Web Design

Why go with my own website instead of using freely available services such as Blogger and Flickr?

The answer is one word: ownership. The terms of service for these free services (which make life very easy) grants them a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free rights and license to your work. Granted, they specify that it is in only in conjunction with advertising and promoting their service, however, however, I feel that is still too much to hand over to them.

For the average user, this is probably not a problem. However, if you want (or hope) to make some money (eventually) off your content, or just want to retain exclusive control of it, then going with your own website is really the only option.

As well, I have various interests and wanted to be able to have them all in one place. I could have had multiple blogs, but ... it is just not as connected as a single website.

Web development is both easy and hard. It is quite easy to code up a web page in HTML and present it to the world. It is much harder to make a nice and pretty website that is easily modifiable. It is also not triviial to make an interactive website (for example, to allow comments) - since this requires some form of database and data management system. Finallty, managing all the content is not trivial. If you only have a few pages of content this is not really a problem.

In 3 years of blogging on Blogger, I posted 603 posts. Managing these without a content management system (CMS) is pretty tough.

In the end, I went with using Joomla! as my CMS and web development framework. It is a lot easier than doing it from scratch. It is quite nice for managing content (although, Typo3 seems to be a better system, but I had problems setting it up and the user community is smaller).

Here, you will find my experiences, my knowledge on web development. If it is not here, I probably know nothing about it - which suits me fine. My principle interest is developing content, not the mechanics of presenting the content.

Embedding Video in Joomla!

Joomla!

Monday, 16 February 2009 16:06

If you have tried embedding a video from YouTube or Google Video or any other video sharing site, you have probably been frustrated as Joomla! filtered out the embedding code.

By default, Joomla! filters out certain types of HTML code that could be malicious - essentially, anything that embeds an active script in your article.

To disable this default filtering, you need to go to Content -> Article Manager -> Parameters.

Then scroll down the parameters page until you get to the Filtering Options near the bottom.

Go to the Filter Groups box and select all the entries except for the last one: Super Administrator.

Select Filter Type to be Blacklist (which it should already be by default).

Scroll back to the top of the Parameters page and click on Save.

Embedding HTML Code in Your Article

Click on the HTML icon in the editor.
Paste the HTML code in the HTML window.
Click Update.
Resume editting your article.

I find it is easier to past all the HTML code first and then edit around it because the default HTML editor is not that easy to work in, since it lacks any concept of formatting.

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Ordering Articles in Joomla

Joomla!

Friday, 30 January 2009 05:00

You can set article order for any given category quite easily from the Article Manager (Site -> Control Panel -> Article Manager), using the up down arrow keys or by typing in an article number.

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If you have multiple Categories in your Joomla! website, Joomla! orders the articles it independently from the other categories.

Ordering articles on the Front Page is a little tricker though. By default, the articles are ordered by the article ID (which is assigned when the articve is created) and not the publication date. This means that if you pre-record a number of articles and have them automatically publish at future dates, they won’t show up in publication order on the Front Page if you have posted other articles (having a larger article ID) after the pre-recorded ones.

To change article ordering on the Front Page it is necessary to go to edit the Main Menu settings. Go to Menus -> Main Menu. Then select the Home menu item. Go to Parameters (Advanced) and set the Primary Order to Most Recent First. This will now display entries published to the home page in chronological order, instead of article ID order.

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You can also change the article ordering on the Home Page to display the articles with the most hits or least hits.

Article Motivation

Going away for the weekend, I had written up a few blog entries to be automatically published on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

When I returned, I was surprised to discover the articles were not displayed in the order I expected them to be because I had posted another article after I had created the pre-recorded ones.

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Getting started with Joomla

Joomla!
Monday, 15 December 2008 16:01
Installation I installed Joomla! 1.5 using the Fantastico installer available from my web host. It is available from many web hosting services and makes installing various bits of software on your site quite easy. I would recommend installing Joomla! with the sample data first and playing around with it to get a feel for it. Oce you decide you want to go with Joomla! then uninstall it and reinstall it without the sample data (this just leaves you with a bare skeleton). I had tried deleting the sample data, but ran into problems because it seems I also managed to delete all the online help files. Read 0 Comments... >>
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