The strange creatures inhabiting this site are reproductions of Gloria’s thread on canvas artworks. They are all © Gloria Toro Ceballos. Music excerpts, scores, images, audio and video clips are all © Lamberto Coccioli when not stated otherwise.

Wordpress is a wonderful tool to create blogs and much more. Many thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, and to the many developers that have improved on the core functions of the software.

I thought that setting up a nice blog with some static pages and media content would have been a straightforward affair. It turned out to take an inordinate amount of time and effort. On top of digging deep into Wordpress documentation and forums, I had to learn the basics of the PHP scripting language, MySQL and phpMyAdmin; a good deal of HTML and CSS and bits of UNIX commands and Apache… Just by counting the acronyms in the previous sentence you’ll have to agree that something is wrong here!

We are still a long way from having simple, user-friendly yet flexible tools to create personal blogs and web pages. Although Wordpress is one of the best publishing platforms and offers a very friendly admin interface, it still falls short of my requirements for a usable and flexible tool. But then, the intricacies of how a web page is generated, and the need to support different implementations will always be a barrier for developing more intuitive tools. With time…

This site uses a slightly modified version of the simple yet subtle Hemingway theme by Kyle Neath, and the following Wordpress plugins:

flickrRSS 5.1 by Dave Kellam and Stefano Verna
Get Custom Field Values 3.0.1 by Scott Reilly
Related Articles 0.2 by Lamberto Coccioli
TextileWrapper 2.8 by Joel Bennett
Time of Day 1.0.1 by Phu Ly & Dunstan Orchard & Michael Heilemann [in order to make it work you need to duplicate the function the_time and call it the_time2 in wp-includes/general-template.php. This is the code I use:
//added by me to make the timeofday plugin work (lc)
function the_time2( $d = '' )
{echo apply_filters('the_time2', get_the_time( $d ), $d);
}
Xspf_player 3.4a by José Rodriguez (a.k.a. Boriel)

I’m currently using in the Portfolio section two great web services, Soundcloud for listening to audio files and issuu for visualising scores and documents.

[updated December 2009]

David Heinemeier Hansson presentation of Rails is called Pursuing beauty with Ruby and Rails. The idea of putting beauty and simplicity first, the concept of an elegant, beautiful and simple way to write code is what intrigues me most. I’m not a programmer, but I’m sure there must be a direct correspondence between beautiful, simple user interfaces and the underlying code; in other words you cannot have a truly elegant, usable and flexible interface unless the code itself is also elegant, usable and flexible.