Simple add this to /routines as a new file. This instance gets the current URL so that it can be used as {location.url} in your template.


switch ($requiredVars[$z]) {
case "location":
if(!isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) || strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) != 'on'){
$http="http://";
}else{
$http="https://";
}
if(isset($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']) && $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == "81") {
$locationNow = $http . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] .":" . $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
} else {
$locationNow = $http . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
}
$tpl->addVariable("location",array("url"=>$locationNow));
break;
}
?>


“Hi Pete, Thank you for your email regarding your Desire. This is a known issue with the Device. You may wish to regularly check for OTA updates. There might be one released that resolves this issue. Can I suggest a suitable work around for the time being is to manually change the location settings each time you travel? Thank you for contacting HTC. If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact me. With good wishes, Sam B HTC”

Setting it manually does indeed work, but it’s a bit of a pain if you move around as much as I do

If you want to change this, open up Components > com_mailto > controller.php and right at the top you’ll have:


define('MAILTO_TIMEOUT', 20);


You can change this (but leave your form open to spamming), or alternatively add in a better message to tell the user what is going on:


JError::raiseNotice( 500, JText:: _ ('EMAIL_NOT_SENT' ));


change to


JError::raiseNotice( 500, JText:: _ ('EMAIL_NOT_SENT_SPAMWAIT' ));


and then in your Languages > en_GB > enGB.com_mailto.ini, add in


EMAIL_NOT_SENT_SPAMWAIT=To prevent this form being spammed you need to wait 20 seconds before you submit the form.


Click here to download our brand new software.

All of a sudden, the ‘Powers of Usability’, stated that links should link to what they are talking about, without becoming unusable. We’d start getting links like.

Download our brand new software.

Now this makes more sense to many developers, and Google loves it, but what about those people who don’t have a clue? Links can be styled in many ways: not underlined, overlined, pink, blue, black etc. Gone are the standards when all links were blue and underlined, and perhaps with the push to descriptive links, we’ve missed out a chunk of the audience that actually can’t tell what is a link.

So what can we do?

Well, Google often looks at links in your document, and pays the most attention to the first link (when all of the links point to the same place), which gives us something like:

Download our brand new software by clicking here.

Is this more ugly? Possibly. Is it more hassle to maintain? Certainly. But is there a benefit to those users who still expect an obvious place to click? It would be interesting to see some stats on the above link as to which one more people actually clicked on. I would wager it’s the ‘click here’, rather than the ’search engine’ link.

What are your thoughts?

You can do this using an FTP client like Filezilla but it can take a while for a big site. If you have access to the command prompt then you can navigate yourself to the relevant web folder and type:

find -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

These standard permissions prevent your web files/directories being overwritten by all but the ‘Owner’. This is a standard setup for a Joomla site.

This is easy to fix though, without having to hack the core Joomla code (as you should never do that should you?)

All you need to do is add the following line just after the call to insert the page header:

<jdoc:include type="head" />;
<?php $this->setGenerator('This site isn't written in Joomla - stop prying!'); ?>;

Image/Banner Rotation

For me, the generic way to put banners on a site, is with a little bit of cross-fading. To that effect, the Simple Image Rotator is perfect for this. Not only does it have a small filesize, it can also be incorporated into the existing Joomla banner component to rotate these from the off. It’s also free.

For more complex, article/image rotation I’m fond of Frontpage slideshow (same people as above). This comes with 5 or so templates, with nice rotation effects and the ability to put article content into the rotating banner. Styling is simple enough through the CSS and it’s easy to link to articles, menu items, or components. You have to pay for this one, but you do get what you pay for.

Sitemaps and Analytics

For every site I build I pop Xmap this in the footer. Not only does it pop a simple HTML sitemap on your site (dynamically driven) but also a Google XML sitemap, which you can then publish in your Google Webmaster tools. Styling is easy and you can turn off the author signature. In addition, it comes with extensions for lots of different components to allow you to get your Virtuemart products, SOBI items and many more bits of content on the site and into Google.

For Google Analytics I just pop the code in my template – I don’t bother using a module. There are tons out there. Just make sure you get one with the latest Google tracking code in it.

Joomla CCK (Content Construction Kit)

For a long time, Drupal had a big advantage over Joomla in that if you wanted to display a product catalog, or run a blog, or even just show some custom fields in Joomla, you really had to hack around. Drupal had the CCK, which allowed you to define your data and create pretty much any content you needed. With the advent of J1.5, several teams have come up with equivalents, but the best I’ve used so far is K2. The user interface fits well within Joomla (unlike SOBI) and is a very natural extension. You can import your existing Joomla articles with one click. You can create many types of content: Dropdown lists, text, radio buttons etc and it also allows nested categories. Templating uses the simple Joomla template override method.

It’ll be interesting to see how Joomla 1.6 changes K2, but in the mean time, it’s a no-brainer.

Menu Systems

The Joomla 1.5 menu system is pretty decent, but sometimes, when you’re doing some hairy CSS, you need some extra control and that’s where Extended Menu. It’s been around since J1.0 and it’s still as reliable as ever. If you need some CSS styling on your Joomla menu, it’s free and perfect for what you need.

Translations

It’s been Joomfish as long as I can remember. It now comes with a really good set of plugins to allow decent URL rewriting to subdomains etc which is good if you’re struggling with geo-location and Google. The language packs are free to download (as is Joomfish itself). Perfect.

Event Booking

Sometimes you want to let people book attendance at an event (maybe even pay for it). Appointment Booking Pro allows you to setup a calendar with bookable resources. You can choose if people need to pay, how much and at what point they can book. You get a nice (if slightly poorly HTML-ed) calendar, which is AJAX driven and you can get people to pay with Paypal or Clickatell. It’s a paid for component, but when you think how long it would take to build, it’s a steal!

As I was playing Travian most nights I didn’t want to surrender the laptop until the game finished. I was still well within my 1 year warranty so I waited a little while then phoned Samsung Technical support.

Monday Evening

The guy I spoke to (Warren) was a pleasant chap (despite me phoning 5 minutes before the line closed for the evening) and after me describing the symptoms, he quickly diagnosed it and said he’d get someone to pick it up on Wednesday, explaining that they aim for turnaround within 3/5 days. Doubtful this was the case, I asked if I needed to pack it up properly. That wasn’t needed. “The driver will come with a bright pink flight case!”.

Wednesday Lunchtime

The delivery/pickup man arrived with the bright pink case and I said goodbye to the laptop, hoping we’d not be apart for too long.

Friday Lunchtime

The delivery man arrived, unpacked my laptop – all sorted. The repair was, as I suspected, a replacement motherboard to screen cable.

Review

I was very impressed with Samsung support and despite they were fixing a broken product, they were quick, knowledgeable and friendly. Thanks very much!

The background to this is that the client wants to get into foreign markets (France, Germany, Italy). To do this they wish to create translations of their existing website. They have been advised that each website should have it’s own TLD (top level domain such as .fr, .uk, .de) and that the site should be hosted on a server in the relevant country.

This poses some immediate problems. Firstly, you need to have 4 separate hosting accounts, with 4 separate websites. This means you have 4 times the amount of work to maintain, which is not a good use of anyone’s time.

In general I’m talking about Google here, but I’m assuming that most SE’s work the same way. Google does indeed look at both the TLD and the IP of the website. The TLD will (should) take precedence over the IP. This makes sense if you think about it as many companies use cheap american hosting to host their UK websites. However, in the instance where you have a non-country specific TLD such as .net or .com, Google would look at the IP.

Thankfully in Google Webmaster tools you can associate a .com/.net with a specific country. So you could have the following setup:

(also used on sites like Nike.com)
http://www.client.com/fr associated with French content
http://www.client.com/de associated with German content

to go one step further you could setup sub-domains

http://fr.client.com

http://de.client.com

To do this, you would need to add several entries to your Google Webmaster account, which is easier than setting up lots of sites/hosting etc.

Ultimately, you don’t specifically need 4 sites to run 4 different language versions, just a way of assigning the relevant content to the relevant search. It should also be noted that this only effects ’show me search results only from the uk’ searches. I’d reiterate that the most important thing for any of these sites is getting country specific inbound links. Without that you’ll get the same old problems.

How do I implement this on a Joomla site?

I’ll tell you in my next article.