Not being a very heavy traffic type of site DeeEmm.com has always been quite happy residing on a shared server along side the other similar sites that I run. My two heavy traffic sites reside on a dedicated server but there has never been a need for such extravagances here. That is, until just recently.
Go Yabba Yabba!
I have a habit of bouncing between hosting plans so that i can get a better deal and have moved between several hosts before settling on GoDaddy. They offered the cheapest unlimited hosting and as I had domains and online storage registered there it seemed like a no-brainer. Before I moved I gave them a call to make sure that they supported Joomla and a few specific hosting requirements that I needed. The support guy was very helpful and reassured me that there were no account restrictions and the hosting could be configured as I required. Cool.
So nearly a year goes by, with no major dramas. The support has been excellent when I have needed it and the sites are running much better then they did on my previous host (who had a habit of continually reconfiguring the servers in the name of 'security' which usually ended up breaking my site).
Out of the blue just before Christmas I get an email from 'network violations' telling me that my account is in contravention of their hosting policy and will be taken down unless I immediately fix it. On digging a little further it transpires that as a couple of the sites I had hosted there have over 1024 files within a directory it was seen as being in contravention with their terms and conditions. They advised me to immediately change the site so that it did not have greater then 1024 files or folders in a single directory and then send them an email stating that I had removed the offending items, was in agreement to their rule of 1024 and would not do it again.
WTF!?!
I smell a rat!
I was majorly pissed off as one of the issues I asked about before committing was hosting limitations on their 'unlimited' plans. Well after doing some digging I found out that there is no such clause in their T&C, hence the request to cut and paste a specific statement into an email. Obviously I refused.
After some debate and moving up the food chain a few levels I ended up in a stalemate conversation with one of their managers who was not going to budge on their newly created 1024 rule and whilst I managed to get the deadline extended a little they were adamant that I had to address the file issue.
There was no compromise on their behalf and I was fed a bullshite story about how my sites were affecting other domains on the shared hosting (quite amazing considering that neither site was actually live, the DNS records were still pointing at my previous registrar meaning that there was zero traffic to their servers).
With lies and a complete lack of cooperation on behalf of GoDaddy I decided to vote with my feet and take my (considerable) business elsewhere. Their loss! I did however manage to get a parting shot by getting them to refund me for the three hosting plans that they miss-sold me. The ironic thing was that in the course of the discussions I had with them I asked if they would upgrade me to a VPS plan for free - which they declined. Not sure why as it was a fraction of the price of the three plans. Idiots.
My Gain
Their loss has literally turned into my gain as I discovered Digital Ocean who offer basic VPS hosting from as little as $5 / month. I have now migrated all of my hosted sites over to a single VPS instance which is working absolutely flawlessly. The best thing is that should I need I can easily and instantly upgrade to a higher spec VPS with the click of a button.
I'm going to carry on testing things out for a while and will probably move my two large sites across as it is much better value than I am currently getting.
/DM
Pragmatism in Code
Michael Percy AKA DeeEmm - Waxing lyrical about life the universe and everything software related...
DeeEmm
Something new is happening.
The past few weeks I have been rejigging all of my sites, services and applications so that they all now fall under the banner of my company Indau. The reason for this is that there was no direct correlation between each of the products. This autonomy also failed to leverage a very important commodity - diversity.
By associating all of my different products with my company, it demonstrates the diversity in the work that I do, and therefore work that the company is able to provide. It helps sell my services.
The reshuffle is partially due to expansion in a new direction, it also helps me to delineate paying projects from hobby projects. Not that hobby projects are without value, indeed the opposite is true. Whilst undertaking the reshuffle I also decided to revive my long suffering content management system. DMCMS. The reason for this is partially because I want to play with the fantastic tools on offer by the guys at Atlassian, but also because it deserves to live on.
After a quick review of the code with a fresh mind, the roadblock that prevented the version 1 release is readily apparent, the multi language support was weighing the code down and preventing progress. The first job is therefore to remove the bloat associated with the multi-language support and provide a functioning version 1 release.
To give DMCMS a new lease of life, and an identity of it's own I have registered DeeEmm.org so that it can reside in it's own space, with no distractions from the crap that goes on here at DeeEmm.com
It might take a few days to get things up and running but considering that there has been no movement on DMCMS in about 2 years I'm sure that should not be a problem.
/DM
I've been a proponent of Evernote for quite some time now, I use it on my Mac, my iPhone and iPad as well as using the online version when accessing from my clients windows machines. Being able to instantly share data between all of my machines has been an excellent boon to my productivity, and being able to find information fast means that I am never caught short in meetings or whilst out in the field. Well at least that's how it used to be before the latest Evernote 5 update.
The new version of Evernote has been vastly prettyfied, so much so in fact, that instead of being the leading GTD app (GTD = getting things done), it has now entered to realms of bloatware. The new update is visually very different, and a considerable amount of time would have appear to have been spent on creating new fancy graphics and swipe actions. Unfortunately this is at the expense of usability.
Heres my lowdown on why you should NOT update...
iPhone version. Epic fail!
Notebook list is so cluttered with pretty graphics that there is hardly any room left for the notebook title, surely the point of the notebook screen is to view a list of notebooks not bedazzle me with faux embossed cardboard. If like me you use title prefixes to keep similar notebooks listed together to make them easier to find, you might just find that all you can see is a list of notebooks that have the same name.
