What an exciting time it has been, from the latter part of April to the latter part of May. Cloud storage discussions rocketed to the forefront of tech talk circles, fueled by Google’s announcement of Google Drive. Google has desktop clients available for Google Drive – if you are a Windows or OS-X user.

They claim to have a Linux client “in the works.” If Google’s support of Linux can be gauged by their (recently withdrawn) support of Linux with Picasa, us Linux users will likely die of anoxia (lack of oxygen) from holding our breath while we wait on Google to provide equal support for the Linux desktop. Of course, this is the same company that runs its business on Linux. Yet they can’t be bothered to support the very operating system that makes them billions and billions of dollars every year. Perhaps some of the growing anti-Google sentiment would dissipate if they would only treat Linux users like the first-rate users they are.

Meanwhile, you may have noticed a change in the magazine’s web site around mid-March, 2012. Weric was hosting the magazine’s website on his servers for most of the past three years. Due to a lack of time and tightening funds, he asked us to see if we could find a new server to host the magazine’s site. So, thank you Weric for being such a gracious host.

Around mid-March, we moved the magazine’s website to servers operated by David Moore. You probably know him better as YouCanToo, the resident PCLinuxOS baker. The old magazine web site used an outdated Joomla! content management system that was difficult (at best) to update and maintain.

So, when we made the move, we decided to leave the Joomla! troubles behind, and recreate the website from scratch. Our new website is almost totally based on plain HTML. With myself logging in – at most – twice a month to maintain and update the site, and Rudge doing the same for the HTML version of the magazine, there really wasn’t much need for a content management system.

Instead, I use Kompozer to update the HTML pages every month. I work on updating the local copy of the entire magazine website that I have mirrored on my hard drive. When it’s time to release the magazine, I simply upload the updated HTML files to the magazine’s server. I can already tell you that the amount of work involved with a typical magazine release has been cut down to about one-quarter of what it used to be when we were using the Joomla! content management system. There’s something to be said for keeping things simple.

We hope you enjoy the magazine’s new website. One of the goals in designing it was to make it lean and fast, a goal that should be easy to attain without all the overhead of a content management system to make things unnecessarily complicated.

Until next month, I wish each and every one of you happiness, prosperity, serenity and peace.