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Archive for the ‘GENERAL’ Category

A CASE FOR WORDPRESS ECOMMERCE SOLUTION

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Recently i had an arguement with a friend concerning the best open source  ecommerce softwares  to use , at the end of the day we agreed that they all serve different purposes but he actually made a case for wordpress ecommerce solution which i have never really been convinced about. After reading his wonderful article, i decided to publish it here as he has made a strong case for wordpress.

“Building Successful Store is very difficult Process But with wordpress its become easy. Recently the wordpress market folded with Free and premium E-commerce plugins and templates with quality function and easy management.  Today I will write about some of quality Plugins and wordpress that’s can help you to start up your online store not only this but also some premium service provided by E-commerce experts Like Shopfiy and Others.”

You can read from his personal  blog here .

USING CHARACTER ENTITIES IN WORDPRESS POST AND COMMENTS

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Recently a visitor was trying to comment on this blog and also posting some codes for us to help out, he was having problems with his joomla template and when we asked him to post his code here for us to see, he became frustrated after posting it so many times with the codes being converted into characters  like  &lt; and &gt;. The thing here is that wordpress would normally interprete anything inside < and > as if it's html. For a quick guide on how to solve this please visit this article here.

JOOMLA AND SERVER OVERLOAD PROBLEM FOR SHARED HOSTING

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Recently another client of mine was having so many issues with his joomla site and this was really really driving him mad. The major problem was his host that keeps turning off his site due to the fact that it is causing overloading to the system on a shared hosting. Please note that this same topic was previously written about in this post here but this is just an update on a related issue.

Problem: Please see a list of problems that you may be experiencing with joomla server overload:

1. My site loads too slowly

2.It gives you an error page when it loads

3. I’m regularly switched off by my host and i have been asked to turn on my cache before my site would be put back online

4. My site loads into a white dis organized page (first check that you are not importing articles from a microsoft word)

5. I have been warned by my host that my site is using too much resources.

Solutions:

1. I would recommend that you get rid of some un-necessary modules you dont need and delete them entirely from the site and server as these may be calling up some database queries even if they are disabled ( A case of bad programming).

2. Another thing is to go to your hosting provider and check if you need to move to a bigger server space either a VPS or Dedicated server, i know most hosting companies would like to push you to do this but make sure you are seeking the best advice. Check your Bandwidth limit used up monthly and your remaining disk space and then determine if you will really heed their advice and try to get a second and third opinion from an expert in the related field, you can do this by simply visiting hosting forums online and asking questions. Most forum members are usually very helpful and would offer you the best and truthful advice they can give.

3. If your case is the case where you are using up too much resources, please take note, if you are on a shared hosting or VPS, please tell your hosting provider to  help you delete your trash bin, usually you would not have access to this trash bin , you may think you have deleted all your trash from cpanel admin but really that is not the case. A helpful hosting admin was able to dig around the problem and found that my client had 18 GB worth of trash not deleted. Once this was done, the site’s speed was up again and there was little issue with resource. so it is really advisable to let your host make sure all the trash has been deleted.

Thanks and watch out for more update.

DOLPHIN 7 PROBLEM WITH HOSTGATOR SHARED HOSTING

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Hello all,

Recently after i installed Dolphin 7 on a shared hosting, a lot of bugs came up and i tried my best to solve the ones i can , the major bugs were video and sound not loading, email not being sent out even after configuring a cron job very well etc .

Anyway after talking to my hosting company hostgator (highly recommended) , i was told that Dolphin 7 cannot run on a shared hosting but would need a dedicated server. Please read the extract here from the hostgator site.

SHOW MODULE TITLE PROBLEM IN CUSTOM JOOMLA TEMPLATE DESIGN

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

Again let’s call to your attention a little problem with Module title not showing after you have designed your own custom templates. Normally the basic joomla template tutorial which many would tend to follow would show you how to go about your template design but  after designing you may find out that your modules do not show titles even for the fact that you have commanded it to do so in  the joomla admin .

Normally you will get a code like this to display module ‘<jdoc:include type=”modules” name=”left” />’,  to get it to display module titles just replace it with this one ‘<jdoc:include type=”modules” name=”left” style=”xhtml” />

Notice that the only thing added there is only ‘style=”xhtml” ‘

IMPORTING EMAIL LIST FROM WORD TO OUTLOOK

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

This is just a quick one , i know most of the people using outlook already know this but this is meant for those curious ones. Outlook express has what they call a distribution list, if you want to import email list from a word document to your distribution list. The most important thing and which might be the hardest thing here is to make sure all your email addresses ends in a semi colon, you may have to do this manually. It is even more demanding when outlook tells you to go back and edit an email address by adding semi colon to it.

At the same time it’s all very easy , just follow the link here for a guide and then after you have succeeded with it, follow this link here for a guide on how to send an email to a distribution list.

Hope this helps out!

INTEGRATING YOUTUBE IMAGE FLOW IN DRUPAL GARLAND THEME

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

This is xmas and i thought i should just give you this for the season. Recenty i was looking for an image flow for my new blog because i wanted a way to rotate youtube videos on my blog and was lucky to find imageflow, basically this lets you search and rotate youtube videos on your page but the problem was that it came with a seperate page of its own and i wanted to integrate it into the front page of my blog www.bloggingyoutube.com. Now this is what i did in order to get it working close to what i need.