The note preview now ignores carraige returns in the note making the snippet look untidy and hard to read.
Sliding tabs are hard to use and also coincide with iOS swipe down alert summary. I constantly swipe down my alerts screen instead of swiping the current view down to return back to the main screen.
Main screen and app in general is now bloated with unnecessary graphics that do nothing to improve functionality, the tabs are hard to use with my fingers and take up valuable space where they could have placed shortcuts to more useful features.
I have no idea why I need to have the premium features tab ‘above the fold’ as the most important thing in my view. I couldn’t care a less about it. I know I am a premium member as I pay the $’s for the privilege. A small insignificant ‘settings’ icon is all that it needed. I used this screen approximately zero times in the old app, why is it now so important?
Ipad app. Epic fail #2
Same useless slide up / down tabs as iPhone app. Same issue with iOS alerts screen.
Still no list view for notebooks or notes. I have previously griped about this, as have many others unfortunately to no avail. Tying to find what you need by browsing though an endless list of similar looking squares is not the most productive way of displaying information. Again, so much display estate is unneccesarily wasted with faux cardboard.
Same issue as iphone app with note previews ignoring returns, making notes hard to read.
The stupid animated window for displaying notes now means that I can see less of my note. Why? Who could possibly have thought that reducing the size would be a good idea?
Generally the screen layout is a waste of space, so much more could have been done with this app. Fortunately the web version displays everything in a manner which makes much more sense, three columns - notebook list + note list + note preview. Unfortunately the stupid drag drop rearranging of notebooks on the web version means that if I try to use it on the ipad I cannot scroll the list of notebooks, all I end up doing is making a mess of my notebook list. Havent these guys heard of drag handles???!!!
No list view was my gripe about the previous version; I abhor icons in a productive environment. Now I find with the latest version that everything is icon driven, Evernote have completely embraced the useless icon view. Arrrrggh. The worst thing is that there is not even any way to disable it. 
Still no way to create a notebook in a notebook, and the 'send to' button on the edit notebook screen just results in a 404 error that locks the app up. Good testing there guys.
Icons and thumbnails
Icons are a pet hate of mine. I have never viewed windows or OSX or Linux or any other flavour of OS in icon view. It's perfect for images, but not for files. Icons are slow to use, they are not intuitive. Consider this; if you sort a list alphabetically or by date you can easily and quickly find what you are looking for by scrolling up or down. However, no matter how you sort a page of icons it is not easy to find non image like information quickly. Unlike lists, icons do not read in up / down order, they read left to right; down a row; left to right; down a row and so on ... It’s is not intuitive. It’s very hard to find info quickly! Perfect for images or galleries, useless for everything else!
I can understand evernote wanting to ‘pretty up’ the app, but not at the expense of functionality. It’s almost as if they have forgotten the app is mostly used as a GTD app, a genre where productivity is key and speed and ease of use are what makes for a productive app. This latest update is a big step backwards in my opinion. I feel that it is ill conceived, poorly tested and so far different in basic functionality from that last version that it might as well be a different product.
It is like the update has been written by someone with no idea of what Evernote is, that they cannot possible be an Evernote user. They have also not done any beta testing, not stopped to ask what the power users want, or need, not read the requests for items like list views. The update seems to be compłetely driven by aesthetics; functionality has apparently taken a back seat. They have effectively ruined a capable and professional app by turning it into a kindergarten toy.
When I think about the designer who penned this update I get a mental picture of someone with bad hand eye coordination using a mouse to chase a pointer around the screen like a child chases peas around a plate. Like when you get asked to help someone with a computer issue at work and then get subjected to having waste an inordinate amount of time watch them use the mouse to do things you can do instantly with simple keyboard shortcuts*. Someone who NEEDS icons and thumbnails to be able to navigate.
Embracing icon type views has effectively dumbed down the app, it has taken a productive workflow improving piece of software and reduced its usability so that it can be driven by the lowest common demographic: those of us who waste 30% of their days chasing mouse pointers around screens and typing with one (or possibly two) fingers.
(*Unfortunately It seems that nowadays computer literacy is no longer a prerequisite for being given a job in front of a computer.)
Well here's some news for you Evernote. Icons and thumbnails have their place, but it is not here. Icons work REALLY well on the ipad home screens, so much so that my one year old has no trouble at all using the ipad. Icons and thumbnails work REALLY well in image galleries, in fact nothing else works quite as well in gallery apps, but they do NOT work for note taking apps. Think of all of the real world and virtual world ways of organising text type data and they alł have one thing in common, a list or index, or arrangement in order of data or by title. Libraries, address books, encyclopaedias, email applicàtions, in fact any kind of filing system, they all organise information in list type arrangements.
Why try to reinvent the wheel?
Do not try to fix that which is not broken!
I hate to say it but I am now looking other apps. I use Evernote for my day to day business and this latest update has made a massive hit on my productivity, one that I cannot afford. If I am going to have to learn to reuse an app, I might as well learn to use one that works for me, unfortunately with Evernote in its current form it longer fits the bill, And due to my recently deceàsed laptop I havent even had a chance to take a really good look at the OSX version yet, but my quick peek did not like what it saw: more icons :(
Evernote need to make some big changes and make them quickly or I am sure that many other users will soon be doing as I am and jumping ship, as this new version is almost unusable.
