Windy Hill

Jforms is a fantastic form editor/creator for Joomla

Ben — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:04:22 +0000

I do a lot of work for non-profits and they rarely have large budgets so I try to make their websites as cost effective as possible. In my lengthy search for a great form plugin, I ran across JForms.

Easy to use, automatically creates a DB table for the form, and has a lot of detailed functions that I just haven’t found in other form plugins. I was originally looking for something like Contact Form 7 like I’ve been using in WordPress, but I think this plugin for Joomla is even better and more powerful!

NoNumber! rocks!

Ben — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:01:27 +0000

So I have been looking all over for random modules and plugins and my latest had me stumble on a great site with a huge set of really useful plugins.

http://www.nonumber.nl/

I mainly needed it for the ability to insert PHP/Javascript code into the articles, but I found several other plugins by the owner of the site that I’m installing as I write this. Looking forward to it.

Joomla is ok too?

Ben — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 19:59:29 +0000

So I built a site recently using Joomla and I thought I should start to blog about it. It’s a very rich CMS with a lot of functionality. Some of it is unnecessary for a site like my own but for someone that needs a full CMS with built in content level management, this is probably the way to go. I’ll add a few more posts with some plugins and things I’ve found useful so far.

Hack Life

Ben — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:47:29 +0000

Just a quick plug for a website that I think everyone should visit. It tends towards the inner-geek, but there is a lot of information that everyone could use to hack their own life. You can become more efficient, get tips on how to re-organize, or learn some of the latest tech trends.

Check it out: Life Hacker.

WordPress Plugin – Plug #2

Ben — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:28:47 +0000

Another great plug-in that I’ve found that fits a very specific niche on the web is the Sermon Browser: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sermon-browser/ or http://www.4-14.org.uk/sermon-browser.

One of our clients that we do some work for is Montgomery BIC Church (www.montgomerybic.org) and they wanted the ability to upload all of their sermons and have anyone be able to easily listen or download the sermons.

This plug-in not only does all of that, but it has a lot of great filters and ways to manage the data, including references to the speakers, what was covered in the sermons and a lot of other great detail that can help your users pick apart the details of the sermon before they listen to it. Give it a try if you’re in need of something like this.

WordPress Plugin – Plug #1

Ben — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:14:41 +0000

I used to build a lot of sites from scratch and then I started realizing that, even with some built-in efficiencies in my own CMS that I had created, someone was always going to come up with a new feature or request that I was going to have to code or find and then painfully integrate. Then a developer friend of mine introduced me to WordPress a few years ago and I’ve been pushing the product ever since.

There is a lot of good core development constantly moving forward on WordPress and you really can’t beat the plethora of plugins and widgets that are available that making adding functionality to a website about as simple as it could be. I plan on doing a series of blog entries about the plugins I find most useful.

The first in this list is a solid plugin called “Contact Form 7“. Fast, easy, and handles everything I currently need for basic forms. I’m sure there are others out there that possibly rival it, but this would be my top pick out of the ones that I have tried.

Another quick useful tool.

Ben — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:51:51 +0000

I do a lot of websites so I try to find tools that save me a lot of time. Another simple thing that people want is that nifty little icon up in the address bar that also appears next to your bookmarks in most browsers. You used to have to pull a few tricks in a graphics editor like Photoshop to create what is known as a Windows Icon file (.ico). Now there are a lot of online sites that will do the dirty work for you and all you have to upload is any image of what you want to appear on that icon.

One of the best sites I’ve found is on the html-kit site: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/.

If you ever need to knock one of these out, give that site a try. You could save yourself a ton of time!

Splitting Files

Ben — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:56:42 +0000

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to work with very large text files (logs of some sort), but if you have and you’ve ever had to evaluate those logs, you’ll find that once these files get above a certain size they tend to drag systems down and some editors won’t even open them.

In working with a file like that today, I realized that no editor I currently have in Windows would open (or at least easily open) the file I was attempting to review. It just so happened that the file I was trying to work with was over 2 GB. While large, it’s not unreasonable for what I do. I also knew that the portion of the file I had to review was in the last 2-300 MB of that file.

So I did a quick google search and read about a few tools. The one I settled on and am now recommending is GSplit.

Easy to use, does exactly what it says, and it split my 2 GB file into 21 100MB files in under 5 minutes. If you’re curious, I’m using a Windows 7 workstation.

Please be aware that I had to setup some default settings to get the files in the right location and at the right size. The thing I like about this program is that it allows you to provide all of those settings, including the filenames and extensions of the output files.

I didn’t go beyond the basic split functionality, but this program also appears to be able to combine files and do several other things as well that I didn’t have time to review.