Information management is crucial to our success. We all have a great number of friends, contacts, email accounts and passwords. It is a huge challenge for us to manage all of this important data; even greater for people in a business or sales situation.  EfficientPIM is Personal Information Management software that can tame this huge task. What is the value of PIM? Here are the important functions of EfficientPIM.

EfficientPIM Software To Manage All Your Data is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

WordPress Backup Plugin That Works is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

One website customer that I met recently wanted an eCommerce site to sell health food products. It seems that Herbalife allows their independent dealers to see products from a website as long as the prices are visible only to logged in members. After some Internet search I found that it is possible to show different HTML content to those who are logged in vs those who are not. The use if a simple PHP If/Else statement allows one to keep certain information only for logged in members.

The $logged variable is used to set the condition which will be be used depending on whether or not the visitor is logged in. By using the statement below the designer or developer has the power to show an alternative HTML content intended only for those who are logged in.

This information was not easily found in the Internet. The info was posted in the forums at prestashop.com. The man who posted this tip had attached some example Smarty templates to show how he had used this. The attachments had been pulled down and led to an error page. I had to do some digging around but was able to find the necessary steps in order to hide product prices from visitors until they log in. The fix is needed on most of the Smarty templates called product, product_list, product_comparison and a variety of product related pages and the template entitled homefeatured.

This tip is not rated for the beginner; I would rate it as an 8 on a scale of 1 – 10. Although I will say that none of my trial-and-error actions resulted in any permanent harm to the site. Be sure that you keep a good copy of each page to replace it if you foul it all up. Most of the time I simply change the name of the original by adding a couple of extra (xx) at the beginning of the file name. You can always delete the mistake and change the saved file back to the original name. I was pleased, at the end, that I had modified the site to accommodate the customer. I had changed the site so that product prices were hidden to all but the logged in members.

Show Different Content To Logged In Members in Prestashop is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

Bloggers and people who are hoping to promote their businesses are on the lookout for good ways to advertise. RSS Graffiti is a Facebook App that may help with some free advertisement. With RSS Graffiti you can show your blog's RSS feed on your Facebook wall. Several valuable options make RSS Graffiti a useful way to get your name out via Facebook.

Setting up RSS Graffiti was not a difficult project. You are given the option to post a micro version which is similar to a Twitter post or to use a full post which shows the first few lines of your blog post. Any graphic that is in the beginning of your blog post will also show in your RSS Graffiti feed. A link to your blog is posted at the end of the feed. If you have a Facebook Group you can feed your blog RSS to the Group as well as your Wall. You can feed more than one blog by using RSS Graffiti. At the current time I have two blogs set up to feed in Facebook using this App. I have them set up to feed to my Group – Illinois Valley Website Consultation, as well as my Wall. Options are available as to how often RSS Graffiti checks your RSS Feed and how soon the post will be shown on your Wall.

You may wonder if this RSS feed will work out well with our Facebook friends. People use Facebook for various reasons and some may become irritated if they think they are being given frequent advertisements. I have a lot of friends who are there mainly for political affiliation and I do not know them personally. Many of them may soon be looking for services that I offer. I doubt that many of them will mind seeing my Blog posts come down their wall. Also, given the possibility that I am offering some sort of valuable information I do not believe that many people will mind. I have not had any complaints and I prefer to believe that my posts are offering valuable free information that will help people.

The RSS Graffiti works well and I and my friends see the tasteful Blog feed posts come by as often as I post to my blog. I will recommend RSS Graffiti as a good Facebook App and I like it a lot more than the constant flood of silly, time-wasting Apps that come to me every week

Feed Your Blog To Your Facebook Wall is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

There is a lot of talk about Cloud Computing going around these days. Cloud computing is the concept that Applications that formerly needed to be installed on our PC would be run on a server and we would access them online. The claim is that intensive computations such as those needed in engineering and similar fields can be done much quicker via cloud computing than by applications hosted on a local computer. I have a number of questions about cloud computing that need to be answered before I am ready to believe that it will benefit me. If the server goes down I may be able to go to Wal-Mart and get a new hard drive quicker than it can be repaired. What about security? If security fails, all sorts of criminal types may gain access to my data that is stored in the Cloud.

There are some great online services that I like and am using now.

LastPass is a great Password Minder that I use. People who have a lot of different passwords have a lot of trouble keeping up with them. LastPass is an incredibly secure service that stores, encrypts and serves your own personal Password Vault. There is a free version and a paid version with additional features. With LastPass you have a master password that gives you access to your Password vault. Your passwords are encrypted on the LastPass server so that no one at the company can access them. Your password and personal data are encrypted on your computer so that no one can obtain it. LastPass will guide you to creating bullet proof passwords. I have discovered that I am able to manage dozens of passwords for my own and my customer's servers and keep them straight. LastPass offers me the option to organize passwords into a number of different categories of my choosing. This is an invaluable tool and it has earned very high ratings from a number of ratings services.

