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Ok so I'm only running about seven hours behind where I usually am on a Thursday and instead of writing this before breakfast I'm actually writing it after lunch.

I fear that the editor is going to kill me for being late with today's column but ... oh wait ... I am the editor ... and I'm sure that I have a good excuse ... well I would if I could think of one.

Actually I seriously can't think of any reason why I'm running so far behind time ... it's just been one of those days where I started early but things have just not gone the way they usually do. I'm very happy to say that this is really the only deadline I've got today.

Perhaps I've got so used to performing under pressure that when the pressure is off I don't perform so well. I've noticed that Steve is running behind with some of what he had planned for today too.

He's in such a hurry to catch up that when the driver disk for his second graphic card finally turned up all he did was pull the box apart, install the new graphic card, load the drivers and get back to work without bothering to put the cover back on his computer.

Maybe it was the fact that the computer that's now running the three monitors is completely hidden by the monitors so it could be a case of out of sight, out of mind. It will be interesting to see how Steve's productivity increases with three monitors on one of the computers on his desk. I've been running three monitors for months now and three monitors really do make life very easy.

And no ... it's not a wank having three monitors ... two monitors seriously increases the amount of work you can get done and three just adds even more to your productivity. Of course you're not going to believe me till you try working with two monitors but once you do you're never going to want to go back to just one screen.

Easy PDF generators
One of the tasks Steve had to do today was to reduce a number of web pages to PDF files for a client's site so that they could easily be downloaded by site visitors. Of course you can do that if you happen to have Adobe Acrobat ... the full program and not just Adobe Reader ... but like all Adobe programs Acrobat is expensive and there are a couple of much cheaper alternatives.

The first one is online and it's free to use. If you want to convert a web page to a PDF file all you have to do is head over to pdfmyurl.com and enter the URL of the page you want to convert into the box on the screen. A few moments later you're asked to accept a download of the PDF file and that's it.

Of course not everything that you might want to convert into a PDF file is online so a while back we lashed out and spent a whole $25.00 on deskPDF. You can buy the program online and once you've got it all you have to do is install it and it then appears in your printer options any time you want to print a document.

We love it because it lets you add more data to a PDF that has already been saved and you can choose whether it's to be added to the front or the end of the PDF document.

Content Management Systems
We're back playing with content management systems again ... well I probably never stopped but I know that Steve does because he gets very frustrated with them when they just don't seem to be able to do what he feels is important and what he can do with HTML and CSS.

We've played with quite a few of them and on the weekend Steve downloaded ModX only to give up in disgust three days later when he couldn't make head nor tail of the instructions. If he couldn't understand them and actually produce a very simple page, then what hope would clients have who wanted us to install a good CMS so that they could update their own sites?

So it looks as though Steve might be going back to Joomla for a new client who does update his own site. While lots of people tend to think of Joomla as something that delivers a very boxy page Steve has come across a designer who has produced some very fluid designs that look nothing like a Joomla CMS.

It's only when you look under the hood that you realize that the site is being powered by Jooma so Steve's going to talk to him to see if we can produce something that will look great but be easy for the client to use.

While you're hardly likely to use Joomla for a free site or gallery I sometimes get the urge to have a play with it for other types of adult site. The ease of updating a Joomla site certainly appeals to me but I've never been able to come up with a design that didn't look clunky and boxy.

And that's it for me ... now to try and get a whole lot more done in the few hours between now and dinner.