Goahead blog space

How to start learning to build Joomla! web sites.

Ray — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:20:55 +0000

An artist asked, on a forum, for advice about template creation and plugins that would be helpful for an artists portfolio site, built using the Joomla! CMS. He said that he doesn’t know HTML or coding, but would like to build it, for the most part, himself.

This is my brief reply to him:

You [...]

Printing a web page

Ray — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:30:33 +0000

A client has asked for a button/icon within each page, that will allow a screen-shot of the page, to be printed by the site visitor.

I have thought and thought about him wanting to give the visitors the capability of getting a printout of a web page, as if it were a screen-shot. I wondered [...]

What did we do, when we built the Internet?

Ray — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:38:01 +0000

I remember well, back in the eighties, sitting at my little flickering 14 inch screen, hour after hour, day after day, writing software for this new thing called Internet and being laughed at, by all and sundry, for my geeky behaviour which ‘is going nowhere’ and ‘a waste of my time’.

I saw enough potential [...]

Guidelines for creating a Mobile version of a Joomla site

Ray — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:29:10 +0000

I have noticed, recently that many Joomla users are looking for some ideas for the best way to create a mobile version of a joomla site.

It is evident that the demand for running a Joomla site on a smartphone, simple mobile device or, indeed, tablet, with its small display and navigation problems, is increasing [...]

Using Joomla Content Editor and its extra plug-ins

Ray — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:29:16 +0000

Even though the version for Joomla 1.6.x is still under development and quite broken, in places, I thought a word about the free ‘Joomla Content Editor’ (JCE) and the extra package available, for a small extra fee, may be useful to Joomla developers, who haven’t yet discovered it.

Anyone not currently using this powerful free [...]

Pitfalls of the software development process

Ray — Sun, 15 May 2011 12:25:24 +0000

I was watching ‘The Apprentice’ (UK version), the other day. It was about ‘creating a marketable app’.

What these simple and foolish candidates did was come up with really dumb-ass ideas of apps that would be downloaded – but immediately dumped, because they were so useless, even for the children’s market. They made a big [...]

Apache file permissions and ownership – A security issue

Ray — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:25:20 +0000

A Joomla developer asked on a forum: “I have a joomla site which is using linux hosting. when i am going to install a module, it is showing an error “* JFolder::create: Could not create directory* Unable to create destination”.”

Someone had suggested that this developer should change the file permissions temporarily to 777 (read/write [...]

Another web-site hack, anatomized – Epilogue

Ray — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:02:11 +0000

I hold up my hands and say that I was wrong, in the conclusion I came to at the end of my last blog. I hadn’t detected the presence of the strange strings, added to the URLs of menu links. I had merely detected a symptom.

In fact the problem was that pretty much every [...]

Another web-site hack, anatomised

Ray — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:34:09 +0000

Recently, I came across a newspaper web-site, in the UK, which had been hacked. The owner reported that there was a security problem. The moment I visited the site, I was immediately warned by my security tools that the site had been blocked from delivering an evil payload to my machine. This is how I fixed the problem. [...]

Vive la difference (between media formats)

Ray — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:17:02 +0000

I was recently asked this question, which is not exactly a web-development question, but I’d like to share the answer, anyway:

when someone sends a pps what is the difference to a wmv ? I just thought they were applications of media files opening up in certain players? can you explain a bit more?

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