IntenseDebate is an online Forum that is becoming on of my new favorites. This service is a quick and simple forum that you can set up on any page of your website, blog or even eCommerce site. When you want a simple forum to offer commenting options for your readers IntenseDebate is it. There is no need to set up a new database or go through numerous confusing configurations; you just enter your URL and then paste the code block into your page. Your readers can post by simply entering a name and email address. You can also set the option for them to log in and post via OpenID or post from their Twitter or Facebook accounts. This service makes a nice looking forum without going through a lot of trouble.

Dropbox rounds out the field as a neat storage service that I can access from all of my computers. I have used online storage in the past but none was as easy and helpful as Dropbox. Dropbox gives one a reasonable amount of storage with its free service – 2G. This account can be linked to all of your computers and it can be configured to share files with your friends. Dropbox works with PCs as well as Macs and a number of mobile devices. And your Dropbox files are available to you even when you are offline. This is a great service to those who work with constantly changing files and on several different computers. If I go to see a client and have made some changes to a graphic or a file I can instantly go to my Dropbox and get the file if I have forgotten to bring my thumb drive.

How long it will be before we are using Word Processing and Photo Editing tools in the Cloud, I do not know. But I am impressed by what creative and imaginative people are offering my right now with helpful online services. Try these out and if you find any great ones drop me a line and let me know.

Handy Online Services That I Love is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

In June of this year Carmen Quiroz won our contest for a free website. Carmen and her mother Maria have a Herbalife business and have been using Amazon.com to sell their products. Carmen informed me that she would like an Ecommerce site in order to sell the Herbalife and Organo products. The next few weeks involved a pleasant journey to the fulfillment of her dreams.

Prestashop was the tool of my choice to build the online shop. Prestashop is an award winning PHP Ecommerce script which is lite, stable and uses the Smarty Template system. Prestashop comes loaded with plenty of modules to display your products, feature best sellers, accommodate customers and to make use of the payment gateway of your choice (PayPal and Google are quickly available).

Carmen and Maria had some special requirements. They have a clientele which is mainly Hispanic and so they wanted the site to include Spanish as the default language and translation available for English. Translation is easy with Prestashop and I used the Lingoes translation tool to complete the translation. They wanted a Forum and suggested a Bulletin Board which they had heard of. However I found a free Module called SimpleForum which makes use of the IntenseDebate Forum Service. This is a great little forum which is hosted as a service and allows one to have a forum without using a Database. I found it easy to set up, the module was just an additional PHP page and a TPL template in the themes folder. It is a robust and workable solution and a good alternative to setting up a script to run your forum.

The process took us about 6 to 7 weeks and was completed with a minimum of trouble and about 14 emails. I am turning offer the keys to Carmen and Maria this week and have installed about 12 products to help them get started. Visit their shop, Maxima Nutricion and see the great Herbalife and Organo products that they host.

Greg’s Webs Awards Free Website To Luck Winner is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

When starting with Word Press I looked at various Plugins for backing up the site and Database. I didn't really find a solution that I liked. After some time I spotted an article that led me to the perfect Backup solution for WordPress. The wp Time Machine when coupled with the Dropbox web service makes the perfect tool for backing up your blog.

The Plugin wp Time Machine will back up your blog and save it to the Dropbox online storage service, Amazon’s S3, or FTP accounts. The Plugin is not hard to configure (took less than ten minutes) and allows you to save your site as a.zip file or .tar.gz file. The developer's site advises that wp Time Machine will save.

1. Your data
2. Your files (and uploads) — everything in wp-content
3. Your .htaccess file
4. Instructions for a smooth recovery

Everything is neat, smooth and easy and the backups are stored offsite. This way, if something catastrophic happens with your hosting account you will not loose your WP blog. I have two separate WP Blogs set up to send complete backups to my Dropbox account. I like it very much.

The Dropbox online storage service is a very worthwhile thing in itself. Dropbox offers a free 250 MB account. The 50 GB account costs just $9.99/month. After registering for your free account you can configure several computers to use the account. Then you can upload files to your Dropbox from any of your computers. Use it at the office if you need files at home. When you get home go to your Dropbox and download the files that you need. Now I no longer need a USB Drive to move files between my laptop and my desktop.

If you need a simple but powerful backup solution for WordPress take a look at wp Time Machine.

wp Time Machine – A Great Backup Tool For WordPress is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

We waited for Drupal 7 for a long time. I made my first Drupal site with version 5 and then took up Drupal 6 in a short while. After more than two years Drupal 7 came out. This version of Drupal comes with a good number of great new features. My first Drupal 7 site has been stable, easy to theme, flexible and full featured. My first Drupal 7 site is very stable and I am very pleased with it.

Installing or updating modules is a breeze. The install feature allows you to upload and install a module from your computer without using FTP. You can also install the module directly from the download URL on Drupal.org. When it comes time to update a module it can be done by a couple of clicks. You do not need to delete the old module; instead the update feature will upload and install the new version of the module for you. The next page gives you a notice reminding one of the need to run the update script.

