Setting up a Portal

Portal what? Isn't Portal something like a device to beam you to a different part of galaxy?

Hold yer horses litta' fellow.

There are static web pages that just say things and dynamic web pages that can allow people to communicate.

Internet is all about communication and the best way to actually talk to your little niche market is by the communication!

(If you sell hundreds of thousands of your DVD's then of course you don't need to communicate with anybody except your bank manager.)

Instead of just a static page where you say how good and pretty you are, allow people to communicate with you. A simple, old way, may be a static site and then user forum. (Like Mediachance and its MMBForums)

However in recent years the CMS got really things moving. CMS stands for content management system and a typical example is the blog.

The reason why CMS become so popular is the easy way of adding content and the integrated communication tools, not because people don't know how to code HTML. A CMS system takes care of the most consuming task - making your site look coherent even if you have more than one person submitting articles.

A setting up CMS may look more difficult at first, especially if you want it to look different than every other Blog on internet. CMS uses PHP language so customizing it require some new learning. But once you get over this (or have somebody else set it up for you) you can then have many contributors to the site, you can have people writing comments and you don't have to spend more than few minutes administrating it.

A great thing is that the best CMSs are also often free. No need to look for enterprise size CMSs that cost a ton and are total overkill.

There are hundreds of CMS systems. A popular portals are based on PHP Nuke, however sites using Nuke do tend to look alike - often the only difference is the header picture. Nukes are probably best to use for their forum functionality.

In recent years Blog tools become very popular. They were created as a more personal version of big CMS, where you can quickly post thoughts and interact with people.  But with a plugin or module architecture they become often as powerful as their bigger counterparts including Photo albums, Search engine, RSS feeds and more.

Because it is easy to write a post form any computer and everything is formatted, archived and sorted automatically, the blogs become a sort of home-based-news sites that look large yet fully organized. No wonder, all big news sites are now running on some sort of CMS because it is the fastest way to get the news out.

One of the popular CMS is Movable Type that recently become a paid software upsetting some of its supporters. There are other open source CMS such as Drupal, TYPO3 or b2evolution, each having more functionality than you would ever need.

For our Cowboy Who? site I decided to go with a smaller, more personal CMS called WordPress. If pets can have their own blogs, why not a puppet?

 I decided to go with WP because it seems to be more compact than the others. I had never set up a Blog or CMS before, so I wanted to start on something that looked less complex. Sure after one hour it was already running on the default template and I grasped most of its functionality from user point of view. Of course I wanted to customize its look so I start playing with one of the supplied template (Connection by Patricia Muller) first replacing the bitmaps then editing its CSS file to change colors. Then I started looking at the template PHP files more closely and changing thing here and there to get the right look. After that I looked at various plugins (photo gallery, backup, etc.) that are really easy to deploy. Just ftp the plugins and then enable them in the interface. In one evening I had a workable site ready for Smilin' Tom to start pouring contents. Choosing WordPress was a good move

The creators of the show are now living all around the North America and World. For example we were able to trace Robert in Thailand. So it become a great meeting place.

If you go to the site you will see its posts are as off-the wall as the show itself. It become a sort of continuation of the Cowboy Who? show where each of us assumed one or few fictional characters from the show or even invent new ones.

An unsuspected visitor to the www.CowboyWho.com site often become quickly disoriented reading the posts, not knowing if he has to laugh or rather check his pulse, wondering if this may be perhaps a portal into some sort of alternate universe he never heard about. What more could we hope for!

For us the blog become a place to try comment on world using different comedy sketches that are somehow continuation of the show.

A nice example of the comedy flavored post may be the "review" of the DVD. You can see it here.

Just to see what you can expect from www.cowboywho.com blog, here I reprint (a fancy world for copy and paste) the first post Smilin' Tom ever wrote on his blog - or any blog. (Funny, reading his posts remind me the e-mails from the show director and puppet master Jeff Green. What a coincidence!) :

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