Harvey balls are circles that are commonly filled in in 1/4 increments to illustrate a percentage such as 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%.  There is even a font now called Harvey Balls Font.

So what happens when these increments are insufficient and you need variations like 10%, 40%, etc.  You go to Google and do a couple searches and find that something this elemental is not so easy to find. Myself, I even checked www.istockphoto.com for stock images and came up empty.

This tutorial describes a couple techniques to create rating type images using GIMP. Read the rest of this entry »

Q: How do I insert an image into a post?

A: Do it the Wordpress way, not the general website way. Here’s how:

The Wordpress image uploader will resize images for you as it uploads them. However if you have pre-resed them this is fine as well.  It is configured to resize them to the follow maximum sizes upon upload: Read the rest of this entry »

Joomla’s Jomsocial component includes some messaging and invite functions which can be easily misunderstood by novices.  With that in mind I wrote this supplementary FAQ to help understand how it works.

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After uploading a php.ini file to a HostGator account, it won’t recognize it.  How do I make this work?

1) Make sure you uploaded the php.ini file into the folder above webroot, i.e. /home/$your_account.

2) Add the following lines to your /home/$your_account/public_html .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_suphp.c>
suPHP_ConfigPath /home/USERNAME
<Files php.ini>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
</IfModule>

Verify that the permissions for both files are 644.

It is important to know and understand the difference in Joomla access levels in order to correctly assign privileges to content, menu items and modules. The access levels for Joomla 1.5.x as viewed via Joomla Administrator –> Site –> User Manager –> User Name: Read the rest of this entry »

Joomla CMS is a great content management system, however saddled with a history of performance issues, meaning slow page load speed. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you need an understanding of the basic (obvious) problems affecting performance as well as some of the techniques useful in the case of Joomla specifically. There are a number of websites dedicated to discussing techniques to improve performance, assuming yours falls in that mediocre performance class. What seems to be lacking in many are case studies with side-by-side comparisons. To tie this together I set up series of Joomla installations with various cacheing type components or plugins enabled/disabled and ran page load time tests on each . The proof is in the pudding. See the results.

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MySQL doesn’t have a core function to delete multiple tables matching a pattern.  This is a simple script that you configure, then run command-line to delete multiple tables matching a pattern.  Be careful to ensure that the pattern will not also match database you do not wish to delete.

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When you click to add an item to the cart you sometimes get a message like:

“Your browser does not accept cookies. To put products into your cart and purchase them you need to enable cookies.”

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If you have dropdown menu items attached to a Joomlart template and JA_Trona template the dropdown menu items fail to display if you have the Home page selected, but works on other pages.  This happens in Internet Explorer, not Firefox, and may also display an error in the bottom toolbar, “Done but with errors on page.” Read the rest of this entry »

The list of website mistakes at your disposal is probably not infinite but is certainly not limited to what I have identified here.  Reorder as you see fit. As with many walks of life put this in perspective, doing it right does not guarantee success but will generally lead you in that direction. Of course you could do it all wrong and just get lucky! Read the rest of this entry »