Drupal 7 is much easier t update when a core update is necessary. It is necessary to upload the new core Drupal version via FTP or other method. But the necessity of turning off all the contributed modules is done away with. This is a huge improvement. The core update will be made without needing to worry about turning off the Contrib modules or changing the theme to Garland. When everything is ready you will be reminded to run the update script. Everything is very quick and very tidy. This makes me love Drupal that much more.

At this writing the Views module had just been updated to Release Candidate 1. A number of the modules that I have used in the past are not ready yet. Still I have been able to do everything that I have wanted to accomplish with my site: First Church of God – Marseilles, IL All is well and I am very pleased.

Drupal 7 And Usability is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

Drupal is the Open Source Content Management System which was invented by Dries Buytaert while a student at the University of Antwerp. This was about ten yeas ago and it was developed to go along with a make-shift wireless internet system which he made to benefit the students at the university. Since then Drupal, which comes as a free download at Drupal.Org, has become the PHP framework behind a number of world class websites such as those for Sony BMG and the Whitehouse. I started to use Drupal about 4 years ago when it was in version 5. Version 7 came out at the beginning of this year and my enthusiasm for it grows with each passing day.

What's New In Drupal 7?

Before, in Drupal, the designer/developer needed to add a Cron script in order to make the site run properly. If you are a Drupal user you remember the days when we got the famous notice, "Cron has not yet run". It was necessary to add Pormanscron or some other solution in order to get the intermittent tasks done which maintained the site. With Drupal 7 a cron script has been included.Also included in version 7 is the famous Content Construction Kit. This allows the designer or builder to build custom content types out of a variety of different fields. This is a great and powerful tool which gives us the power to add efficient and creative content to many pages without the need to build them over and over. The Administration Menu was build into the Drupal Core also, This helpful menu at the top of each page gives quick access to all of the administrative sections of the site. Many things are streamlined in Drupal 7. Modules can not be uploaded in their archived state and installed without using your FTP program. You then find a convenient link to go and enable the newly installed module. The contextual links found in the site to aid the administrator give quick access to modifying blocks and other parts of the site.

How Well Does It Work?

The new version of Drupal is working out great for me. I have only found one minor glitch and that has not caused any real problems. There are not many contributed themes ready at this time. I found a nice CSS theme that I liked and ported it to Drupal 7. The real work was done in less than a day and a half. Everything worked out fine with a little bit of experimentation on my local installation. I have felt hindered slightly by the fact that some of the contributed modules are not ready for use. One that I really miss is the SWF Tools module, which aids in embedding videos and flash animation. I have tried to embed videos in the templates and the nodes of the site without the aid of SWF Tools. This has worked out very well and it is possible to use the swfobject.js script to add flash to the site. The Views Module is still in Beta 3 at the moment but I have found it dependable after some cautious use. At this point I have been able to build my site exactly as I have wanted it with the limitations of unfinished modules. Everything is running well with an allotted 68M of php memory.

Why Does This All Matter?

Two years ago I read that the Catholic Archdiocese of Peoria, IL had a network of about 24 sites built on the Joomla CMS. They needed to get something new, badly. The system was a resource hog for the server and several of the sites had been hacked. They called in A Drupal expert from Chicago and had all of the sites built into one multi-site installation of Drupal. When the guys got done the whole thing ran better and it took far less server resources than in the previous configuration. People have said that Drupal has a higher learning curve than Joomla but I just can't see it Everything in Drupal has seemed better than Joomla, to me, even from back in version 5 of Drupal. I think and hope that Drupal is poised to knock the stuffings out of Joomla. If you build CMS websites all of this should matter a lot.

Ramblings About Drupal 7 is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer

Use Caching With Your Content Management System

A Content Management System is a Database Driven Website which creates pages in real-time rather than storing them. The database holds the page content and several templates form the structure of these pages. These sites are powerful since they can construct new pages based on user input and show pages based on user preferences. When a user clicks a link the page forms as the database spits out the content into the sections of the page that will display them. This makes for a slower page load time than with a static site. The database must work each time there is a page request and this slows down depending on the number of users who are browsing the same page.

Caching is a tool that helps with this problem. Many CMS systems including Drupal, Joomla and WordPress allow for page caching. The Caching system stores a copy of the web pages recently accessed. For a certain amount of time new page calls will receive these saved copies. This speeds up the page load time a great deal. The down side is that a webmaster updating the site must clear the cache or he will see the older saved version. When members make posts they may not show up immediately due to caching. When the caching system starts over again the new features will show up.

Find And Use The Caching Feature For Your CMS Or Blog System

Drupal 7 has its caching features listed at "admin/config/development/performance". There are caching features available to work at various levels as suits your needs. WordPress requires a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache. These plugins are very advanced and work very well. It will pay to look into and configure these caching features. For sites which contribute something very popular it will be crucial. Caching is crucial should your site wind up on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. This fame will generate so many hits that your site will go down without effective caching; the database will not keep up with the demand.

These tips will help you speed up the loading time of your website. Keep your eyes on the horizon because there are newer methods coming out all the time.

Make Your Web Page Load Faster Part II is a post from: Greg's Webs Tech Blog. Quality web design by a Qualified Website Designer