Yes, we're in that age when anyone's gotta get connected with anyone. For what reason?! Err... well, that's not been thought of. At least not for now. Just let's connect, let's get in the hub, do some chatting about what we've done this morning. Ya know, waking up, bathroom, breakfast, bus (or train, or car), business, back home, boring stuff... Just put it up there and feel important. Some will (are already, wow?) definitely harvest(ing) all the trivia from the public hubs and build nice projects of the future, cute models and more than few neat prognosis charts to be thrown on some table, for some other investment. Sounds like the bursted bubble of ten years ago. Possibly bit more mature because of the better infrastructure. As for the networking software running the clouds and clusters? Most, if not all, was in place through the '80s on mainframes.

Remember yesterday's blog? It happened the same summer, lasted for a month, the building, and keeps on and on with regular maintenance ever since. Couple months ago we even did a major upgrade to it. This is, as you may already figure, another client. Still the provider team is exactly the same one: same web developer, same graphic designer, same web programmer. And this is a very successful web project we're gonna do a fast case blog about.

It began in the late summer of 2006. Joomla plus Virtuemart e-store for thousands to tens of thousands of items. Nothing special, nothing scaring. Yet it proved to be one of the worst ever project of the past decade. Why? Keep reading to see why:

Seems I can't help myself blogging back every morning. So yes, again the "back" tag. That's about to haunt the day again. Today about the back button in your browser. Theories of usability are divided.

Some sustain that users worldwide are mature enough not to loose your site from sight once they click an external link out. In simple words for the coder and the designer of web sites: What to do with external links? Code them to open in the parent window or in a new window? The former will pass your site to history once the visitor clicks on that link, because another (external, alien, foreign, not-yours) web site will occupy the very window where you were just cherishing the clicking visitor's arrival and presence. Now you've gotta relay on the visitor's fidelity to 'remember' the importance of returning to your site. And then also on his or her perspicacity with the simple use of that top left browser back button, where the unforgetting user is supposed to punch in order to return to your site, where you actually want him to stay instead of roaming the web at random, ever farther away from your displayed work and business.

I'm back. New morning, new problem to fix. Or maybe the old one to re-fix. Yeah, just like some (few) clients used to: when you wake up early in the morning, then you ignite the computer, start your browser, load the project and haste in to write a mail to the developer, asking him to "move that back yet a little bit more"...

The "back" theme of my morning today will focus on fluid designs for web sites. It's that kind of menus, or columns, or divisions to be more general, that will shrink by themselves if there are lesser entries to fetch from the data base. And, respectively, will expand when more entries are served to fill in the allocated screen space.

There are clients who think they 'know' how it works to build that site of theirs. The more they think they 'know', the less they do. How to recognize such a client from the very beginning:

1. He will slap a PDF file at you and demand a 'perfect' reproduction of the design in the PDF over the web site. Anyone having an idea about web design and Content Management Systems, or CMS, will smile at that demand.

2. He will send you color data in CMYK.

3. He will force you to stack in there, over (almost, at best) every 'sub-page' that lorem ipsum text ad nauseum. Like no one but you are called to fill and fix the lorem ipsum, align them, bold them and craft few more paragraphs under fugia nullat pariatur...

K2 comes as the Drupal-like content constructor kit for Joomla. A long awaited feature that, some say, will get in the core of next Joomla v.1.6...

But when you install K2 by the book, together with the All Videos plugin and the Simple Image Gallery plugin [both by the same excellent Greek creator] you'll notice that the respective Image Gallery tab in the Item creation interface is either empty or returning an error message. Here's what to do:

1. SFTP in to these paths:

It happened sometime around mid June on a Dreamhost user account, older than three years and bloated with quite some antiquated long forgotten web applications. All of a sudden, every site under the above mentioned unix user was displaying this:

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on top left of a blank page. D'oh...

We're now gonna skip remembering the hassle of urgent chores moving live sites to newly created, separated unix users, naturally after restoring them from the backups. Because, like any respectable host, Dreamhost is providing a

Well, that's a statement to stay in the e-universe, of course...

Everything we do means: Joomla! installing, customization, hosting, maintenance, upgrading, migration; template code customization; component code customizing and new component creation; module code customizing and new module creation; search engine friendly (sef) URL installing, customization; SEO (aka Search Engine Optimization) consulting; PSD to XHTML hand code template creation; and... click here to ask for something.Joomla! we forgot.

Everyone means: YOU!

Yes, running an online business is not JUST everything about template design, images slimming and fitting, links optimizing SEO-wise, content creation and management, feedback contact forms, e-commerce, shopping carts, communities, socio-nets, twitting, digging, flashing, youtubbing, googling or blah-ing...

It's ultimately turning down to the infrastructure, to the hardware (enhanced security servers cluster) and software elements burried deep inside the LAMP web hosting ecosystem (where LAMP goes for Linux Apache MySQL PHP)... Then what would be a Volkswagen without the marvel of the Autobahn.

And what's a Joomla! without web hosting excellence for Free... (go click this link to read what you get for the cents).

Here comes the (*)asterisk note, in same font size as the GRAND offer above:
IF and only IF you've taken your Volkswagen (Joomla! is the e.Volkswagen, remember?) from our service labs, then you may ride it TOLL FREE for three months time!