/DM
The past week has been pretty painful as I have been without my trusty macbook. Unfortunately it died in what I can only call freak accident.
Last week whilst I was flying to visit a clients site the plane hit some turbulence. Now when I say some turbulence, you could probably translate that as the worst turbulence I have ever experienced. Not wanting to sound too blasé about such things; I fly quite a lot and being originally based in London I've experienced quite a bit of extreme weather whilst flying. Anyhow, before departing i did what I always do; put my mac into sleep mode, loaded it up in my trusty pull along samsonite laptop case and headed off to the airport. After going through check-in, stopping off for the obligatory coffee at the qantas lounge and boarding the plane I settled in to reading my book. (This week it is 'Existence' by David Brin).
Takeoff was pretty bumpy and the ride did not improve as we rose above cloud level, then about 15 minutes into the flight we hit some turbulence. I can only liken the turbulence to what it must feel like to be trapped inside an industrial washing machine, stuck inside of a cement mixer that is bouncing on the worlds biggest bungee. In fact, I'm not really sure if that is an adequate analogy, but I'm sure you get the gist.
Whilst such a ride is no issue for a skateboarding petrol head (I did at one point think of throwing my hands in the air and giving a 'whoop' or two), I've got to admit that the sound of the engines straining and the wings creaking was making the engineer side of my brain ask questions.
Eventually, after what seemed like half an hour or so the turbulence subsided and we landed safely. Unfortunately when I went to get my laptop bag from the overhead locker I found that it was open and that most of the contents had spilled out. I thought little of it until I got into work and discovered that my macbook would not boot back up.
Fortunately I use an online cloud storage solution to sync work between my macbook, iPad, the mac at my office and the mac at home so I had a relatively recent backup of my work which was just as well as no matter what I did I could not get the macbook to boot up. Eventually I did manage to get the system to boot and recovered the additional data but both the hard drive and hard drive controller are now cactus.
I would guess that putting the macbook into sleep mode rather than shutting it down completely may have been a contributing factor, and it is also possible that the hard drive may not have survived regardless, but it still remained a complete PITA that needed resolution.
After some consideration I decided that it was a good excuse to buy a new laptop. The macbook was a mid 2009 model and nearing the end of its useful life, it was already on it's second keyboard and third hard drive. As I travel a lot and have the use of a 27" iMac at work I decided to go small and have ordered an 11" macbook air with i7 2Ghz / 8Gig RAM and 512Gig SSD. Now I just have to wait for it to arrive, it's the longest 5-8 days of my life.
So I guess the moral of this story is remember to completely shut down your laptop before you fly.
I have recently migrated a site from Dolphin to JomSocial and needed to modify the way that the activity stream was displayed to visitors. By default the replies and likes of activity stream posts are only displayed to friends of the original poster. This means that the comments are very limited in their reach.
The overall effect of hiding activity stream comments and likes from guests is that this valuable activity is wasted. I wanted to show this activity to guest visitors so that they could see how active the site is. This in turn encourages them to join and hopefully encourages them to comment.
Of course, this may not be suitable for all sites, but in the case of this site, there was no activity that is 'secret' or 'private'; the activity stream is public viewable, and so should be the comments.
The modification you need to do this is pretty straightforward, it simply involves removing or commenting out two lines of code.
Modification Instructions
open the following file...
components/com_community/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/activities.index.php
Look for the following line of code at around line 223
<?php if( $allowComment ) { ?>
Replace it with the following
<?php //if( $allowComment ) { ?>
Next look for the following line of code at about line 263
<?php } ?>
Replace it with the following
<?php //} ?>
This simply comments out the lines. You can also opt to delete them completely if you wish.
Now your activity stream will display comments and likes to visitors as well as all members. The only caveat to this is is that if you are logged in it will display the 'reply' link but will not allow you to actually reply unless you are a friend of the original poster. What happens when you are not a friend of the original poster and you try to post a reply is that you will simply see a popup message box saying 'permission denied'. There are two ways that you can deal with this. These are as follows.
1. Change the message.
To change the message to something a little more meaningful you can do the following...
Edit the file components/com_community/controllers/system.php
At around line 1460 look for the following code...
$objResponse->addAlert('Permission denied');
Simply change this message to something else - for example...
$objResponse->addAlert('Only friends can reply');
2. Allow non-friends to post.
If you want to let anyone be able to post to the Activity stream you can do the following...
The easy way...
Enable the following setting in the admin panel
components > jomsocial > configuration > site > activity > allow everyone to comment
The hard way...
Find the same line mentioned above, but this time replace it with the following code...
$table =& JTable::getInstance('Wall', 'CTable');
$table->type = $act->comment_type;
$table->contentid = $act->comment_id;
$table->post_by = $my->id;
$table->comment = $comment;
$table->store();
$cache = CFactory::getFastCache();
$cache->clean(array('activities'));
$comment = CWall::formatComment($table);
$objResponse->addScriptCall('joms.miniwall.insert', $actid, $comment);
CFactory::load( 'libraries' , 'notification' );
$params = new CParameter( '' );
$params->set( 'message' , $table->comment );
$url = 'index.php?option=com_community&view=profile&userid=' . $act->actor.'&actid='.$actid;
$params->set( 'url' , $url );
$params->set( 'stream' , JText::_('COM_COMMUNITY_SINGULAR_STREAM') );
$params->set( 'stream_url' , $url );
CNotificationLibrary::add( 'profile_activity_add_comment' , $my->id , $act->actor , JText::sprintf('COM_COMMUNITY_ACITIVY_WALL_EMAIL_SUBJECT' ) , '' , 'profile.activitycomment' , $params );
Now anyone can reply to any post in the activity stream. Additionally anyone can also post directly to another users profile page. cool huh?!?
