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Good Web Design CAN be affordable and made locally

November 26th, 2009

We are currently looking for Central Coast businesses wishing to create or update their website.

A website is an investment and as with any investment it pays to shop around, so look around and get some quotes.

We have a passion for great webdesign and will put the time and effort in getting your business online and looking great.

Posted in Web Design, Web Programming | No Comments »



Does your business have a professional website?

November 25th, 2009

Listening to Star 1045 this morning I keep hearing the radio ads for another central coast business building cheap websites.

The ads aren’t great and the businesses website leaves a lot to be desired.

In the year 2009 where the quality of professional websites are pushing the boundaries, businesses just can’t afford to have a dodgy website that lacks visual appealing graphic elements. And its not that hard, all it takes is a bit of graphic design know how and the patience to apply a thousand tweaks.

The business in question is developing sites using templates with an open source back end application running the website, a quick and effective way of pumping out a lot of websites with almost no coding knowledge.
This saves a lot of time, but rather than spending more time on the design of the sites most of them have resulted in amateur looking websites designed by someone who just doesn’t seem to have the passion for webdesign.

Having said all that I don’t want to put this business down, we are all on the learning experience of life and good on them for getting some radio ads out there.

Posted in Web Design | No Comments »



Removing title tags from wordpress menus

April 7th, 2009

I love wordpress, I really do. But it has a couple of annoying hitches that I hope will be fixed in V3.0. One of those hitches is the way wordpress displays a ‘little yellow popup’ caused by the title attribute on linked items. This title tag is designed to increase accessibility as encouraged by the Web Accessibility Initiative. I strongly believe in making the web as accessible as possible, but there comes a point where things like a persistant title bubble make it even more unusable.

Because this function is hardcoded deep inside wordpress’s code, it’s actually quite confusing to work out how to disable it. Luckily I found a brilliant post that outlined a solution. It uses the php function preg_replace to exclude the title tag from being rendered in the menus. It works almost perfectly except it also renders out all the other arguments that are usually passed to wordpress to customise your menu output. For example if your code looked like this:

<?php
if($post->post_parent)
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0");
else
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
if ($children) { ?>

wordpress would remove the title tag but also ignore “title_li=&child_of=”. It took a bit of thinking, but here is one solution to this problem:

<?php
if($post->post_parent)
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0");
else
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
if ($children) {
$children = preg_replace('/title="(.*?)"/','',$children);?>

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Posted in Web Programming | No Comments »



Google Reveals Server Design

April 1st, 2009

So I’ve always wondered what makes Google tick. I mean seriously… For Google to be able to process a query in 0.06 seconds is pretty incredible, especially when they are getting millions of those queries a second.

Well you can imagine my excitement when I found this article that seems to reveal Googles once extremely secret server design.

According to CNET, Google packs all of it’s servers into hundreds of airconditioned shipping containers. They also appear to have a 12 volt battery attached to each motherboard to act as a backup power supply, and apparently they have patented the idea. This really is quite an ingenious design and seems to be typical Google.

I only wonder if the date that this article was released somehow decreases its authenticity… “April 1, 2009 2:26 PM PDT”

Posted in IT Stuff | No Comments »



How to turn your old modem into a switch

March 28th, 2009

A few months ago I got a new computer. That makes six all up in this house hold alone, all of which need to be connected to the internet.

There was a problem though. I had completely maxed out our routers ethernet ports, which meant I was going to have to shell out another $150.00 on a new switch. A network switch acts like an intelligent powerboard. You can just keep plugging in computers until you run out of ports on the switch. If you need more ports you can connect a switch to that switch and another into that switch… your bascially just ‘linking’ them all together.

Going back to the $150.00 new switch issue… Something I really didn’t want to do.

Then I remembered our old modem sitting unused next to our shiny brand new one. The modem chip was broken, but I was pretty sure I had still seen lights on the routers ports. This got me thinking… perhaps I could recycle this old modem back into some usefulness.

I plugged the old modem into our new one and then plugged my laptop into it. I hit refresh in the browser and then success, Internet access was there! However… I knew it wouldnt last long and then about 3min later it was all over. No internet, no network… nothing.

I noticed that the old modems IP address (192.168.1.1) was conflicting with the new ones. I also noticed that the old router was still fighting for DHCP rights. But I had proved that the modem could still act as a standalone switch even though it was ‘broken’. Anyway time to configure this puppy.

Instructions

  1. Plugin your computer into the old modem, but do not plug it into the new one.
  2. Open up a browser and navigate to the modems default gateway. Usually 192.168.1.1, 10.1.1.1. Check the manual if your unsure.
  3. Login to the router using the username and password. Check the manual again.
  4. Go to the LAN configuration. Have a look around and consult the manual. It varies depending on which modem you have.
  5. Set the modem to a Static IP address. Set it to something like 192.168.1.254 or 10.1.1.254. The last number should be out of the typical range.
  6. Set the netmask to 255.255.255.255.
  7. The last thing is to disable DHCP. This is extremely important because otherwise the modems will be fighting for rights to hand out DHCP and you only want your main modem/router to be doing that!
  8. Save your settings. This is important ensuring your settings return after you switch the modem off.

And thats it. I now have another 3 computers connected to the internet and it didnt cost me a cent.

Here are the settings I used for my modem/router. Its an NB5+4 by Netcomm.

nb5settings

Posted in IT Stuff | 4 Comments »



Moving Your Website to another Server

March 20th, 2009

Moving a website from one server to another can be tricky, especially if your client demands ‘no downtime’.

There is no right and wrong way but I’m going to outline a few steps that might help if you ever find yourself in this situation.

  1. If you have numerous websites on your server, make sure you inform your clients… and if they are reselling tell them to tell their clients as well.
  2. Set aside a period of 3-4 days. This is necessary for DNS propogation which normally takes between 48 - 72 hours to complete.
  3. When the agreed time occurs, put up ’stop pages’ that prevent people entering the website and hence stops changes to the database (this can be done using a mod_rewrite)
  4. Backup the database and the files.
  5. Copy the files to the new server and reload the database using PHPMyAdmin (import function)
  6. Change the DNS records to change to your new server
  7. Take away the stop pages after 72 hours
  8. Backup again and your new website should start appearing.

Posted in Web Hosting | No Comments »



Listening to the new U2 Album

March 10th, 2009

Listening to the new U2 Album, “No Line on the Horizon” and its starting to grow on me. At first I wasn’t a fan at all but as many people have been saying on Last.fm its one of those albums that just sounds better and better everytime you listen to it. Currently my favourite song is magnificent. Check it out!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »



Hello world!

January 1st, 2009

I’m pleased to announce that we have launched a new website featuring more content and now my very own blog. My aim (lets see how I go) is to post regularly about news in the IT, Web Design and Professional Video fields. Anyway, I’m off to keep working on the website.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »