A couple of months ago I invested in a spanking new laptop which meant my old Dell Inspiron could be put to good use as a testing / development / backup PC. It was only once I’d wiped everything did I realise that I’d also deleted the folder marked “drivers” which as you’ve probably guessed, had all the drivers for the laptop.
Every web designer loses sleep when it comes to choosing a web host. How do you know the most expensive is going to be the best for your business – is the cheapest cheap for a reason or are they just damn good value?
A search for web hosting reviews returns nearly 270,000 results in Google UK and nearly 3 million if searching with Google.com! To make matters worse, new web hosts pop up every day making your job of finding a suitable hosting company even more difficult.
This year, why not add the personal touch to cards and gifts by making them yoursel?
Peterborough-based craft warehouse Pondskipper Crafts have everything you need to put together some great looking gifts. Ok, they don’t have everything – you need some degree of creativity in your blood but apart from that Pondskipper have it all!
If someone you know has a new addition to their family, why not make them a great scrapbook or photo album? For the entrepreneurs amongst you, why not make several cards and approach local shops to stock them?
Now is the time to stock up on all your craft supplies though as Pondskipper are currently running a 15% off discount throughout December, and what use are Christmas cards in January anyway?
CMS Made Simple is a great content management system. It’s free, easy to get to grips with, quite powerful and the forums are fairly helpful when you need help.
There are obviously quirks with it (as there is with all off the shelf software) such as tables inserted within the WYSIWYG editor lacking any outlines, making placement quite problematic (think “invisible table”).
Thankfully there is an answer with at least the current versions of CMS Made Simple (1.4.1 at the time of writing this) having an option to turn table outline borders on and off.
From within the CMS Made Simple admin control panel, go to: Extensions > TinyMCE WYSIWYG > Advanced (tab)
There you should see a checkbox for the option “Include only screen CSS”. Tick that, update the settings and give the WYSIWYG editor a whirl.
If all has gone well, you should now see the outline borders when editing page contents.
If you’ve ever wondered how to redirect users from a non-www (e.g. domain.com) to www (e.g. www.domain.com) URL when you’re using ASP (Windows Active Server Pages) on your website then wonder no longer.
By combining a simple 301 redirect with a check in the URL for the string “www”, you can ensure that users to your website always view the www version. Reasons for this could include ensuring that session state is maintained or for marketing purposes.
Implementation
If InStr(LCase(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")),"www") = 0 Then
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.domain.com"
End If
Simply include this code at the top of any pages you want to redirect (ideally add it to an include file that is used on every page).
The code above isn’t perfect as any URL with www in the name will never redirect, such as http://wwwshop.com, but some simple string manipulation will fix that.
The Fox and Hounds is a popular, lively pub in the area of Longthorpe in Peterborough, one of the old “townships” in the City and serves a fairly decent food menu along with usual drinks.
When I was recently sent a link to the Fox and Hounds website, I imagined the site to be a fairly traditional effort, giving the contact and location details of the pub, maybe a few sample menus and photos of the building or interior. After all it’s a busy place so you’d expect them to have at least a basic site in place…
…how wrong I was!
If you’re scratching your head on how to get an HTTP redirect with CMS Made Simple, then save your scalp and scratch no longer!
All you need to do is create a User Defined Tag (UDT) within your CMS MS admin (Extensions > User Defined Tags), call the tag “redirect” and paste the following code:
if( isset( $params['to'] ) )
{
global $gCms;
$manager =& $gCms->GetHierarchyManager();
$node =& $manager->sureGetNodeByAlias($params['to']);
$content =& $node->GetContent();
if (isset($content) && is_object($content))
{
if ($content->GetURL() != '')
{
redirect($content->GetURL());
}
}
else return '<!-- redirect udt - page not found: '.$params['to'].' -->';
}
To use, add {redirect to=”page_alias”} into one of your pages, or somewhere intelligently placed in your template. If it’s going into a template then you should have an if statement around this, or you’ll get some nasty redirection loops!
Credit to calguy1000 for writing the function.
Further reading:
Update
I don’t know if they have always been there but I’ve since noticed the CMS Made Simple tags redirect_url and redirect_page
To use, insert into your page or template:
{redirect_page page="some-page-alias"}
or
{redirect_url to="www.cmsmadesimple.org"}
According to a recent poll by CSS-Tricks, 40% of those in the survey said WordPress their favourite content management system.
Now I’m no expert when it comes to CMS platforms, but I’ve developed with a few, tested out a few others (before uninstalling and running away) and even use one (WordPress to be exact) for this blog, and I’m quite happy to put my neck firmly on the line and say WordPress isn’t a proper CMS by my standards.
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