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Archive for the 'Technologies & Tools' Category

Graphic Programs

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

A friend/colleague sent me email recently, asking about programs for creating Web site graphics. Basically, he’s working on a low-budget labor-of-love Web site and needs something better than MS Paint. Don’t we all?
Sure, the pros use Photoshop and Fireworks, but the cost is steep and the learning curve is steeper. So what’s a weekend Web [...]

Creating A Joomla Web Site

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Recently, I posted on Wordpress setups, and since then I’ve set up a couple of Joomla sites. Same problem — I have to remember all the steps. In the ongoing spirit of sharing, here’s the setup checklist but for Joomla this time.
I’m assuming you know how to set up a domain and install Joomla. If [...]

Do You Really Need a CMS?

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

In the past few months, I’ve been working a lot in Joomla and Wordpress content management systems for various clients. I’m not quite ready to call myself an expert (yet), but it’s getting to be that way.
Recently, a couple of my clients have either a) asked me to convert their current sites to a CMS, [...]

Web Site Errors

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I hope I’m not being snarky here, but even the big guys have Web problems sometimes.

For those who care, the error is a Windows server error, probably from an asp.net application that they’re upgrading (or recently upgraded) and some essential bit of code is missing.
It happens, but we’ll see how long it takes for them [...]

Creating a Wordpress Web Site

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

I’m making a lot of Wordpress sites right now for small clients, and every time I set one up, I have to remember all the steps. So, this post has a selfish goal: I need to create a list anyway, and figured I might as well share.
I’m assuming you know how to set up a [...]

Creating a New Web Site While You Already Have One

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Creating your first Web site is easy — get the hosting, create the site, test it… and when you’re ready, start promoting the site. (Hah! Easy…)
But once you have a Web site, how do you create a new one? People are (hopefully) visiting your current site — browsing pages, clicking on services, sending emails. You [...]

Protecting Digital Content

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

You’ve paid big bucks for your site — original artwork, professional photos, carefully written content. How do you keep someone else from stealing it?
You don’t. If someone wants to grab your Web site content, images or HTML, they can find a way. Best you can hope for is to let them know that they’re [...]

Your Life, Online (and some extra stuff on the side)

Friday, July 10th, 2009

You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that more and more of our life and work is happening online – online bill paying and banking, online socializing and networking, online radio and TV, online applications like Google docs. All within a Web browser, I can edit videos — my own [...]

Wolfram Alpha, Bing and Deep Research Tools Made Easy

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Search is back in the news again. Long dominated by Google (and for now, still dominated by Google), some new tools are emerging. Microsoft is throwing a lot of ad dollars into Bing, which to me is Google with random header photos. Yawn. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha is fascinating, even to a mathematics noob like me.
Earlier [...]

Monitoring Your Web Site

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to it [...]

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