Im Not Playing Any More
.. rantings and blog of Chris Williams @scampiuk
Monday, 19 July 2010 11:01
Collective Madness: Social platform usage for the sake of it
Written by Chris WilliamsThere have been great advances in the social component market over the last year or so. Old staples such as Community Builder have had more competition with the likes of JomSocial. All with the goal of quickly turning your Joomla! site into a social hub - have we lost track of an important question: Could we do it in the first place?
Published in
Joomla!
I get may people asking me about linking external databases with Joomla! because they have found my ExternalDB plug-in on the JED - but people often look for different things when they tap in this simple phrase into Google.. I'm going to try to clear up things a little to get people working in the right direction.
Published in
Joomla!
I think it's been about a year that we've been using Amazon Web Service as our main servers now. I think because I can't remember exactly! However long we've been using it, we've used it to manage our media servers and web servers without to many problems, just the occasionally steep learning curve.
Published in
Media Servers
Tagged under
How many times have you looked on one of your clients web sites - the site you've spend more than a few hours getting the template right, the content imported and the typography just right - only to find a huge image that's been shrunk down to under 100px?
Published in
Joomla!
Sunday, 13 June 2010 15:04
Setting up Wowza Media Server 2 and Flash Media Internactive Server
Written by Chris WilliamsWowza Media Server is a very nice tool, and with the use of their images on Amazon Web Services, very very fast to get additional servers up and running when you need them for as long as you need them. The documentation to set it up as an edge for Flash Media Interactive Server can be a little, err, thin at times however, and sometimes you don't have time to spend an hour going through the forums to work something out!
Published in
Media Servers
I've been charged with my usual creation of components and modules. It's nothing special, nothing to taxing or complicated, but with the Joomla! 1.6 beta coming up soon, I'm temped to wait and see...
I know I'll have enough to do with J! 1.6 to migrate some sites to it, or more likley, migrate our `standard batch` of plug-ins and modules (you know the ones, the three or four things you always install), just hoping that the development teams for nearly everything are keeping an eye on the development Google Groups for any potential problems (and feature conflicts - I site K2's hierarchical category feature). I've also got to manage my own list of modules/components/plug-ins!
So - how to go about developing new things, now? We've been told that if we adhere to the framework, all will be well. Will it? The alpha is getting better (try the SVN version for a different thing breaking each day 
) So the options are...
- Develop for both 1.5 and 1.6
- Develop for 1.5 and hope....
I don't like ether of these options, so I'll add a third..
Don't develop it
Simple, wait until 1.6 is out. I'm sure the clients won't mind that.
Published in
Joomla!
After a little googling I stumbled over this PDF from Matt @ Last.fm, which gives a wonderful idea of how Last.fm deal with their scaling issues.
While some things won't work for our implementations of products, mainly because we're using Cloud Computing rather than maintaining our own hardware - however there are some very good ideas in here.
Worth a read while you're digesting the last of the mince pies!
Published in
Rantings
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/10/how-to-explain-to-clients-that-they-are-wrong/
How to tell your clients that they are wrong in what they want!
Published in
Rantings
Thursday, 05 November 2009 21:05
Unlearning the things you taught yourself
Written by Chris WilliamsI'm trying to resolve the problems caused by the self taught nature of my PHP coding. It's not a huge problem, however I do know that there are things that I don't know, don't do with the greatest efficiently as I could be doing.
So, how do you un-learn those years of bad habits? Those methods for doing the every day mundane and routine things that I've developed over years of programming?
Published in
Joomla!
We've two Thecus products in the office, both N5200 boxes, now both dead or dying. The first died about a month ago, and while Thecus are trying to recover the falled raid, it's not playing. It started to report one of the HDD's as broken, which isn't quite true. Then it decided that there isn't a raid there, which is also not true. So that' broken.
So this leaves us one Raid with aaall those lovley files on... which was found this morning flashing on and off in a very
worrying way.... It took about 10 minutes to take out all the disks and realize that it was the base unit that is broken. God knows how many of the disks it's taken with with the dam thing, we'll have to get the other one fixed to fix this one, simply to get another replacement raid to put the dam data on!
Some days back to work after a week off are always fun.
Published in
Rantings
Biog
Chris Williams
chris@imnotplayinganymore.com
PHP & Joomla! Developer
A coffee is always welcome, or maybe some pennies to charge the laptop.
They also pay for flowers for my wife so she doesn't hate me spending so much time on the computer...
Me on Twitter
scampiuk:
Loving DJ Amnesty on @bassdrive !
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