MDS BLOG

One of the problems faced by webmasters with a static html websites is how to make it dynamic and also how to increase it’s popularity with the search engines. Every good webmaster understands that search engines likes dynamic pages and this is one thing giving rise to use of content management systems. I would argue that despite all the features offered by most CMS, some webmasters only need a basic use of it.

As usual most webmasters would like to feed constant dynamic contents to their static html pages which gives it that changing look and may attract some search engines to it.

After some good reserach you would find there are many ways to link up your blog contents or contents from other places of interest to be updated regularly on your static page.

If you are interested in this, you may like to try  Google Feedburner, i find it to be one of the best and most stable. When you have created your account, follow the instructions and set up your feed.  To publish on your web page, just choose Publicize and the BuzzBoost.

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Somehow this is not included in the editor of your wordpress post but can easily be added through switching to a html mode. Switching to html mode would allow you to insert appropriate html tags to change things in your text. For you to be able to do this  you must have a basic idea of how to write html.  With common sense, a html novice can google this solution,  copy  and paste the right code into the right place, please visit a very good article about this here.

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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.

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I am actually tired of apologizing all the time to my readers for lack of constant updates on this site. Please bear with me as i have a lot to handle these days but just like i always do, let’s get down the business straight away.
I dont know why but me and a client of mine got frustrated with joomla recently when it started loading partial pages and loading pages with the template css missing and also calling up templates and modules that has already been deleted. We did a lot of research in this field and after coming up with no tangible answer to fix the problem right away and of which the last option was to re-install joomla again, we decided to wave goodbye to it and move to another CMS.  A programmer demanded a large sum of money we couldn’t afford to help fix this issue but we were quite concerned that the problem may develope again in the future as we are convinced it’s a bug problem with joomla.
Drupal offers a very good platform and very stable with less module and bad programming issues you get with joomla. Though the graphic user  interface (GUI) and editor in joomla are superb and also the ability to install modules and configure them easily are better in joomla, drupal on the other hand offers you the ability to be independent and develope your site to your taste. if you ask me, i would say Drupal is actually a bit for advanced users.

Well just to cut the long story short, if you find yourself in our shoes and would like to move to Drupal, migrating to drupal from joomla is as easy as can be, it takes just few minutes depending on your database size.

To do this please follow this link  here and if you have any more problems please let us know. I decided to post this here because a lot of discussions may confuse people on the best approach but i find this approach to be the best so far.

Hope this helps out!

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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” ‘

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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.

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Hello All,

It has been quite a  while since i last blogged about anything here but like i always do in regards to going straight to point, i would like to highlight a little problem using @import url(“css file”)  to call your CSS file from your html file.

Recently i listed a site for sale but to my surprise, after i upgraded my firefox browser to 3.5.3, the sites pages looked all jagged up . I went back to my css file and checked everything and they were okay. I also checked the browser shots page to compare my site on different browsers, some of the browsers displayed it good and some displayed like the firefox i was using.

Finally i got to the answer, it looks like some browsers or recent browsers  have problems recognising the call of the css file using @import url(” css file”)

Fix:

I simply changed the call to the css file to normal standard below and it was fixed. Please remember to remove the @import in the heading of the main css file if you wish to use the method below.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="file.css" title="stylesheet" />

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I was in a forum searching for an answer on how to find and edit a particular part of a CSS file  and i stumbled on the firebug . Simply put, this firefox addon is one of the best experiences for any web developer, all you need to do is simply download it from the site, then after it as been installed you would see the great difference it will make in your developing experience.

To access  firebug after it has been installed, please go to tools and then click on firebug to open up.

Practically just open up any webpage you would like to take a look at the codes, then go to tools and open up firebug, you would immediately see the a new window with options of viewing html,  css and DOM. If you are good with your browsing, it wouldnt be that hard to get around. It will even indicate what part of the site any code you see on the firebug is associated with. Please read an extract from firebug below.

“Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…”

Hope this helps.

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