I am happy to announce that Highdesert Photography is now online with its new design. It sports a simple, semantic, all CSS layout and validated XHTML. It designed to be very easy to update with new photographs. I am also working on a design for this photographer’s Coppermine Gallery, which will be done in the next month or so (no rush).
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Because I am working on several projects at once now, I thought it might be useful to check out what is available from Open Source offerings. I didn’t care whether it was a desktop application or a web-based application, but the advantages of a web-based application seem to be pretty obvious as I am going on vacation soon (from where I will continue to work) and because I am often working on both my desktop and my laptop (and access to this software from both would be nice). Well, I found a wonderful solution in the Open Source web-based application dotProject. It is a project/task planner, time tracker, calendar, client list, and a powerful collaborative tool that comes complete with .pdf reports, gantt charts, forums, etc. It is based on Moodle, the Open Source educational CMS, which is quite extensible and powerful, although it really doesn’t look or act anything like it. Basically, my thoughts on dotProject are that it rocks! However, I ran into three problems upon installation that basically anyone on shared hosting like mine (ipowerweb) will run into because of the lack of ability to tweak the server environment. Although I did find the answers to these issues relatively easily by searching on the forums, I thought it might be helpful to post them all in one place. Problem 1: Projects module The projects module must be able to create temporary tables in your database in order for it to work; however this is somewhat of a security risk. For this reason, ipowerweb has turned off this function, and so you get errors if you try to run it. The fix requires you to change the code of the modules/projects/index.php file; but the file, already fixed up, is also located here. I just replaced the original with this file and it worked great. Problem 2: Gantt chart The Gantt chart module calls for fonts that aren’t available on the shared server, and results in a host of errors. To fix it; you need to change the following line in lib/jpgraph/src/jpg-config.inc DEFINE(“TTF_DIR”,”/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/”); so it reads DEFINE(“TTF_DIR”,”/home/user-name/public_html/dotproject/locales/en/fonts/”);. Then you take the fonts listed below from your local machine Font folder and upload them into the fonts folder directory in the second line. You will have to create this folder; it does not exist in locales/en/. arialbd.ttf That fixed it for me, at least. Problem 3: PDF reports Requesting a report in a pdf format resulted in a number of font and permissions related errors. This problem was easily fixed by changing the chmod to 777 for the following folders: files/temp (where the pdf is stored) and lib/ezpdf/fonts. I found once this was done that the pdf reports on projects, tasks, etc. to be very useful and well worth the little bit of extra effort to make work. All in all I am impressed with this application and I am looking forward to using it for a variety of projects, including fixing stuff up around the house and things for the kids! I recommend it. The much anticipated Drupal 5.0 build has been released in beta version. I’m going to install a test site and start playing around; I have a small project that will need few, if any modules that would work as a tester for this bad boy. Join the minions, install today! The other night we were sitting around the dinner table admiring the fantastically long-lived and creative oeuvre of Weird Al Yankovik. He hit the scene back when my hubby and I were about my eldest son’s age, and he rocked! I loved “Eat It” and “I Lost on Jeopardy” and other classic spoofs; not just because he made fun of the original song and star, but when he was at his best no cultural fact, no matter how sacred or trivial, was safe. Then, long after Weird Al has faded into my vague memories of MTV, my sister who was 10 years younger went to one of his concerts and came how proudly waving his siggy on a napkin. “Wow, Weird Al is still around?” I wondered. Another decade has passed since then and Weird Al is still “bringing it”. I have to admit, I had never seen the following vid., although my son’s been talking about it for months. I thought it was so hilarious I just HAD to post it. Thank you Weird Al!! |
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Drupal, ipowerweb, site5 and my new hosting home
I have had hosting through ipowerweb for the last 4 or 5 years, and they were my first hosting company. I learned a lot through my experience with them, especially because they had “auto-installers” through the vdeck which allowed me to start playing with WordPress, phpBB, and other scripts. Lately, however, I had been getting more and more unhappy with what I could and could not do with my website. I have also noticed some pretty severe performance issues regarding database queries. The long and short of it added up to me finding a new hosting home with Site5.
What put the nail on the coffin with ipowerweb for me was its poor support for Drupal database requirements. I kept reading about errors that would occur even after the lengthy back and forth with tech support to get it configured correctly (and that is every time you need a new db for Drupal) and I decided I just didn’t want to deal with it as a Drupal newbie. I definitely didn’t know what I was missing, though, until I signed up with Site5.
So far, I am ecstatic with my new host, truly. They are less expensive (!), faster, have a great control panel, have Fantastico, and their servers and databases are set up to handle Open Source scripts. I have shell access!! They have good, active customer forums and my two minor support tickets were resolved in 5min and 10min respectively. For the first time I feel like I have control over “my” server space and databases. And because handling domains is so easy (with MultiAdmin) I feel very comfortable offering hosting to my design customers who may not want to mess with their own hosting.
The only downside to all this is that I have gobs of hosting from ipowerweb paid up until December 2007 that I don’t know what to do with. If you have any use for it, let me know.