Pleasanton Web Design

I most recently ran into this problem using JoomlaWorks FrontPage Slideshow (for Joomla 1.5), but have seen it before in other JavaScript slideshow scripts. During the transition, you will see dots in the dark/black areas of the image being transitioned. These dot’s can be white, but are actually whatever the color of the background behind the slideshow image is. The problem is actually that both IE7 and IE8 interpret the black areas of the images as transparent. Why? Probably just the typical IE browser bug (try FireFox or Chrome if you aren’t already using them).

Here’s what it look’s like:

Internet Explorer Slideshow Transition Problem

How do you get rid of it? There are two ways that I’m aware of:

1) Set the background to black. This will probably make your slideshow darker overall, which may or may not be acceptable, depending on the context.

2) Edit your image to make the black, just not quite black. If you are using Photoshop, do the following:

• Choose “Select > Color Range”
• Click on the eyedropper with the “+”
• Click on a black area, then click “OK.”  This should select all the black in the image.
• Fill the selection with a not-quite-black color.

admin internet explorer, joomla, joomla extensions

It’s pretty common to have the same global navigation items it both the main navigation and footer links of a website. Be careful though, if you are using an SEF URL extension for Joomla 1.5, such as sh404SEF. Having multiple menu items pointing to the same article or ItemId can disable the active menu styling. Instead, use the standard Joomla menu links for the main navigation, and set up the footer navigation with external type menu items, pointing to the sef urls created for the main navigation.

admin CMS, joomla, joomla extensions, search engine optimization, sef urls, seo, web design

Page titles in Joomla 1.5 are not particularly configurable. I prefer to use an SEO extension, which gives me total control of my page titles and metatags, but I understand the reluctance to rely on a non-commercial extension. Will it be around for Joomla 1.6? Who knows?

The problem with Joomla 1.0.X page titles was that they insisted on putting the site name in the page title. Joomla 1.5 cured that disease, but some people would still like to have their site name in their page title consistently across the site. For that, the perfectly simple solution is the Title Manager extension for Joomla 1.5 (native).

Download, install and activate this plugin, and you will have your Joomla site name, or another text string of your choosing in all page titles. You can even configure whether or not the page title goes before or after the original page title, as well as the seperator character. Here’s a peek at the configuration screen:

admin joomla, joomla extensions, search engine optimization, seo, web design

Microsoft’s update of LiveSearch launched this weekend. I haven’t read much of the hype, because I expect it is just that – hype. What I have absorbed is that Bing is supposed to be a “Google Killer” and a substantially new way of performing search, with the searcher being kept on the Bing site longer (because it gives them everything they need) so they can be exposed to more advertising.

The first thing I noticed when visiting Bing.com is the nice big graphic on the homepage. There was a little arrow indicating I could change the picture (hot air balloons, how original), but when I clicked on it, I was prompted to install Microsoft SilverLight, with no explanation of what it is.  I happen to be aware that it’s supposed to be a Flash type program that allows rich media experience, but I don’t know that the typical visitor would be. Anyway, I learned my lesson from Windows Vista and my daughter’s X-Box to thouroughly research performance of Microsoft products before exposing my life to them, so, no thanks.

The searches returned results identical to LiveSearch. Focused on keyword relevance rather than link authority. On-page trump off-page factors, so very easy to get good ranking, even for competitive terms. Good news, I guess, if anyone actually starts using Bing.

On Bing.com you are automatically shown local listings, including a little map for certain searches. Not a huge difference from Google, which does that already. Also included are categorized links below the top result, kind of like Google Sitelinks.

A search for Pleasanton Restaurants in Bing resulted in a list of the worst  restaurants in the area. I have a stomach ache just looking at it. The same search on Google results in a list of some very good, and some so-so restaurants. This is probably due to the review feature of Google Local. Bing has reviews listed too, but they are all pulled from Yelp. Bottom line is, as my son would say “FAIL.”

In conclusion, my first reaction to Bing.com is that it is a mediocre attempt to copy Google, so I have a hard time seeing how it is going to be a Google Killer.

admin google, joomla, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web promotion

The tournament took place at Donlon Elementary School and at Harvest Park Middle School in Pleasanton CA on April 25 – April 26, 2009. There are pictures of the 7th Place Game, played on Sunday at 1:30 PM.