NOTE
Well I guess that this modification will not be for everybody, but if like me you have a community site this might just increase your activity.
/DM
Another multi platform mobile template, Mobile Joomla. Works great with joomla and kunena and is configurable with seperate templates for different platforms. This is currently active on the site.
View your Joomla based site on a mobile device. Just installed this on DeeEmm.com. Needs some tweaking but works reasonably well.
http://ericasadun.com/ftp/AirPlay/
Turn your Mac into an airplay device or serve files and URLs to Apple TV
After restarting work on the migration script a few weeks back I have made great progress on getting it finished. I have gone through a few revisions and am now on version 0.10. The bugs are slowly getting addressed and the end is nearing.
The current version 0.10 is still in progress. I'm currently working on migrating the group forum posts into the discussion section of each group, but this is proving to be harder than originally anticipated. Still to go before I release the next version are to migrate articles, navigation structure and IBDW Spywall entries. I finally decided to migrate Spywall posts as the user profile pages look very bare. Plus the transition from old to new will be a lot smoother for members.
One major change is that I decided to flip the way that the migration is carried out. Originally I opted to install JomSocial and copy the Boonex files into a sub directory. However, after some thought I decided that it would be better to do the opposite. Now the migration is carried out by installing JomSocial into a sub directory. This means that you can get the whole migration up and running before going live. It also allows you to easily retain or switch between both sites by using htaccess rules.
The other major change is to move away from the corePHP Wordpress plugin and use EasyBlog. EasyBlog is much more user friendly and comparable with Wordpress on a basic level. OK so it doesn't have the plethora of plugins available to Wordpress, but on a community site this is probably a good thing. I do Have one JomSocial site that uses the corePHP Wordpress plugin, and whilst it works well, it is generally too complex for most users to get their heads around. If anyone really wants / needs a specific blogging platform I would be happy to write a custom script, although I would not do this for free.
I have addressed most of the issues with the previous release including the video and photo sections. All videos, both embedded and uploaded are now supported. Groups are migrated as are events, forums and groups. I have also added messages to the migrator. Although my own site does not really utilise the messaging function, there would be plenty that do.
One nagging issue that I have not been able to fix relates to the forums. There is a bug that means a small amount of posts are not being converted from HTML into the BBcode that the forum uses. This means that the HTML tags display in the posts. I've stared at this particular issue for so long that I now have code blindness. It only happens to longer posts and almost seems to be an issue related to REGEX or database limitations. For the time being I've decided to focus on the outstanding issues, and leave this issue until later.
Once the basic migration script has been finished I will then look towards writing some code to allow htaccess redirects for the moved content. This is really important for SEO and retaining any rankings that you may have already amassed. The redirect script will utilise both htaccess rules and a custom php script to lookup the new data and return the correct link with a 301 (permanent) redirect. This will also allow any hot linked images or videos to still work.
At the moment I'm throwing all of the time that I can at getting the script finished as I want to migrate my remaining Dolphin site to JomSocial. Timeframe for the finished article including redirect script is probably still at least a month away, although a fully functional migration script will hopefully be closer.
Anyhows, Here's the changelog...
/DM
Version 0.10 (so far)
21.06.12
- Improved forum migration
- Kunena setup (categories to be enabled - add viewing permissions)
- Fixed group avatars
-
Version 0.9
20.06.12
- Fixed Video migration
Version 0.8
08.06.12
- Improved video migration
- Updated Photo migration
- Reformatted script to work from subfolder of dolphin installation
- Added groups migration
- Added easyblog integration
- Improved Forum migration
- Added Message migration
- Added Sites migration
Been a while since I started using the iPad so thought I'd best post some progress.
If you have read the iPad versus MacBook experiment post you would know that one of the objectives of the whole experiment was to see if I could use the iPad as a replacement for my laptop. Well, in short, I did actually manage it, albeit with a few restrictions.
I will start off by saying that whilst you can use your iPad for most things, there are a few things that are much easier on a proper computer. The biggest issue with the iPad for me was simply the user interface. It's great for most things but when you want to type there is nothing like a real keyboard. This is no big issue as you can use the standard apple bluetooth keyboard which works flawlessly. However, this leads not to another issue. There is no mouse.
Mouseless
To me not having a mouse is generally not an issue as I tend to use the keyboard wherever possible. I'm a staunch believer that as far as efficiency is concerned it's much quicker to hit a few keys than it is to reach over and use the mouse. The only issue is, that on the iPad, the common keyboard shortcuts do not exist. There's no 'cmd-tab', no 'home', no way to easily navigate between apps. This means that the only way to navigate is to use the touchscreen, which quite frankly sucks big-time as far as efficiency is concerned. This isn't a massive issue if you do not need to frequently change between applications, for example using a word processor but is a massive PITA if you are trying to code a website. If Apple can address the keyboard shortcut issue it would be a lot more useable.
