mysite blog

New Theme

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:05:00 +1000

Well, with new hosting comes the motivation to finally learn to theme Silverstripe. So, here is the first effort. Far from ideal, or really even finished, but it is a start... I never claimed to be a designer!

The more I get into customising SS the more I love it. So easy to extend, modify, and use!

New Hosting

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:02:00 +1000

So, I have now moved my site to new reseller hosting in Australia, provided by Cove. Hopefully not too much breaks in the transition.

Oops...I borked it

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:31:29 +1000

If anybody noticed, subdomains were broken on my site for a few days due to rather aggressive mod_rewrite rules that were put in place by SilverStripe. Should all be fixed now though.

It is one of the few minor issues I have with SilverStripe so far, other than that it has to be one of the easiest to use CMSs I'm tried, but flexible enough to expand on the core modules if you require.

New site!

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:50:40 +1000

So I finally found a CMS that I want to use. It might take me a little time to get everything copied across to the new CMS, so please be patient.

SilverStripe Review

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:49:38 +1100

So, having used SilverStripe for a few days now, I thought I'd share my experience with it.

Installation
Install was quick and reletively painless. The usual entering of DB details, and checks for required filesystem permissions and PHP settings.

Administration
The admin section of SS is what initially drew me to it. I was looking for a CMS that was powerful, and yet easy to use. The backend of SS is broken up into several sections:

Site Content
Fairly obvious, this is where you create and modify your site content. A sidepane contains your site structure, allowing drag-and-drop reordering, revision history, and site reports. The main pane contains a consistant layout in the form of global tabs for each page- content, behaviou, to-do, Reports, and Access. These control how the page looks and behaves, as well as permissions.

The content tab changes subtley for each page type. For normal text pages this does not differ a great deal, however gallery pages will allow you to customise the layout of the gallery, and select images.

Files & Images

Newsletters

Security

Comments

Statistics

Help

An online demo is available at http://demo.silverstripe.com/

Critisms
Not everything is fantastic about SilverStripe however, I have run into a couple of small problems in the last few days.

Mod_rewrite
Firstly, SS uses mod_rewrite to achieve friendly URLs. Unfortunately the rewrite conditions don't restrict to the domain that it is installed to, so depending how your subdomains are set up, you may have issues with subdomains being passed though the rewrite engine.

Configuration
Changes to configuration could be a little better. As it is, to change themes you have to manually edit the config file. Themes have the site name and site slogan defined in each theme, rather than having these as variables. Email configuration is non-existent, all mail is passed through PHP's mail() function which can be a little restrictive.

Blog Module
Until writing up this post, I hadn't realised that the Blog module does no use the WYSIWYG editor in the admin panel, instead relying on the rather clunky BBCode for formatting. This is disapointing, but as it is only an 0.1 release, this may be improved.

No news is good news

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 22:26:38 +1000

Almost 1 year since my last news post...I should really do something more often around here! I'm looking into premade CMS packages, I just don't have the time to do the sorely needed redevelopment (or more accurately, finish the half-finished mess I have now!)

Google Webmaster Tools

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 22:25:26 +1000

We all love Google, right? They have given us a heap of great applications, on top of their superior search engine. Today's tool that has just been brought to my attention is the Webmaster Tools.

What is it?
Put simply, its a set of tools to help you optimise your site for search engines (namely Google, surprise surprise).

The tools included are seperated into 3 tabs: Diagnostic, Statistics and Sitemaps.

Diagnostic
Here you see errors that were encountered when the spider was crawling your site. Great for tracking down dead links, although realistically, most webhosting comes with much more in-depth reporting on such errors.

There also seems to be a tool for Mobile website crawl errors, which could be much more interesting if you are into that sort of thing.

Also include is a robots.txt tool, which allows you to modify your robots.txt and test it from the site. Again, who really cares. Perhaps my robots.txt isn't as complex as some are though, it could be useful for poeple who have more than a few lines to their robots.txt!

Statistics
This is more interesting, it ties into google searches to see what users have been searching for to reach your site. Again, this is something that any decent web stats can provide from referrer headers.

