Montego Musings

In the interest of helping out a family member with her web site and personal blog, I decided that I needed to take some time to see what is available here. So, here I am.

First, a little bit about me.

I have been developing and supporting web sites for family, friends and non-profits for about three years now. Have been a “consumer” of the web prior to that, but had not yet ventured into the web site development and support until September of 2004. That is when I found a host and found Fantastico.

I was looking to do certain things and ran into PHP-Nuke through Fantastico. Had some issues and questions about it and ended up running into Raven at RavenPHPScripts.com, which at the time, other than NukeCops, seemed to be the only real active sites supporting it.

Well, the rest is history…

Follow up:

I am now an admin on Raven’s site, am on the RavenNuke™ team, and have my own script site related to PHP-Nuke and PHP called Montego Scripts.

Ok, so I jumped ahead quite a bit. I was wanting to create a family web site where family and extended family and friends to come to keep in touch, share stories, recipes, photos, etc. I also wanted to send out fancy newsletters as well of the goings-ons with my own family. That sent me out looking for something already pre-made for PHP-Nuke. I tried Fancy Newsletter but did not like it much. Then, one day, mangaman posted a news article on Raven’s site for his HTML Newsletter tool. I checked it out and found it much easier to work with.

Well, over time, I ended up modifying it quite a bit for my personal needs and then approached the author to see if he wanted my mods. He did, and we co-released version 1.1. I still was not satisfied with it, so I kept programming away at it and eventually released 1.2, but mangaman had fallen onto some difficult times and had to quit his web hobby. I took over the HTML Newsletter from 1.2 version on.

Now I had to have a site to release and support the HTML Newsletter tool from and I did not want to do it from my family site. Hence, Montego Scripts was born. I continued with newsletter development, but my focus had changed on giving back what I had learned about PHP-Nuke to the community and so accepted Raven’s offer to become a moderator at his site. From there, I could help many more people than I could just from my little-known web site. LOL.

Over time, I saw a few really good projects go dormant: GoogleTap/GT-NextGEn and Dynamic Titles. So, I decided to pick those up and continue on with them, including support. I almost picked up Sommaire, but chose not to given the added complexity of being written with French variable names and comments and such. I just did not have the kind of time that would be needed to really do it justice.

What a ride. That’s it.

I have a bunch of web site topics queued up and hope to post weekly at least, but, I am NOT a writer, so go easy on me…