Category: Web Tools

Web tool articles including Content Management Systems like WordPress, WebCalendar, Coppermine and php scripting and MySQL database issues.

WordPress.org – Trust Violated

MMOx_2013_10_00002

The last update from WordPress.Org has left us all with less trust in WordPress. They released 3.7 with a nasty bug that caused images in the “Visual” display of the edit post windows to be displayed wrong. Easy issue to test for.

They have now fixed the bug with a 3.7.1 update.

We all trust WordPress.org a little less this week.

– ww

CMS – The Agency Model

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Level 0

Over the past 15 years or so we have seen several levels of abstraction develop in the evolution of tools for the web. At this point, there are WYSIWYG website builders that model the page and it’s high level elements and allow building of entire websites. Among these site builders are SquareSpace, Weebly, and several others. There are also other tools such as Joomla, Drupal and other CMS schemes that solve more flexible problems.
However, as far as I can determine, none of these CMS schemes to date solve what I am calling here, for lack of a better name, “The Agency Problem”.

There is a natural extension to the abstraction that we have thus far reached that does solve this “Agency Problem”. It occurs to me that this problem is of sufficient generality that it deserves consideration as the next level of abstraction for CMS systems to solve. In this paper, I’ll present my take on the levels of abstraction in the technology of building websites and present a scheme which solves “The Agency Problem”. Continue reading “CMS – The Agency Model”

Modern Website Building

The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

  • These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
  • Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
  • The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
Continue reading “Modern Website Building”

Google Spreadsheet Test

Here’s a test of a Google Spreadsheet posted here to this page.

Starting with an Open Office 3.0 spreadsheet Import failed. Then after converting the sheet to XLS it failed. Finally converting to CSV worked.

Google_Spreadsheet_test

Notice that the Frozen Row 1 of the above sheet is not frozen.

I’ll try this again for publishing complex data to my websites. Since I can add formulae, it should be interesting.

– windy

Google Sitemaps for Coppermine

Google has help and services for Webmasters. Among the things they provide and encourage are sitemaps. However, it’s not as complex as it all seems. WordPress and coppermine, and many other CMSs have scripts that generate these sitemaps. There are tools that run from your computer too, but these can’t know the internal structure of the site database, and so they are inefficient or don’t work for dynamic sites like WordPress and Coppermine.

With over 2000 images in my photo site, it seemed useful to generate a Google Sitemap for the Coppermine gallery. After some searching a plug-in turned up in the Coppermine Forums.

This plug-in is fairly primitive and when I tried it, it failed with an error on Google. Google produced an error about the first URI produced by the script. Also, the entire sitemap was produced as one single line, so error messages or looking at the sitemap with an editor were not user friendly.

I have repaired the script and you can find the new version by the link below. It is advertised to work for CPG 1.2.x, 1.3.x and 1.4.x. For more information, read the forum post above.

To use the script, unzip and upload it to the base coppermine directory on your site and then activate it from the browser with a URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/cpg144/sitemap.php

Then visit the Google Webmasters Site,

  1. create an account, or log in with your google email account,
  2. add your site, using the Coppermine base directory, and
  3. then verify your site using one of the methods provided and finally
  4. point to your sitemap to tell google about it.

Here is the fixed script.

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Sitemaps for better searching with Google

Google has help and services for Webmasters. Among the things they provide and encourage are sitemaps. However, it’s not as complex as it all seems. WordPress and coppermine, and many other CMSs have scripts that generate these sitemaps. There are tools that run from your computer too, but these can’t know the internal structure of the site database, and so they are inefficient or don’t work for dynamic sites like WordPress and Coppermine.

Sitemaps tell google about the content of sites that have dynamic content. You can find out more about services for Webmasters at google. You will need to log into an account to see these pages, but accounts are free.

You will want to look at this page to find plugins or programs to build sitemaps for your site. For example, there is a plugin for WordPress to build sitemaps – WordPress Sitemap Plug-in.

There is also a php file to build sitemaps for Coppermine.

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