Something that it much more useful is the Crawl stats and page analysis, which breaks down you pages into High, Medium, Low, and unranked, depending on where your pages appear in google page ranks in searches. It also provides the highest ranked page on your site.

The page analysis evaluates your page content, breaking it down into the type of file, and the most common words used on your site. Considering most modern search engines work on page content, instead of the META keywords element, this is a handy little tool. If your pages mention one topic more than another, that should help the page ranking, and so on. Realistically, this is the most useful site in the package.

Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an interesting thing, it allows you to add an XML based sitemap to your site. Why you really need to do this isn't really well explained. It helps Google to find all the pages on your site, and to do it faster. Although if it can't find pages simply by crawling your site and following links, what is the chance that you will add them to the sitemap? I dunno, maybe I'm missing the point...

I guess this is probaby more useful for larger or less organised sites. And to aid in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in such an environment. Although, I think the effort would be better placed in producing cleaner, easier to crawl webpages than in creating a sitemap.

Conclusion
I'm a little underwealmed by this offering by Google I must admit. I had high hopes (while at the same time not entirely sure what to be hopeful for), and really what I got is something that most webstats (certainly awstats) already provide you in more detail. Although, like most Google services, its still in beta so perhaps I just need to keep an eye on the toolkit and hope it grows.

<a href='http://www.google.com/webmasters/'>Webmaster Tools</a>

- Sneddo

The Adsense experiment

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:17:48 +1000

Well, its been a week for the Google ads. The first day I earned a whopping seven cents! Thankfully it has picked up a little since then, the total for the week so far is $8.92. Not bad really, at this rate I'll have $100 (the minimum required for Google to pay you) in a couple of months.

Once that happens, the ads will be scaled back. I will probably keep the Firefox ad permenantly, but the ads appearing on each page will be scaled back to the first page viewed or something like that. That way I can hopefully earn enough to keep the site going over a longer period, which will mean less ads and annoyance for anybody that stumbles upon this place.

In other news, there is another guide that was added last week. It details how to hack Firefox extensions to work with newer Firefox versions than they were designed to.

- Sneddo

Eeek! Ads!

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 22:27:24 +1000

Right, so you may have noticed that google ad down the bottom of the page, unless you block them.

First up, sorry. I hate ads as much as the next person. At the moment, this is just a trial. I'm faced with the decision of whether or not to keep my webspace, as it really gets very little use other than filestorage, which there are lots of free alternatives out there. If I can earn a bit of money to help subsidise the costs, then the site will stay. So please, get clicking!

After a few weeks, or a month, they will be reviewed. I may scale them back to select pages, I may make them show only on the first page you see, I may remove them completely. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as well, so <a href='/?page=Contact'>let me know</a>.

- Sneddo

Update: Sorry about the 2 ads on the Firefox page, it won't stay like that permenantly, I'm just getting to grips with AdSense and what is available.

woooooo new theme!

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:13:09 +1000

After using OS X for a while on my MacBook, I decided this place was decidedly un-Mac-like (hey, its a word now). All up it was a bit of a rushed effort, and bits of it seem a little *too* plain, but its good enough for now :P

Minor updates

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 22:12:03 +1000

Some minor updates:
IE should display the news page a little nicer
A few less errors on some of the pages.

Hopefully it won't be nearly 2 months until the next update ;)

Sneddo.net two-point-oh

Wed, 17 May 2006 22:12:27 +1000

With the extra time I've had lately (job security is for suckers :P) I decided I'd finally get around to tidying this site up. The original site was a pretty hacky, quick and dirty site back when I was really just getting to grips with PHP.

The new site should make adding content, and maintenance that much easier for me. Which should mean things actually change around here occasionally. Visually, not much has changed. Its mostly the same content, although updated slightly. There are a few things that were removed, that may return in the future (more on that later).

Some bookmarks (if anyone bothered) may not work, Firefox extensions may not auto-update, and some content may not be available (either intentionally or not).

Hopefully not too much will break moving from my dev box to here...

/me crosses fingers