Blog

First Kindle eBook published

Details: Published: Wednesday, 28 August 2013 09:11

We have published our first ebook! We took H.G. Wells book, Anticipations, where he makes forecasts about the future and annotated it with illustrations, a glossary and extracts from his autobiography and one of his other books where he discusses it. This book was written primarily as a trial of publishing on Kindle. As most of the content is public domain in the US only it is for sale in amazon.com and not amazon.co.uk. We have another book in development. We will update the blog when it is available.

Switching PHP magic quotes off

Details: Published: Saturday, 27 July 2013 11:31

Having moved to Joomla 3 I have discovered the joy of php magic quotes killing links in articles. Despite this being a shared server, the way to switch them off is simple. Create a file called php.ini and save a copy of it to the root folder (i.e. where you have the Joomla index.php file) and also in the administrator folder. The file should have these contents:

magic_quotes_gpc = Off
magic_quotes_runtime = Off
magic_quotes_sybase = Off
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so

Thanks to Stack Overflow for this

Migrated TomLeonard.co.uk to Joomla 2.5

Details: Published: Friday, 26 July 2013 19:21

I have just migrated http://tomleonard.co.uk to Joomla 2.5, from 1.5 which was too old to be secure.

If you do have to migrate, I can strongly recommend using sp_upgrade to copy the data over. Also, its worth checking if the template you used has an updated version for the more recent joomla as that does make it a lot easier.

Updating Twitter automatically

Details: Published: Saturday, 27 July 2013 10:54

In case you want to update Twitter automatically with every new Joomla post, there seem to be many ones you can choose. I have decided to try AutoTweet to send to my not very loved Twitter account @leonarduk. This is a test post of that update.

Excellent cloud services for the small business

Details: Published: Monday, 22 July 2013 18:03

My business wouldnt be the same without 2 cloud services, Teamlab.com and Freeagent.com.

With Teamlab.com you can create many projects each with milestones and tasks and assign them to team members who are auto emailed on changes, or when someone adds a comment. I find this feature very useful as keeping track in emails can be quite tricky. It can also host a wiki and allow you to store and edit documents on the site. They seem keen to expand on the site too.

My accounts and book keeping is made much simpler thanks to freeagent.com. I use this to track the time I spend on a particular contract and then generate the invoice for it. It also file VAT returns and the PAYE RTI stuff. Very useful time saver.