CustomerCentrix - We satisfy your business technology needs

New Site and Product

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:09:45 -0600

We have launched our new site to prepare for the coming load testing product. Get ready for aWebStorm!

Performancing editor with Drupal

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:55:50 -0700

Here are a few notes about using Performancing For Firefox with Drupal. When I first installed it, it only worked with the admin user (1st user added) which has special privileges. I thought at first that other users would not work because we generally have a space in the user name "Firstname Last", but this was not the problem. The problem was with enabled modules and permissions. Both the blog and blogapi modules must be enabled. Then, using administer >> access control >> blog module >> edit own blog >> check this for users who will be using performancing. The last thing to do is in administer >> settings >> blogapi >> Blog types >> choose one or more type. We haven't used personal blog (or any blog) for our business sites. Even though we are really blogging, it is just called other things in Drupal (like stories and pages).

Performancing Firefox 1.1

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:16:14 -0700

Here is a great little tool - technically a Firefox extension, it is really a nicely integrated blogging editor. Something that could (and probably does) exist as a standalone tool but ties into the browser well. I am using it now to add a posting to our company Drupal-driven site, and it also works for all of the most popular blogging products. It pops into the bottom of your Firefox browser and provides basic WYSIWYG markup features. I dislike HTML editors as javascript-based tools that download from the server because they are often full of quirks/bugs and sluggish in performance even with today's computing power. This one is a free download that I might not have seen or tried if it hadn't been a Firefox extension.

Building Drupal stories and other content

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:38:36 -0700

The story is the simplest type of content to start with, and I try to avoid using an online html editor for a number of reasons. But, realistically most people want to use some html markup. The internet after all wouldn't be what it is without links, images, colors and other stuff that might be functional or just fun and prettier than basic text. For users who just want a few of these, learning how to do a link and images with html and the Drupal plain text edit box works.

Links are created with an anchor tag that brackets the text something like this:

<a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">my link to yahoo</a>

Alltel spins off wireline business

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 12:34:48 -0700

Here is a news story about our largest customer, Alltel. Not sure what effect that it will have on us, but likely there will be some contract adjustments next year.

Del.icio.us plugins for Wordpress

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 10:11:58 -0700

Seems like a simple thing, but there are too many options that don't seem to easy enough. I was looking for a way to show a couple of link lists for a particular tag or group of tags. Basically a replacement for the built-in links and categories included with Wordpress. Sorting alphabetically would be nice.

First try was the one by Alexander Malov (version 1.4). I have curl installed, but it gave an error, so I moved on to try others.

Next is Tom Gilbert's version 1.1 which works fine. This one just doesn't have the functionality that I would like, and also requires a password, which seems a bit of a nuisance. There is no way to select a particular tag or subset of tags and the links are displayed in what looks to be save order, making it good for showing recent links but otherwise not what I want.

Created a Technorati Profile

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:40:16 -0700

I now have a Technorati Profile and added (claimed) this site, LearnCentrix and the Albuquerque Campbells. This is part of our campaign for site promotion. Need to do the same for some of the other blog/site directories on the web.

Social bookmarks and internet memory

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 12:02:49 -0700

Although not new, two web tools are now available that solve problems and change the way that we think about the internet. Del.icio.us is a free web service that now has a broad following and good support from 3rd party software and services. Its purpose is very simple: social bookmarking. The basics is that your bookmarks or favorites (internet addresses) are saved to the web site and available to the rest of the world. You categorize them as you wish with tags. Tags are similar to folders except that they are not hierarchical, so a bookmark can have multiple tags and tags have no specific relation to one another.

Site Promotion Steps

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:12:12 -0700

Prerequisites: Site has been created, is available on the web and there are a couple of pages of content available.

Generate google sitemap
(and possibly text version for yahoo)

Sign in to Google Analytics
Add Website Profile - turned off currently (use vid=1151)
Add tracking code to site (in the footer area)
Perhaps because of recent problems, this seems to take a day or more before it will start collecting data

Submit to Yahoo

Beginning AdSense with Drupal

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:03:40 -0700

We added the Drupal module for AdSense today to this site and are planning to put it on some others as well. It can be used as a Drupal block (sidebar) or embedded in content. Embedding seems like it would work well for popular pages, home page between excerpts or at the bottom.

Zimbra Ajax toolkit available

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 10:34:32 -0700

I spent a little more time with the Zimbra toolkit recently. It still looks impressive, but unfortunately there appears to be a good bit of work involved with just figuring out how to make it work.

Zero Cash . . .

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:15:36 -0700

Interesting series called Zero Cash, A Little Talent and 30 Days by Jennifer Laycock, who writes for Search Engine Guide. It is a practical story about making money on the internet.

Links to the articles are available here.

Customizing Drupal for Site-Centrix.com

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:23:48 -0700

How to build a custom version of Drupal? We have been implementing Drupal for customers and ourselves, and each time make some of the same module and theme additions and settings changes. Today, we are making a first try at a customized version (starting with Drupal 4.6.3) called Site Centrix.

The initial target for this customization is small customer sites or internal sites used for advertising with AdSense or affiliates.

Search and Replace "Drupal" with "SiteCentrix" in all files. Match case and use whole word to avoid changing code.

Replace the default /favicon.ico with the SpreadFireFox theme version.

JavaScript Tree Widgets

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:42:54 -0700

For some upcoming new improvements to LearnCentrix, I have been analyzing javascript widgets and tools. I am always interested in new technology, currently such things as AJAX, JSON and the newest techniques for CSS and DHTML. The specific issues that we need to resolve in the next few months are:

Asynchronous loading of an html/javascript tree - we currently use a tree component to load a course, which is like an outline of web pages and other learning objects. This tree typically contains a couple hundred items, but occasionally it has 300-500 or more We are expanding on how this works, so it must accommodate potentially many thousands of items. Since the response time is currently pretty slow on the initial load when you get above 300 or so items, we need to move to a model where only the nodes closest to the root are loaded initially and the rest are loaded as needed (when requested by the user).

AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 09:21:51 -0700

We have turned on ads from both of these, but are still very much novices in this area. Currently, I have set a budget of $5/day each with a max cost per click of 25 cents. We purchased the initial set-up from Yahoo, so we have a set of ads that they created for us based on our, now outdated, product pages. I had thought that I would just copy those ads to AdWords and do some editing in the process. Unfortunately, there is too much difference between the size of ads (number of text characters) and the creation process to make this easy. So, I am slowly just trying to create some new AdWords campaigns and groups.