In the cloud
As the iPad has limited storage, some kind of 'Cloud' or centralised file sharing is absolutely necessary for getting the most out of it, this is especially true if you are using the iPad for business. I have been a user of iDisk for quite a while. It was working really good for document storage and allowed me to easily share docs between all of my machines.
...Enter stage left iCloud.
Apple decided to replace it's iDisc service with iCloud, this has been rolled out over the past 9 months or so, with the end of life for iDisc happening next month. I've got to say as a cloud service iCloud sucks big time. Mostly as there is no webdav or FTP access, no way to manually organise the stuff that is stored there, no way to store files other then from inside an app that supports it. This is a big fail as far as I am concerned, okay for the home user using the apple suite of products but absolutely crap for business users such as myself.
So now that iDisk is basically at its life end I needed to find a way of sharing docs between all of my machines. After looking around for a suitable cloud storage solution I decided to give GoDaddy Online Storage a try. They offered by far the cheapest solution, with a 100 gigs of storage weighing in at just under $30 per year, which is pretty much what most other hosts are charging monthly. Of course, with a price that cheap there had to be a catch: I found that the supplied sync tool was not very reliable and ended up resorting to manually synching my data using FTP. Not a massive issue, and for $30 a year not one that I am complaining about. I decide that as this was a bit of an experiment I would go with the cheap option and upgrade providers later on if I needed to.
It was actually good to reorganise my storage. Pretty much everything was stored on my laptop and backed up to a time machine. Using the iPad has forced me to move my storage online and change my workflow a little suit. Storing everything in online storage means that I can access it from any machine anywhere at any time, plus I get an extra level of redundancy as not only are my files backed up to my time machine, they are also now backed up online as well.
Basic Apps - Accessing your stuff.
To access your online storage you will need to have a suitable WebDAV / FTP client. I tried a few before I settled on using Air Sharing which had the cleanest interface and also included mail server integration which allows you to connect to your mail server and download message attachments directly to the iPad, a really handy feature. Air Sharing also allows direct access to your iPad from other devices on the network via a web based interface making it easy to quickly share files. You may also want to consider access to other services such as drop box, MobileMe or Google Docs, Air Sharing has support for a variety of providers but it's worth checking that it supports the ones that you use.
Basic Apps - Editing office files
Unless you are happy with the apple suite of office type products you will need an app that is compatible with Microsoft office. Whilst Pages is okay, it does miss out some very basic formatting which makes it more or less completely incompatible with office docs. This is okay if you simple need to be able to open and read the document, but no good if you need to modify it as it will screw the document up. Fortunately help is at hand in the form of Quickoffice which does a much better job.
Quickoffice also incorporates the ability to download docs directly from your preferred cloud service provider and also provides direct access via a web client if you are connected to the same network. Unfortunately at this time it does not allow you to add custom WebDAV clients which means that you cannot add a client if it is not in the pre-defined list, unfortunately GoDaddy is not in the list.
My Impressions
Overall having the ability to access files remotely and edit them will enable many to be able to use their iPad as a day to day office tool. Sure it might be a bit more clunky to use than a laptop but with the keyboard you can easily (and comfortably) use it to create and edit documents as you need. I find that being able to access my email and calendar is of greatest importance, and being able to take notes and refer back to them in meetings is the next most frequent thing that I do on a day to day basis, whilst I actually use another app for taking notes (more about that in a later post) it is easily achievable by using either the native notes application or Quickoffice.
The most important thing for me in being able to use the iPad on a day to day basis instead of the laptop was finding a suitable online storage provider so that I could easily share files between my computers and my iPad. Being a consultant, my work also allows me to be able to use the iPad for taking notes that I can then later type up when I am back in the office. In short I do not really need access to massive processing power on the road which has been a big factor in the success of using the iPad on a day to day basis.
Of course, it is no good for things like app development or PHP coding, for activities like these you will simply need to use a desktop or a laptop, but it is possible to use your iPad for making mods to sites, especially if you have got the correct apps, but more about that in another post.
After 3 months of using my iPad instead of my laptop, I can say wholeheartedly it is indeed possible. It will take a change in the way that you work, and a bit of reorganisation to your workflow, but when you are set up it is refreshing to be able to travel light and work simply. It was initially a bit hard for me to get my head around, and it wasn't until I had reorganised my complete storage to be online based that I could really take advantage of the iPad as a productivity tool.
The outcome of my three months trial is that instead of buying a new laptop I opted to buy a new iMac for my office instead.
/DM
The first in a series of articles documenting an experiment with an iPad, a consultant and a sense of adventure, If you are considering usig an iPad as a replacement for your laptop then read on...
To address some issues with the current hosting we are moving the site to another server, in fact, if you are reading this message, that means the migration has already been a success!
The move is to address some configuration issues and help improve access speed.
There is also an update in the pipeline - watch this space...
When recently migrating the DeeEm.com site I needed a way to be able to organise the tutorials section so that each tutorial was easily accessible. This meant creating an index of blog posts so that visitors could browse through each category so see if there were any mods that applied to their site. Whilst EasyBlog makes provision for listing category titles, there is no way to list the blog posts without additionally showing an intro portion from the post itself. This is achieved using the 'Latest Blogs' module, and whilst there is a setting to control the length of text displayed, even setting this to the minimum possible value, you will still display a couple of newlines in the output.
Whilst digging though the code to see if there was a way that I could modify the CSS or core code to force the list to display as I wanted, I discovered that there is a hidden value within the administration settings for the module that hides the intro text. The solution is to manually apply this value by directly editing the database table.