Download image flow from imageflow.nl and then upload it to the folder you would like to use it  on your server

Find and open the css file sreen.css and if you know css very well you can tweak the page the way you want , in this case i wanted to just embedd the page on my blog as part of the blog.

Find this line in your screen.css file

#imageflowstart {
max-width: 600px;
width: auto !important;
width: 600px;
min-height:310px;
height:auto !important;
height:310px;
margin-left:0px;
position: relative;
background-color:#000;
padding: 0px 0px;
text-align:center;

The highlighted margin-left:0px; should be adjusted till it fits the page the way you want, as you can see i left it at “0px” because i wanted it to align to the left of the page entirely for the embedding purpose.

Find and do the same for the  css code below;

#main {
max-width: 600px;
width: auto !important;
width: 600px;
min-height:150px;
height:auto !important;
height:150px;
margin-left:0px;
}

Please note you can manipulate the whole css file the way you want but in this case i just needed to tweak the two parts of the css code to get what i wanted.

Afterwards i used the <iframe> </iframe> tag to embedd the page where i want. Please note that the embedd parameters were  set to “0″because i wanted it to embedd neatly as part of the page without a scroll button.

Here is the embedded code below;

<iframe src="http://bloggingyoutube.com/themes/garland/index.php" style="width:500px; height: 480px"
scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" vspace="0" hspace="0">
</iframe> <br />

Hope this helps out.

HOW TO EQUIP A BASIC WEBSITE TO MAKE MONEY AND RUN ITSELF

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

HOW TO EQUIP A BASIC WEBSITE TO MAKE MONEY AND RUN ITSELF.

These days it’s easy to read different articles concerning the relationship between websites appearance and how it can make money. Actually the proponents of such ideas are right and believe it or not they are right with that school of thought. But another school of thought is of the view that instead of making a website look too flashy or using sophisticated programmings to achieve nothing in a website, a simple website that is focused and well equipped can generate traffic and make money for its owner.

BASIC WEBSITE:

A basic website can comprise of one or many pages of focused contents and other relevant materials that contributes in positive ways to its image as a web page.

It is now a frequent occurrence that when you open some websites these days you are taken through a series of flash images which makes sense and sometimes does not make sense to the viewer. Infact some viewers find too many flash ridden websites too annoying and tend to leave the site immediately. The saying goes that a greater number of the internet public are fast aligning themselves to flash ridden websites these days but also the truth is the fact that people like to be very traditional about things. No matter how they tend to adapt to new innovations , they also usually want to carry along their old traditions.

Most people commend flashy looking websites positively but would rather go straight to a web page that is content rich and sends the message immediately it is opened by the viewer. People and not only people but search engines also still prefer  content rich websites and tend to index and present them to search results easily.

The view of many but not all is that a basic website should have the following characteristics.

  • A well focused contents
  • Very easy to navigate
  • Connected to a database if need be
  • Validated HTML/CSS
  • Meet accessibility standards

Then other minor issues should be taken care of also (i.e removing dead links etc etc)

EQUIPPING YOUR SIMPLE WEBSITE TO MAKE MONEY.

If you have got a website that meets the standards lined up above then making money with your website is sort of easy. It all depends on what your site offers or what purpose is your site meant for.

Some sites are built to make money directly while some are built to make money indirectly, If you offer direct goods and services to people on your site then your income can be considered as direct and when you sell goods and services or publish advertisements for third parties then your income is indirect because you will be paid by the third parties according to your agreement with them.

Your site can also be equipped to make both direct and indirect money. It’s common these days to see sites that offer direct goods and services and then at the same time offer third party materials on their sites.

No matter what everything points down to the word TRAFFIC. The number of genuine visitors that come to your site matters a lot if your site income is direct or indirect. This is the major thing every site owner should work on and continue to work on for as long as the site lives. It’s not a thing to relax about.

Another issue is the fact that when your site income is mostly from third party sources, then it’s better to  know where to place the third party materials on your site. Visitors tend to get annoyed with pages ridden with affiliate links or banners and this alone can make them leave your site without spending time .

Try to place those materials in sections of your site that are visible but also makes the content visible and relevant to each other. Google and other advertising companies does this automatically. Their advertisings displayed on your site somehow matches the contents of your site. Also try as much as possible to have a good and brief review of any third party material you are posting on your web page if your source of income is through third party marketing usually known as “affiliate marketing”.

If you offer direct services, let your best products and services appear clear and well explained to the visitors and the issue of “EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE” is something to watch out for.

So let us summarise the issue of equiiping a basic website to make money here below

  • Make your site simple and straight to point
  • Look into the issue of maintaning a good genuine traffic to your site
  • Make sure your third party materials meant for income are posted at strategic places on your site but you must be careful not to disturb visitors easy navigation of the site.
  • A brief and good review of third party materials posted on your site is very good for sales.
  • Be ready to provide a great customer service assistance.

SUMMARY

The issue of making money with a simple website is possible and had always been possible as websites are judged mostly by the messages it sends across and not how flashy they are. A flashy looking site can attract but may not deliver if the sites message is not in order or designed to reach any visitor easily.