Friday, August 19, 2011

Will I teach my kid 'A for Apple' or 'A for Android'?

As a soon-to-be-father I was thinking that very soon I will have to teach my kid ABC alphabets :)
I started with A for Apple and when I reached F, the first word which came was Facebook! Funny enough, I decided to start all over again, this time writing down what I am calling the Alphabets of the Web 2.0 and Social Media.

A - Android
B - Blog
C - Collaboration
D - Del.icio.us
E - Email
F - Facebook
G - Google (of course)
H - HowStuffWorks (hardest one to come up with)
I - iPhone
J - Joomla!
K - Kindle
L - LinkedIn
M - Mashable
N - Ning
O - Open Source
P - Profile
Q - Quora
R - RSS
S - Second Life
T - Twitter
U -
V - Virtual Worlds
W - Wiki
X - Xbox? Coudn't find better
Y - YouTube
Z - Zoho

I haven't been able to find anything starting with U :(  Have you?

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Upgrading Joomla 1.6.3 to 1.7

A couple of months ago I deployed Joomla 1.6 and I am now having to upgrade to 1.7. This latest version doesn't come with major changes from an admin perspective.
After August 2011 Joomla! will not be releasing security updates for Joomla 1.6. It is thus recommended to upgrade to 1.7.  This is the last of the short cycle releases until Joomla 1.8 scheduled for January 2012 reaches. The latter is planned to run for 15 months.

Anyway life was made easy with the one-click upgrade button. Here's a quick step-by-step guide.

1. Open your Joomla! Backend administration page.
2. Go to Extensions --> Extension Manager

3.Click on 'Purge Cache' button (located in upper right corner)

4.After that click on 'Find Updates' button next to 'Purge Cache'


5.Select the Joomla check-box in the results list and click on 'Update'

6. Notice the new version of your Joomla! installation after successful update.



Am happy that my templates and add-ons still work properly for now. A mail just popped in saying that CB is now 1.7 native. Great!

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

MediaWiki Tip: Enhancing your search results with tags

MediaWiki has many limitations with regards to its search engine.Sometimes searching for 3 to 5 letter words does not return any result.It is also known that the Wiki engine is limited in terms of syntax and functionality.
The use of search extensions such as Lucene (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lucene-search) will help overcome the setbacks of MediaWiki's search facility.
Personally I haven't tested any of those extensions. Running a relatively small corporate wiki hasn't given need for advanced search requirements  - at least not yet!

One thing I would like to share though is how to tag your pages with keywords you don't necessarily want to show as content on the pages.
Lets say you want a page called 'Test', which contains steps to install a printer, to show up each time a user searches for words like HP, Xerox or Lexmark. You don't want these words to appear on the page itself coz you've got nothing to say about them. I simply use the basic HTML comment tag!
Yeps, as any MediaWiki user will know, there is a list of permitted HTML tags which can be integrated in the Wiki Markup code.
Thus, searching for Lexmark will return the results hereunder:
 

As easy as that. Hope this helped.