Blue Bridge Development Blog

Locating Content in Joomla

John — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:01:00 +0000

This is a short screencast tutorial on Joomla's organization and locating information within a site in order to change it.

Uploading and Linking with JCK Editor

John — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:37:00 +0000

I have a client who wants to use the JCK Editor to post content for download from his site. In the tutorial below, I demonstrate how to do this for a pdf, an Open Office document, and an image.

Email Marketing Engine

John — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:45:00 +0000

The Bottom Line

Email marketing is a valuable tool for small businesses and the best way to get a campaign rolling is to use a service based site like Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp, and etc.

Email marketing is a very popular way to grow your customer base on the web. It allows you to reach out to your customers in a way that is permissive, regular, and cheap. The first two points are great, but being cheap is especially important, because as small businesses, we can't afford the same levels of marketing as medium and large sized businesses.

But, how does it work? What do you do to get a email campaign going?

Start With Other forms of Marketing

I'm no marketing guru, but that's not going to keep me from giving you advice: marketing is a whole picture deal, not one or two efforts. To be successful, you have to take a strategic approach and market through a variety of methods and environments that support each other.

SSL Certificates Explained

John — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:35:00 +0000

The Bottom Line

If you collect private information on your website or want to sell goods from your site, you need to purchase a SSL Certificate and a dedicated IP address.

You've probably bought something online. You go through a site, put items in a virtual shopping cart, and then click the check out button. If you're like me, you check the little favicon in the location bar and the website address to see if the color changes and whether the address begins with, "https://". Or, you might check to see if the lock icon on the bottom bar is locked. These symbols tell you that the page you're viewing is safe to use and your information is being protected. The trigger that makes these symbols appear is the SSL certificate.

What is an SSL certificate?

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and is a way for your website to communicate privately with your customer's web browser by encrypting the information being sent back and forth.

Memorial Day

John — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:22:00 +0000

I try keep this blog focused on small business and web related topics, however today I'm going to drift into personal territory for this post because it's Memorial Day. I worked all day and didn't visit the cemetery, however last September I did visit a veteran's grave in New York. It was a personal pilgrimage that I will repeat many more times in my life. The veteran I visited was a guy named Joey Tremblay who was one of my closest friends. He was killed April 27th, 2005 in Iraq.

I got to know Joey my second year in the Marines. We served together in Golf 2/3, based out of Hawaii. I got drafted into a program that pitted infantry squads against other infantry squads in competition. Joey and me were in the same squad and I remember the first time I really talked to him was in a mock town in the middle of the Okinawa jungle. We trained all day and had a few minutes of free time before passing out, so me and Joey went up to the top of a concrete church and he told me about where he came from and what he left behind. With a cigarette in hand he would crack jokes and

Internet Caveman

John — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:51:00 +0000

The Bottom Line

If you're using Internet Explorer version 6, it's time to upgrade. Using IE6 is like cooking over a fire when you have a stove available.

If you're reading this post in Internet Explorer humor me and do a little test. Go to the help button and select, "About Internet Explorer." If you don't see a help button or "About Internet Explorer," displays your version as 7 or 8, then pat yourself on the back-- you're not an Internet Neanderthal. If you see an old looking illustration with a copyright that says 2001, well... let me be the first to welcome you to the, "Information Super Highway." That term is just a little older than your web browser. You're surfing that highway on the equivalent of stone wheels, just like a digital Fred Flintstone.

Character Management

John — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:17:00 +0000

The Bottom Line

What set of skills within your occupation provide synergy, give you a competitive edge, and still keep you flexible enough to adapt? What are you doing to advance those skills?

Character management sounds like a very serious topic, and it is, but it's probably not what you infer it to be. I think if I were to see a blog post titled, "Character Management," on a business blog, I would expect some talk about principles and the moral compass and how it's easy to talk the talk but harder to walk to the walk etc. etc. That would be a good topic, however, this post isn't about that kind of character management. This post is about managing wizards, warriors, and druids.

Three years ago I became addicted to an online game called, "World of Warcraft." My addiction was pretty mild, but it was enough to spawn more than one argument with my girlfriend. I'd say that I was lucky in that, because WOW, as it's commonly referred to, has caused people to abandon their normal lives, wreck their marriages, drop out of school, and even committ suicide. It's that fun. :)

What WOW has going for it is

The Old is New

John — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:36:00 +0000

When I was in junior high, I used to read a series of fantasy novels called, "Dragonlance." In the Dragonlance world, history was divided by an event called the Cataclysm. Prior to the Cataclysm there was great wealth and prosperity, but also much corruption. After the Cataclysm, all the dominant institutions were wiped away and the world was in the stages of rebuilding itself (the setting for the book).

Flocking

John — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:13:00 +0000

The Bottom Line

Flock is a great tool for networking and social media, but not(yet) going to save you time for your business networking.

Social media is here to stay. By social media, I mean all the user generated content on blogs, Facebook, Flickr, and etc. It's been available via bulletin board systems (Remember Land of the Red Dragon?) long before the web went boom and will probably be there when the machines develop consciousness and rise up to destroy us all. It's a surprisingly good way for people to connect and we're just starting to see it really develop speed. One of the ways that it's changing the landscape of the web is through the browser, which is beginning to become more socially aware with feed readers and plugins for social tools. Flock, is a web browser that takes this a step further by being designed around social media.

Own it or Rent it?

John — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:56:00 +0000

The Bottom Line

Their are advantages and disadvantages to using software as a service. You gain ease of set up at a low cost and you lose flexibility, power, and freedom.

I've got blogging on my mind. I've spent the last few weeks digging through the guts of Wordpress(the most popular self hosted blogging platform now). It's been interesting-- a challenging job that will probably end up on my portfolio. While I've been working, I occasionally have thought about a succinct conversation I had with a few members of my I Take the Lead networking group.

In March, I offered to set up a blog for free as a way to network. Setting up a blog is not that hard to do, but most people don't possess the technical familiarity with web hosting to get it done. When I announced my promotion, a few of them raised their eyebrows and said, "What's so hard about setting up a blog? We've set up like, ten of them." I told them that there is a lot that you can do wrong setting up a blog(because there is), but internally I was a little confounded. I really doubted that the people in