The value in question is for the 'introtext' variable: (Content be taken from). This will only allow you to select between 'introtext' or 'main content'. What you cannot see is there is a third value 'Hidden'. I assume that this does not display, due to it having the value '-1', or at least it does not display in the browsers that I am using.
The solution is therefore very simple.
using phpMyAdmin or your favourite MySQL client, browse to the #__modules table and search for the Latest Posts module you wish to edit (TIP - search for the module title + if you have just added the module it will be on the last page!). When you have found it, hit the edit button, and then scroll down to the 'params' section and search for the text "showintro":"0" . This may have the value of either 0 or 1 depending on the value of the setting in the admin section. Simply change the value to -1 and save it. Be careful not to change any of the other text.
Now you will notice that the intro text is gone, and the additional carriage returns are no longer visible.
One caveat is that if you edit any other settings within the admin section, it will overwrite this value and you will neeed to manually re-apply this fix.
/DM
The recent migration from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7 left me without a comments system for the tutorials section of the site. Previously this was handled by Jcomment, a great component that allows you to easily add commenting to standard Joomla articles, its only drawback, is that the Joomla 1.7 version is still some way from release.
After having taken a look at various options, including several other commenting systems, I decided that the best solution would be to import the tutorial articles into EasyBlog, mostly as this would help keep some continuity on the site. The migration of the posts went flawlessly, as expected, but this still left me with the actual comments to migrate. I briefly considered a manual migration, but then discovered that there are actually quite a few comments on the site.
After a bit of digging around I discovered that EasyBlog creates a table that cross references the old article ID's to the new ID's. This is created during the migration process and the values are stored in the '#__easyblog_migrate_content' table. Perfect for migrating the missing comments across.
Using this table I was able to change the object_id in the original jcomments table to match the new post_id for EasyBlog. I simply ran the following SQL statement from within phpMyAdmin. (You will notice that I've made a copy of the original table into the table j17_oldjcomments, just in case.)
UPDATE j17_easyblog_migrate_content p, j17_oldjcomments pp SET pp.object_id = p.post_id WHERE pp.object_id = p.post_id
With the correct values assigned to the comments, I deleted all unnecessary fields (all fields except `userid`, `comment`, `date` and `object_id`) and then exported the table.
I then modified the SQL in a text editor as follows: I deleted the CREATE TABLE section and modified the INSERT statement as follows...
INSERT INTO `j17_oldjcomments` (`userid`, `comment`, `date`, `newid`) VALUES
Changed to
INSERT INTO `j17_easyblog_comment` (`created_by`, `comment`, `created`, `post_id`) VALUES
I then saved the file and using phpMyAdmin I imported the new comments into the database (again using phpMyAdmin).
Now all of the comments were under the correct posts but when viewing them I found that some of them had a left-margin set within an inline stye causing the comment to shift over to the right side of the page. After a bit of digging, this transpired to be because there was some data missing from the database. For each entry there are two fields set which relate to the comments location within the comment stream, this is needed EasyBlog allows nested comments. My quick import simply assigned zero values to these fields confusing the script as to where the comments should sit within the comment stream.
The fields should function as follows - Assuming that all comments are sequential and not nested, on the first comment the values for the two fields lft and rgt will be 1 and 2, the next comment will be 3 and 4, and so on...
Rather than get technical and write a PHP script to do the job properly, I decided to manually add the values. I simply gave all comments the values 1 and 2 for the fields lft and rgt respectively (via phpMyAdmin). I then manually edited the posts where there were more then one comment so that the subsequent posts had the values, 3&4, 5&6, etc. I used the following SQL to find the duplicate entries:
SELECT `post_id` FROM `j17_easyblog_comment` GROUP BY `post_id` HAVING (COUNT(`post_id`) > 1)
Fortunately there were not too many posts with multiple comments.
/DM
If you are a regular internet user, or even a regular user of other more traditional media, you probably couldn't fail to be aware of the blackout of several well known websites. Amongst the most reported was the blackout of Wikipedia. It's actions receiving a lot of media coverage here in Australia on the radio and television, coverage that was no doubt echoed around the rest of the globe...
The black out of Wikipedia, and several other high traffic sites such as O'Rielly, WordPress Reddit and Cheezburger, is in response to the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy) / PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property) Acts. These Acts have respectively been proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and are considered by most to be ill conceived and not needed.
Although the intent of SOPA / PIPA is to prevent online piracy and sites such as The Pirate Bay from operating, the crux of the issue with the proposed acts is the apparent lack of due process laid down in their enforcement, resulting in the ability to be able to misuse the acts for purposes other than their original intent. This is of course very bad news.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act
Application of the existing DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) has already seen many instances of the existing law being liberally applied without following any formal due process, resulting in unfounded Cease and Desist notices being issued and major inconvenience to those on the receiving end. The proposed SOPA / PIPA acts far exceed the scope of the existing DMCA Act, and without a formal process for their application have every chance of eventually morphing into a set of laws that bear no relevance to the original intent of the acts.
If like me, you do not live in America, you may think that the proposed SOPA / PIPA acts do not affect you. Well think again. There are several precedents where those falling foul of the DMCA in Australia have been extradited to America to face charges, resulting in custodial sentences. Admittedly, in each case the sentence was befitting of the crime, but it goes to show that the proposals do in fact have a very far reaching nature, and that operating a warez or torrent site in Australia, on Australian servers does not exclude you from might of American law.
