PICnet Blog

That’s right folks, you read that headline right: I use Windows Desktop Search. And I love it.

I know, I should be using Google Desktop, with all sorts of Web 2.0 gadgets, widgets, thing-a-ma-bobbers, etc. I’ve used Google Desktop for a few years actually, but I was finding that in exchange for the 3GB of disk space that it started taking up, the benefits were a little limiting. I wanted to be able to sort my results in a variety of ways, to search things other than just basic Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook contents.

In short, I wanted more control of my desktop search.
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I get a ton of email. I truly believe that there are small gremlins in my laptop, building hundreds of emails a day for me to try to keep up with. Everyday, I lose the battle against email, and find myself flagging many of them for follow-up. This isn’t too helpful though, because:

1. they’re not actionable (there’s no task associated with them)
2. it increases my blood pressure to see my follow-up email count rise to the current 424 level

In the rest of my Outlook life (that’s right, I use Outlook 2003) I have created a task management system that allows me to create actionable items in my Task manager by categorizing everything I do into Musts, Needs, and Wants. This has actually worked pretty well, and has kept our Post-It note supply noticeably higher. Flagged emails, however, just make me look at the mess that is my inbox and realize this is a losing battle.

Until now.

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Last week I made the leap to Google Apps and I’m loving every minute of it. Having all my email in GMail is saving me so much time. Problem I ran into was monitoring over 6 emails through GMail. You could sign-in to each email and check, but who wants to do that. Or you could have multiple tabs open, but thats gets so cluttered. Solution? GMail Manager. Its a Firefox Add-on just like GMail Notifier but allows for multiple GMail accounts. Definitely in my top 5 Firefox Add-ons.

During the Web development process, one of the most important phases of work is the information architecture. In laymen’s terms, the outline of the site. Of course, this phase doesn’t get the glory of the more glamorous work, like design mockups and development iterations.

One reason why this phase is often lower on organization’s radars is that it’s just not that much fun. It seems, however, that we might have a contender that could make this process a lot more, well, bubbly.

Bubbl.us is a new Web based mind-mapping tool that we think might have some traction in the Web development world. The goal is to make it easy to develop bubble-like outlines of systems, with an easy to use interface. The system is still a little buggy, but it’s just in beta, as is everything else these days. Lots of Flash makes me worry a little bit about its extendability (would like it if you could export these mind-maps into text documents).

Definitely worth a look.

This is for all your Joomla Developers out there. When trying to add Joomla javascript to the frontend like the pop calendar, it only works for the registered users. This is because the code currently only loads joomla.javascript.js for registered users and when joomlaJavascript has been set in the mainframe object. So what do you do then? Add this one liner to your code:

$mainframe->set(’joomlaJavascript’, 1);

Thats it, now you have the javascript pop calendar in the frontend. Little update on the current calendar installed with Joomla. It is one created by dynarch.com. Joomla currently uses 0.9.2 and with the next release they should be upgrading to 0.9.4 which allows for adding of time allow with the date.

So I know a lot of you think that Joomla! is incredible because it does everything, but as the saying goes “Computers are only as smart as the users using them”. Joomla does a lot of great things out of the box, but bad administrating can make any Joomla install unsafe.

Brad found this forum posting about the “sad, but true” things that some administrators do. For those of you who do these, I hope this opens your eyes and you learn from them, but for most of you, I know you’re doing the right thing.

OpenSEF seems to be the community preferred component for implementing search engine friendly links in Joomla! sites but unfortunately it’s not compatible with Joom!Fish. Which means if you’re using Joom!Fish to handle your mulit-language site you’ll have to find an alternative.

One option is to wait for OpenSEF 2.0.0 RC6 which is due out sometime soon or switch to using Artio JoomSEF (@Joomla Extensions). The current version of JoomSEF offers all the features of OpenSEF and is compatible with Joom!Fish.

Google has done it again. The great people at google have tried to make our lives easier with their new invention of Google Code Search. Now I can find bits of code that I otherwise wouldn’t have found. How does it do this? Well google now can traverse into compressed files like .zips and .tar.gz. What does this mean for you? You know how your a good webmaster and make make backups of your websites as websitebackup.tar.gz? Your configuration.php file is one of the files that you just backed up. Guess what. Now everyone on google code search can see your user name and password for your mysql database. How do I fight this? you might as. Simply put your backups below your website directory so it isn’t accessable via the web. Read more about it from the Joomla Developers here and from a Slashdot article here.

One of those technical buggers that I couldn’t figure out, is how to make your command prompt run through a directory and change the permissions (chmod) for only directories in it. Then, just to top it off, do it recursively:

find /dir/to/chmod/all/dirs -type d -exec chmod -R 755 {} \;

That helps us, hope it helps others!  Many thanks to linox.be for the tip!

If you have ever wanted to use images as menu items without hacking the main menu module this is for you. You can do this all in the template. First turn on output buffering, then send the buffer to a callback function which will find the menu links and swap them out for your image links.

Here are the steps. Open the index.php file for the template you want to use and right before the HTML tag put in the php function ob_start(”callback”) - callback being the name of the function you will use - and at the very end of the file put in ob_end_flush(). Now just include the callback function somewhere before you start the buffer and you’re done.

Here’s what the function does: First it will load info on every menu item. Then for each menu item it will check the parameters to see if a menu image has been assigned - in the administrator, choose to edit the menu item and under parameters assign an image from the images/stories directory. Usually if an image is assigned to that parameter it will show up to either the left or right of the link. This changes that. If an image is assigned the function will create the text link to search for and the new image link then it executes the swap. After it runs through every menu item it just returns the buffer which prints out to the browser. Pretty basic and you’ll probably have to do some tweaking to get it just right for yourself but it’s a nice way to use images without hacking any core files. Oh, and if you’re just looking to use non web safe fonts then couple this method with a text-to-image conversion script and dynamically generate images from the menu item name. You could also use this with content headings or module headings or just about anything. Have fun.

Here’s the callback function, put it above ob_start():
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