Gunn High School vs Foothill High School

Final Score:
Gunn High School (Palo Alto) – 15
Foothill High School (Pleasanton) -  12

admin Pleasanton, Ultimate Frisbee, joomla

I’ve been using the Breezing Forms fork of the Facile Forms powerful form creation component and module for Joomla 1.5 for a while now. During development of a recent project, however, I suddenly starting having problems. Upon form submission, I’d get sent to a 404 page with the error message “Article #0 not found.”

After addressing every possible cause I could think of, in desperation I tried turning Legacy Mode off. It worked! Go to Plug-in Manager > System – Legacy, and click off if it is enabled.

Of course I needed to scramble a bit to eliminate the need for Legacy mode. I found out the hard way that Joomla 1.5 Legacy mode and Breezing Forms don’t mix!

admin CMS, joomla, joomla extensions breezing forms, error, joomla, joomla 1.5, legacy mode

For Joomla 1.0.x (click here for Joomla 1.5)
Joomla’s standard way of displaying page titles is with the Site Name first, a dash, and then the title of the content. This is not the best way to display the page title for search engine optimization (SEO). The page title is a very important element in determining the relevance and ranking of your page to a keyword search. The search engines consider the first part of the page title the most important, so altering the page title so that the content title comes first and the Site Name second is a definite improvement. This is easily changed in /includes/joomla.php. Find the following text around line 503:

 function setPageTitle( $title=null ) {  if (@$GLOBALS['mosConfig_pagetitles']) {   $title = trim( htmlspecialchars( $title ) );   $title = stripslashes($title);   $this->_head['title'] = $title ? $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] . ' - '. $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];  } }

and change to this:

function setPageTitle( $title=null ) {if (@$GLOBALS['mosConfig_pagetitles']) { $title = trim( htmlspecialchars( $title ) ); $title = stripslashes($title); $this->_head['title'] = $title ? $title .' - '. $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];  } }

Having the same Site Name on every page of your site, however only serves to reduce the relevance of each page title to the keyword search and your targeted content. To completely remove the Site Name, instead replace the function above with this:

function setPageTitle( $title=null ) { if (@$GLOBALS['mosConfig_pagetitles']) {  $title = trim( htmlspecialchars( $title ) );  $title = stripslashes($title);  $this->_head['title'] = $title ? $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];  } }

admin joomla, seo

!JoomlaComment 2.40 is probably the best free commenting component available for Joomla content management system (CMS). Unfortunately, that may not be good enough for those Joomla developers or web site owners without a lot of coding, troubleshooting and hacking experience, because it is pretty buggy.

First of all, if you aren’t using Community Builder, you are going to get the following error when you try to use this component:

joscomment Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

It’s an easy enough fix, if you are comfortable commenting out some code. The instructions can be found here: http://www.haanchiang.com/joomla-comment . Also available on that page is a downloadable version of the component with that and a couple of other patches already installed. I installed the haanchiang version right after I got the first error, so didn’t have to deal with the other errors described on the page.

After that was solved, I set the admin to allow anyone to post, but required that the posts be approved before publishing. When filling out the comment form and hitting send, I got the following error:

Database error: insertNewPost!

The post, however was inserted into the database and I could publish it just fine. More than just an annoyance, however, because the user would tend to think the post wasn’t accepted, and may try again. Because I haven’t been able to fix it, I have no choice but to remove !JoomlaComment from my Joomla installation. In searching for a solution, however, I did find a lot of posts about various other bugs that people are experiencing with this component. If this is version 2.4, I’d recommend waiting for 9.2 before giving this component a try.

admin joomla, joomla extensions

I’m in the process of evaluting various open source content management systems (CMS). A CMS based website is one that allows editing of structure as well as content through an administrative interface, and doesn’t require knowledge of coding. The open source CMS solution that seems closest to a standard corporate website out of the box is Joomla. I have a basic installation here:

http://www.tpdesigns.net/

Other open source CMS choices, like XOOPS and Drupal, appear to be geared more towards community websites, where many individuals post content in the form of blog entries. This is probably a better all-around format, as the web is evolving away from packaged corporate information, which is generally assumed to be mostly PR and therefore BS.

admin CMS, joomla