Whilst stories of extradition of individuals under the DMCA are relatively uncommon, action against service providers is not. The easy target for enforcers of the DMCA is to target the hosts of infringing sites or the service providers of those guilty of dealing in the infringing data, the results of this are usually very effective, resulting in stopped services and almost instant solutions. The big issue with the application of the existing DMCA (act) is of course that the effected users have no participation in the process at all, it is a case of guilty until proven innocent. Basically if your site is taken down, it is up to you to engage lawyers, or enter into lengthy debates with your ISP to reverse the process.
So why is there a need for the new acts?
Like many others, I think that the new acts are mostly in response to the corporate giants feeling sore for the loss of sales to online piracy, the acts do not really protect the intellectual property of the 'little man' at all. Being a software provider I have been the victim of piracy myself, where others have taken my work and passed it off as their own. My attempts at trying to get the data removed from the offending sites by issuing a formal request was met with disdain, and short of employing expensive lawyers to act on my behalf (not really feasible for a $20 CMS extension) there was very little I could do. Generally under the DMCA, a representative of the copyright owner will contact the provider and make a similar request, this is long before a ceast and desist notice is raised, but with the weight of a large company behind such requests, most ofter this request is executed unchallenged.
Ironically enough, I have also been on the receiving end of such a situation. i designed some t-shirts for vdubber.com (a VW enthusiasts website that I run), and offered them for sale on the site through zazzle. The t-shirts contained the site's logo and a slogan which included the name of the auto manufacturer - 'www.vdubber.com - Next generation VW community'. One day whilst browsing through the site I noticed that the t-shirts were no longer available in store. There was no notification from Zazzle, no opportunity to put forward a contrary argument, they were simply removed. I then subsequently found out that an independent representative acting on behalf of VW had contacted them and asked for the t-shirts to be removed, which Zazzle had done without argument. Such is the perceived power of the DMCA. Needless to say, I no longer use Zazzle.
So what is the solution?
Hack, the current affairs program hosted by Triple-J radio here in Australia, had a reportage on the new acts and invited comment from the public. The general consensus seemed to be that the corporate giants were the main driving force behind the acts, and that they were in response to lost sales. Interestingly, many agreed that the solution was simply for these companies to change their business models to suit the new digital marketplace. If products were made more accessible, easier to buy and at more reasonable prices, the effect would be that many would favour purchasing these instead of pirated versions. A point in case raised by one listener was Adobe's products. In America one product retailed in their online store for $699, whereas in Australia the same product was Over $1000. Adobe had also taken great measures to ensure that Australian customers could not purchase the product through the american online store. (I know, as I've previously tried).
Digital music is probably the biggest culprit for piracy. But the shift from tangible goods towards digital goods has not really seen an accompanying shift on the business models of music providers. Steve Jobs has done a lot towards this transition with the iTunes store, but the prices are still too high for many, and the lure of free music from torrent sites is simply too great.
Online music today has no physical aspect, there are no manufacturing costs, no distribution costs, virtually no retail overheads (online hosting excepted) and more importantly it has exposure to a much wider audience. Many argue that online music should be much more affordable, and that reducing the cost and making it easier to download would see a rise in sales. But this requires a change in business philosophy, a change that still appears to be some way off. Is it greed? is it simply that corporate executives simply do not 'get' the internet? Who knows. One thing is for certain, and that is that the new SOPA / PIPA acts are not the way to go.
Censorship
The stance taken by many in the blackout campaign, is that the new SOPA / PIPA acts will enforce its wielders with the power to censor, a direct contravention of the first amendment, and something that most patriotic Americans feel very strongly about. The introduction of similar censorship measures in countries such as Thailand has been met with a lot of discussion relating to the rights of website owners to freedom of speech.
Interestingly, censorship in Thailand often relates to items that directly contravene Thai law, for example certain content relating to their King. Similarly to America, both ISP's and individual's can be held accountable. So considering that Thailand does indeed have extradition treaties in place with both America and the UK, and the magnitude of offences in relation to insulting the King. Is it therefore reasonable for Thailand to expect extradition of any American citizens found to be in contravention of Thai law for posting something that offends their King? If you are American you will no doubt say a great big emphatic NO!
So why should there be one law for Americans, and a different one for everyone else? In short, there should not. Stop the SOPA / PIPA acts now by showing your support.
http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
Here’s what else you can do:
1) Learn if your U.S. Representative or Senators support SOPA or PROTECT IP through SOPAOpera.org
2) Use the tools at AmericanCensorship.org, StopTheWall.us and POPVOX to tell Congress where you stand.
3) Participate in Better Activism Day, a free livestream of experts discussing ways to "improve your power in Washington from people who’ve been successful at moving it."
4) Call or meet with your representatives in Congress. The single most effective action any concerned citizen who wants to talk to Congress can take is to see your Senator or Representative in person. Failing that, call them. Write them a letter. Make sure your voice is heard.
(credit to O'Rielly for above links)
You would think that working on websites all the time i would have an up to date site myself, the problem is, that by the time I've finished working on everyone else's stuff, i don't really feel like working on my own. Contrary to popular belief, there is actually a life outside of the internet (it's true :D ), and whilst it can be really hard to drag myself away from the monitor, I make a point of doing other (real and tangible) stuff wherever I can. This is especially true since having children. The upshot of this is that time is at a premium and my own sites suffer, nothing gets updated.
