropped me a line earlier and asked me to come over and tell you a bit about the free online magazine I'm launching - so here I am! I've only just discovered DonationCoder and I'm mightily impressed. A very nice site - makes a change from some fairly dull programming sites whose names I shall not mention.... 

OK, anyway, you want to know about Bitwise, so here goes. A bit of background first. I've been writing programming columns for magazines such as PC Plus, PC Pro and Computer Shopper (in the UK) for more years than I care to remember. I've written tutorials to all kinds of languages ranging from Lisp and Smalltalk to C++ and Java. For the last 10 years I was the Delphi columnist for PC Plus; and for the last 3 I also wrote the C# column. But.....

ah, but.... the big problem with writing for print magazines is that most of the editorial staff don't understand programming and none of the publishers do. I've been trying for years to persuade magazine publishers to publish a really technical magazine - one that talked to programmers and other technically literate computer users but didn't have "50 Reviews of inkjet printers; 10 mouse mats rated and reviewed" and all that other guff. I went to meeting after meeting and lots of people said "yeah, good idea" - and then did nothing about it.

In the end, I deicided that if this was going to happen I'd have to do it myself. I can't afford to print a magazine so that meant I'd have to publish it on the Internet. However, I decided that I would publish it just like a 'real' magazine - with regular features and columns and regular monthly 'issues'. That's what Bitwise is - or will be when the first issue goes online on June the 1st.

To give you a bit of an idea of what to expect. Here are a few of the things you'll find in issue 1 (hey! This is a world exclusive. I haven't told anyone this before  ). There is a C# tutorial on serializaton; a VB tutorial on programming the comms port; a Delphi tutorial on writing a screen-grab utility; a beginner's tutorial to Smalltalk; special features on DVD compression and burning tools; an exclusive interview with the chief architect of Chrome (Object Pascal for Visual Studio and Mono), plus various book and software reviews, opinion columns, features and interviews. So I'm hoping you may at least find one or two things of interest.

You can find a bit of brief background info at www.bitwisemag.com

In the meantime I also have a regular column (not so technical) online at www.rantsandraves.co.uk plus a blog, which has some info on Bitwise (plus a picture of a man's bottom dressed up as Elvis Presley  ) at: http://www.huwsrant.blogspot.com/

all the best
Huw
====================
Editor: Bitwise Magazine
www.bitwisemag.com