Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Monday, October 20, 2008

A lot of friends told me about a new book about vampires, and since I'm a fan of Anne Rice and Lestat, I scoured the book stores to look for this particular book. I was amazed that I actually had a hard time looking for the book, that alone made me conclude that this book is really something, but eventually I found a copy and so I started.

The story is about a teenage girl named Isabella "bella" Swan and her love affair with Edward Cullen. Teenage love stories are pretty usual but this one is very much different since Eward is actually a vampire, Bella doesn't know this fact at first but even when she knew, she couldn't deny what she felt for the hundred year old teenage looking vampire.

Bella seemed a pretty ordinary girl with extraordinary skill in being at the wrong place moved from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington, to live with her Father Charlie, since her mother Renee can be with her new husband. At forks she eventually adapted herself at school and quickly made friends with her classmates.

At first Edward being a classmate was being rude and shows a bit of agression with her, but as time passes, this turned to friendship and Edward even saved Bella from a freak accident that made Bella think about who Edward really was. After a bit of flirting with a friend, she concludes that Edward and his family are a bunch of vampires.

Despite this fact they both fell in-love with each other since to Bella's satisfaction Edward and his family are actually resisting to drink human blood, specially Edward who finds Bella's blood to be very attractive. Everything seemed to be doing well until they encounter another group of vampire with one particularly interested with Bella.

The family of vampires hid Bella and tried to stop the vampire thats interested with bella which they eventually did using their vampire skills.

For me Stephenie Meyer is like a lighter side of Anne Rice when it comes with vampire stories. I'm really not a fan of love stories but I liked this one since the story is new and puts a new description to vampires. Stephenie's vampires are not your usual vampire's and for me her vampires are much cooler that your usual Bram Stoker Dracula's.

It seems I'm on the hunt for Book 2, 3 and 4 of her series.

Joomla! CMS Review

Thursday, October 9, 2008


Joomla! is a Content Management System (CMS) Introduced to us at the Department of Science and Technology to easily manage the websites of the Department. I was reluctant at first to try this system since I was more of a static type of person, who always want to have full control of the website, but I soon found out that I might need a little upgrade.

Installing Joomla in my opinion might need an intermediate knowledge in IT since it entails a few tinkering to your server, if this is the first time for you install an open source CMS, I suggest you seek a little help just to make sure. Luckily for me, it's not the first time, and I already have some of the requirements in my server such as Apache, Mysql, etc..., you may also use XAMPP, you search XAMPP at any decent search engine and follow the instructions at their site.




Working with Joomla isn't really that difficult onceyou get the hang of it, if you've tried editing your profile at your favorite social site, then you've probably have little difficulty using this CMS. You may also need a little background in HTML and CSS, specially if you want to make changes to the codes of the templates.

Joomla uses CSS templates, and can use various modules, mambots and components which are readily available at a search of a button, and there are lots to choose from. I however uses, components for Galleries, modules for login menu, mambots for text editors just to name a few.

Creating articles is also fairly easy, you can cut/copy text directly from MS word and paste it to your text editor. It also alows you to create an info text to be placed at the front page of your website.

Over all, Joomla! is a great way to improve your website specially if your moving out from the old statict website management and administration, but might just have to get a little technical background on a few stuff, and most specially you'll need a bit of patience learning the tools. And as far as security is concerned, Joomla! seems to be good enough to keep those nasty beings from tinkering the website.

 
 
 
 
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