So with new abandon, I'm setting out to update DeeEmm.com. It's been long overdue, but the time has come to give the site a bit of a spruce up. i did take a bit of a look at this some time back, but as the site is still running from the old 1.5 version, the main reason for wanting to update was to upgrade to the newer 1.7 code. Unfortunately the jUpgrade code prescribed by Joomla for migrating to 1.7 did not seem to want to work, however, there is now a new version, and the test migration I performed last night worked flawlessly.
At this time I'm planning to migrate the info over, spruce up the template a little, and maybe (maybe), add a few new features in.
One component that I've been using quite a bit on other sites is EasyBlog from StackIdeas. This will probably see it's way into the update as it's much easier to use than publishing these posts via the Joomla interface. Plus, it comes with all of the bells and whistles that you would expect from an up to date blogging platform.
In the past i've advocated the use of Wordpress for Joomla by corephp for blogging needs on the Joomla patform. I even used this in my Dolphin to Joomla migrator. But whilst WordPress for Joomla is a great way to integrate the familiar blogging platform into your site, EasyBlog is actually more feature rich and believe it or not, much easier for a novice to use, which in my opinion is the right thing to have when trying to get your non tech savvy site members to start blogging.
StackIdeas also have a couple of other great products, namely SectionX - a great (free) component for organising articles - perfect for the tutorials section here ;) and EasyDiscuss, a Yahoo answers type of Q&A plugin, which may, or may not make an appearance. I'm keen to replace the forums with it, but at the moment I'm not 100% decided.
So as you can see, there's things afoot here at the DeeEmm office, things that you will hopefully be seeing on the very near future.
Watch this space.
/DM
I'm just about to embark on the start of a new project to build an occupational health and safety web portal for engineering professionals. The new site, ohs.eng.pro will provide community tools for OH&S professionals and engineers engaged in safety related roles. The goal of the project is to provide a think space where safety professionals can collaborate on safety related projects, get peer advice and share in discussions realting to all aspects of safety, safety management and safety related products.
The portal will be open to all who wish to join and contribute and aims to provide a central repository of safety information for all to share in. With a focus on improving current safety knowledge and sharing best safety practices, the portal aims to be a truly global endeavour.
Dedicated discussion forums will be provided for a variety of safety related subjects and industries, and each forum is available to be sponsored by comercial entities.
We are currently looking for content contributors. If you are interested in contributing editorial articles relating to any aspect of safety for inclusion in the new site, please contact us using the contact form below. Contributors will be allowed to promote their own product or company by way of a short 'bio' included at the end of each article.
For more info, or to sign up visit - http://ohs.eng.pro
Good news for all those waiting for migrate to JomSocial, you can now download a beta version for testing.
Instructions are included in the file simply view the source code.
IMPORTANT - MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS !!
Please note that this is a beta, and still has a few issues. Also not all modules are migrated.
The following have been tested and are working
Users
Profiles
Avatars
Friends
Photos
Videos
Forums
Events
Support is also included for Modzzz Points totals
Still to finish are...
Blogs
Sites
Groups
Other Content
Known issues are as follows...
Video migration throws error message for embedded videos
Events avatar migration throws error message when moving files
Forum migration needs to be updated for latest version - it's partially working (was working okay on 1.6)
No doubt there are other issues too.
Please, please, please, report back your findings HERE so that I can improve this and hone out the issues for RC1.
There is still a way to go, but things are moving in the right direction.
Download nautilus version 0.7 (updated 21.09.11)
If you are one of those visitors who is expectantly waiting for the release of the Dolphin to Joomla migration script, you will be happy to know that things are moving along nicely and the script will be released before the end of the month. In preparation for this imminent release I have started to prepare the documentation for the installation, including the scope of operation and the requirements for getting it up and running.
The documentation will be provided in a series of articles in the tutorials section which will walk you through the whole process in a step by step manner. It will also cover the setting up of Joomla and Jomsocial, as well as providing installation help for the required third party modules.
The first of these articles is now available to view and is an introduction that covers what you can expect from the migration. To view the article visit...
http://www.deeemm.com/resources/tutorials/60-dolphin-to-joomla-migration.html
Long time dolphin frustratee's will be pleased to learn that the migration utilises the excellent Wordpress script for the blogging component, and includes the world class forum script 'Kunena'. Photo's videos, events, messaging, profile customisation including widgets and the mandatory activity wall are all standard core components in JomSocial. Mix this up with a few free modules from the Joomla Extensions Directory and you have a site to be reckoned with.
So if are getting impatient, why not take a read through the first article, and maybe even install a test installation of Joomla and Jomsocial to have a play about and familiarise yourself with how it works.
/DM
It's very nearly here. The Dolphin 'Fish Script' to JomSocial migration script is just around the corner.
To continue on with the theme so affectionately adopted by Boonex, I have decided to give the script a nautical name. So with respect to Jules Vernes Twenty thousand leagues under the sea I have named it the Nautilus.
For those of you who have been patiently awaiting me to pull my finger out and get the script written, you will be happy to learn that I only have a few more tables to migrate and it will be finished (after testing of course).
So, just to raise the tension a little, and build the anticipation (in the best Boonex style - LOL)
Watch this space...
