Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 5, 2013 Deadline September 2013 Issue Desktop Databases: Still Great for Many Tasks “dBase LLC is very excited to announce the new and updated version… dBase Plus!” When I received an email announcement that dBase Plus 8 had shipped, compatible with Windows 8, I had to double check that the press release wasn’t a hoax. As a teenager, I loved experimenting with dBase III . Sure enough, dBase is back, trying to compete against Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro. Easily one of the five most important personal computer applications of all time, dBase was the best database engine and development platform for many years. It spawned great competitors, too, from “clones” like FoxPro and Clipper to innovative databases like Alpha Five, Clarion, Revelation and Paradox. Even today, the many applications on your smartphone likely use SQLite , a relational database with tables similar to dBase IV of the 1990s. While Ashton-Tate’s dBase was not th...

This weekend I installed WordPress on our personal server. The process took about two hours, including customization and tweaking beyond the basic installation. No great PHP or MySQL skills were required; as long as you know how to use the command prompts you can install WordPress. The modifications included adding Amazon code to the PHP-generated pages. This allows us to use Amazon links without long URLs. To do this, I had to copy code from our Amazon Associates account and paste it, formatted, into the PHP code. Not a challenge, thankfully. I also enabled two spam filters via the PHP code. What makes WordPress, Drupal, and Moodle popular is the ease with which these systems can be extended. Third parties have created numerous plug-ins, widgets, and themes for these three open source platforms. I could, rather easily, support a pretty large number of teachers and students using open source software (OSS) for Web applications. The price is ideal and the skills required are incre...