Long Time No Read!

2018-03-24 2 min read Site Updates Marco

The spiders are busy deciding what happened to the old links on this site, while humans find the content just fine using the Search feature. But what happened? In short, we switched from Joomla to WordPress. It’s been a painful process, but one that couldn’t be postponed.

What was wrong with Joomla? Nothing major, really. Joomla is a fine piece of software, despite not being as popular or as beloved by the geeky masses. The crown of the former Kingdom belongs to WordPress, while the one of the other probably to Drupal, as far as PHP is concerned. But I grew increasingly frustrated with the direction Joomla was taking, and the camel’s back broke when I tried to get an Esperanto version of the software. I spent weeks translating and translating, the most boring and redundant strings, only to have the translation administrator disappear, then reappear, then declare he was going to take care of translating from then on, and then disappear again.

‘Sup, Dudes?

2011-04-05 3 min read Site Updates Marco

Well, it’s been a long while since the last update. I just checked, and it looks like the last entry on this blog was from just after my participation in the AIDS LifeCycle ride – that was LifeCycle 8, and we are at 10 now. I guess living in San Diego has been a lot of fun and a lot of work, and I hadn’t had much time to keep this site updated. Plus, I’ve been posting on a trillion other places – mainly on Blogger – and didn’t feel the need to keep this up-to-date.

ZooM broken

2006-09-19 1 min read Site Updates Marco

Darn it! After upgrading to Joomla 1.0.11, zOOm didn’t allow me to upload images any longer. It just shows me an empty page, no matter what option I select to add images. That’s certainly a security upgrade, but not necessarily the one I was after.

Independently, I went online and found out that there is a brand new version of zOOm available, 2.5.1 (I am still at 2.1.something), and I am deciding whether to upgrade. Follow me on my path to self-immolation on the altar of progress!

Joomla Upgrade

2006-06-28 1 min read Site Updates Marco

Netcraft reported a serious SQL injection flaw in Mambo and Joomla. Given that SQL injection is pretty much the worst that can happen to your site, I immediately ran to the Joomla download page and got myself the upgrade from 1.0.8 to 1.0.10. Ran flawlessly, except for the usual SEF problem reported on several sites.

To fix that, I had to go to includes/sef.php and manually change the behavior. How annoying! In this case, I had to go down to line 511 of the new file, where you’ll find the following lines:

Switched to Joomla

2006-03-12 1 min read Site Updates Marco

A new era for content management on this site: I switched from Mambo to Joomla, the new open-managed fork of the old CMS of choice. (I like the *open-managed* moniker.)

The transition was neither hard nor easy. I decided to try the copy instructions: copy the site to a new location, copy Joomla on top of it, then deal with all the problems.

Mostly, I had to retrieve files I had changed (like sef.php or the custom image on top). A little extra time went into debugging: I had to change the configuration to go to a different directory, and then revert back.

So far, the only issue I cannot figure out is the fact I have lost the ability to do rich edit: somehow the editor mambots are not firing. Otherwise, I particularly like the Administration interface, where they finally added sorting to the Content items. What a nightmare it was when you just wanted to publish an article, and there was no way of telling Mambo to please sort by date.

**NEWSFLASH:** I finally figured all I had to do was to set the variable $mosConfig_editor to the value of my favorite new editor, JCE, and all worked from there on.

Site Back!

2005-12-08 1 min read Site Updates Marco

After moving into the new house, DSL made me wait a few days for a connection. This was followed by the usual problems in finding cables, hardware, keyboards, etc. Long story short: the site is back up!

Site Going Down Tomorrow Until DSL Is Up

2005-11-29 1 min read Site Updates Marco

Since I am moving tomorrow and DSL won’t be started until the 5th, the site will be temporarily down. I will have diva.homelinux.org point to www.marcogazzetta.com and remove the redirect there, but the content will not be updated.

If you get a chance before the site is down, check out the pictures of the new house!

PHP Weight Table

2005-11-25 2 min read Site Updates Marco

Somehow this application follows me like a curse…

The PHP version of the weight table is available as a Mambo/Joomla component. It was my first attempt at a component, and I have to admit it was much easier than I thought. You can download the component from the Remository.

A long time ago I decided I needed to track my weight. I used to be a fat kid, and even in early adulthood I had real problems keeping my weight. In the winter, in particular, I would need comfort calories to an excess.

Hotlinks Off

2005-11-24 1 min read Site Updates Marco

I noticed that more and more of the requests to this site are for images that are embedded in somebody else’s pages. That’s quite a drag (as it has caused me almost to lose my other ISP for bandwidth violations until I turned it off).

What to do? Well, wonderful Google helped out.

People that link an image externally to save bandwidth are called bandwidth thieves and their activity is called hotlinking.

First Attempts With Joomla

2005-11-13 3 min read Site Updates Marco

tohI decided to bite the bullet and start migrating to Joomla. I wasn’t expecting much of an issue, since the code bases just forked, so I followed the easy path and copied Joomla over Mambo.

To do so, first create a copy of your Mambo directory:
cp -a mambo moomla
The moomla directory will be our new playing ground while we test the installation.

Next unpack Joomla into the moomla directory:
cd moomla
tar xvzf Joomla_{your version here}.tar.gz

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