While I know quite a bit about technology, construction techniques are new to me, so I decided to read up on the subject. It turns out that new advanced techniques can help provide permanent foundation restoration. This was important since I’d read about some unreliable concrete repair jobs that require annual adjustments, which means additional costs. After we called a number of contractors, we decided to use steel piers to anchor our foundation. This turned out to be a good decision based upon the complete evaluation. While we’re not looking to sell our home at this time (but who really knows in this job market), it’s important that we made the investment in our home. We had a Realtor come to evaluate our property (for kicks, or maybe for security), and she really liked the investments we made in the home (especially foundation restoration.) So, now all we have to do is fix our kitchen and guest bath and we should be all set to move the home in case the need arises.

Open Source Apps

I’ve been using various hosting solutions for the past few years, and have pretty much tried every provider out there. In fact, every time I’m out with my friends and they mention a web host, I’ve tried that hoster at some point. Most of the hosts are pretty much the same, cPanel-based, plenty of space and storage, decent support and lower prices. Well, cPanel features Fantastico which is a decent application installer, although I recently found site that offers one step installation of prominent open source applications.The great part about using open source apps is that you can customize the look, feel and functions without worrying about extra cost. A friend of mine recently built a pretty sweet shopping cart using Magento and linked it to his Sugar CRM customer service module for a complete solution that would have cost thousands just a few years ago.

Here is a list of open source applications that I’ve been working with to build out some of my sites along with their core features and options:

• Drupal – A super sweet, highly fleixble CMS that can handle most any type of PHP mySQL site. A solid alternative to developing your own CMS from scratch using Code Igniter or a related PHP framework
• Coppermine – A flexible photo gallery that allows me to host my own files rather than relying on Flickr, which is limited unless you shell out for the pro edition.
• PHProjekt - I love this collaborative app – you can built team-based projects to work remotely and can provide updates to clients and friends for your work.

My advice to beginning web developers is to build up your skills by customizing open source applications – build your own templates, plugins, modules and tweaks before you move onto fulls scale CMS development: