Learning PHP Site Mgt.

Exploring SEO

onyxcollector — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:42:41 +0000

Search engine optimazation is an interesting quagmire to dive into. With Yahoo! one can submit ther site directly to Google and Yahoo. I did and am indexed there, but not in Bing. Since Bing will be around for awhile, I have found that if I go to Bing’s Webmaster Center, they have a line of code to insert in your section to get it’s spiders to find you.

Of course the evil ones are the commercial sites. I don’t see any reason to go that route yet. I found places promising the moon and stars for $5 to hundreds of dollars.

I did find some other mineral dealers with large sites that will list your site if you list theirs, a deal I can live with. I’ll just keep on trying to get http://FromMotherEarth.net out there as much as possible. One trick is to have two or more blogs, then reference the siteback and forth.

Windows 7 for $30

onyxcollector — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:50:52 +0000

If you don’t know, students with a legitimate college email address can purchase Wndows 7 for only $30 thru January 3rd. I’d say that’s a pretty sweet deal! Go to www.win741.com to learn the details.

And the beat goes on…..

onyxcollector — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:52:30 +0000

Many little things Elaine taught during the Spring course are coming through now to save the day. I couldn’t get my photos to show on the pages, and in checking the addresses, found I had written them incorrectly. I re-did it, and now there are photos! Yay! http://frommotherearth.net Even in the fun stuff like creating pages, there is still alot of work involved, especially when listing so many items at once. Lots of tweaking to do, too, but that gives me an excuse to escape all the people staying here waiting to eat my turkey and my pumpkin pie. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

So many options, so much to learn & try!

onyxcollector — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:22:23 +0000

It’s nice to be working on the site rather than fighting to install it. I seem to be taking a long time going thru all the options one has. I spent half an hour just trying out every position my menu module would go! I need a template for the modules! There probably is and I don’t know it.

Remembering the sequence to create a page is slowly coming. My next big challenge will be photos – resizing them and placing them where they belong. I see Intuit commercials all over the tube now, $5 a month for them to host.

Feel like I got some work done.

onyxcollector — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:58:08 +0000

I got my access logs configured, and learned how to access my site statistics. I see this is how info is collected and used for marketing etc. I was surprised to learn things like the most popular browser used by visitors (Mozilla), or even the most common screen resolution used by visitors. I can even see which operating systems are used the most. I also learned how to protect my directory, and I also chenged all my passwords, and deleted a user who wasn’t using.

One thing I still need to do is direct the site to forward all my email to my main email address. I found emails on the site I hadn’t known had arrived. I don’t want to have to check various email addresses, jus forward them all to one main one.

Halloween is tomorrow. For a true scare read the story of the Donner Party, who after loads of hardships got caught in a Sierra mountain pass in 20 feet of snow on – you guessed it! – Halloween 1846!

More Joomla fun!

onyxcollector — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:52:30 +0000

So, yesterday I went to preview some content I added, and got nothing but some jumbled words and symbols – no webpage. And all my other pages are the same. The Forum said to delete the entire Joomla file and upload a new one, which I did, but no change. Some poor guy in Chile who had someone else do his website says he’s found the same thing, and the Forum is saying we’ve been hacked. But I don’t think so – my site is on the server but has never been published. I used Yahoo’s own software to quickly put up a website until I got the Joomla one set. I haven’t switched the sites so that the Joomla one was the one published (don’t know how to do that yet), so how could it be hacked?

Also, if I go to the control panel on the server and look at index.html, it shows the front page of the joomla templete, so it hasn’t disappeared or anything. I think it’s an internal thing I screwed up when looking thru files. I’m continuing to seek help from the Forum. I think Elaine’s given up on me, I’m so far behind….. I notice she posted a “Last day to drop the class” notice, and can’t help but have the feeling that’s directed at me. Oh, well, I’m doing this to learn, not for a grade, so I’m gonna keep at it. Hopefully a Forum member will have some idea.

So far so good.

onyxcollector — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:57:12 +0000

Day two of joomla working and all is going well so far. I have several sections, catagories under those sections, and articles on the front page and two other pages (special offers and publications). I have linked the articles to the main menu! Once I have some content on each page, I will stop and look at what modules and extensions will help.

Catching up on all the work.

onyxcollector — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:33:24 +0000

Joomla is installed on my Yahoo server just fine and is working. I took two things to make it work. The first was switching from Filezilla to Smart FTP Client. It had no problem uploading Joomla completely to the Yahoo server.

The second thing it took to make Joomla work on my server was not to follow the Installation Guide or the Quick Start Guide at Joomla, but to follow the advice on the Joomla forum:

Review the discussion http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=429&t=421021&p=1771559 that provides step by step procedure for installing Joomla! in Yahoo Web Host!

This did things differently, and it got the job done. I got into Joomla and immediately noticed no error messages everywhere. I noticed links and files previously missing were there. Good thing I’m taking this class to learn and not for a certificate! So, I’ve started adding content.

Throwing out the installation guide.

onyxcollector — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:28:09 +0000

So, I got two responses to my silly challenge, one of snide namecalling, the other trying to be helpful…… I will try the helpful suggestion in the morning when I have the energy to take this on again. But I note it too says to ignore the installation guide. And no one was willing to actually answer my questions. But who cares? Maybe the helpful suggestion will work.

A challenge to the Joomla Forum

onyxcollector — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:24:16 +0000

After being told by some supposed “guru” on the Joomla Forum to ignore the Installation Guide (what the hell good would THAT do and how does it answer my problem?), I issued a Challenge on the Forum for someone to explain to me why I should continue using Joomla. I point out that it seems messed up from the start – wrote an article, put it on the front page, Preview it, and the menu has error messages in it!

Create a section or a catagory, and the manager page starts filling up with error messages. Go to Menus>MainMenu>Home, there’s no Home link to click on.

Of course, the first response was to blame me. Told me to download the sample data and practice. How would practicing solve Joomla error messages? How would practicing make missing links reappear? Stupid and useless. We’ll see if I get any other great suggestions.