It is a Vostro 1520 (entry level business class notebook) with a Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 3Gb RAM running Windows 7 Professional.

I am going to use Microsoft Office Professional 2010 Beta and Microsoft Security Essentials and see how this turns out. This lowers the TCO for the user (at least temporarily) and gets it up and running faster.

I will publish the results later in the year.

It seems that TuneUp sees Dropbox as something needing to be fixed, and since Dropbox has no Program Files entry, the whole thing goes away.

Supposedly TuneUp Utilities is working on a fix, but so far, no luck.

Microsoft PowerToys has an Image Resizer that allows you to simply select one or more images and then Right Click > Resize.  Bydefault, the program will even create copies so as to not mess with the originals!  How awesome!

Download Here Read about Other PowerToys

Combine this with my favorite batch image renaming application Namexif and you’re good to go.

Also,  I just found out this little pearl of wisdom about native Windows Image Renaming

I didn’t have this kind of luck when I searched Google. You guys have it sooooo easy.

The return window should begin 0.7875″ from the top of the page and 0.5625″ from the left edge of the page.

It should be 1″ tall, and 3.125″ wide. The logo and return address should be completely within this boundary.

The Address window should be 2.2125″ from the top of the page and 0.5625″ from the left edge of the page.

It should be .8″ tall, and 3.625″ wide and the address of the doctor should rest firmly within it.

These measurements allow for an invoice to rest inside a standard #9 Double Window Envelope whether the letter/invoice/statement shifts to the left, right, top, or bottom.

You’re welcome.

DynDNS.com + OpenVPN.net + DD-WRT.com = LUV

Part 2 – New Blog Settings

Ok, so you’ve already installed WPMU and you’re able to log in (and you’ve already changed the admin password to something memorable, right? (Users > Admin, bottom of the page)).

The first thing you need to do is put New Blog Defaults in your wp-contenet/mu-plugins/ folder.  This little beauty will do several things: change the default first post category from “Uncategorized” to “Articles”, remove the wordpress.com and wordpress.org links from the Blogroll and replace them with a link to your site’s main page, and change the default permalink structure to /categroy/post-title/ among others.   The most important part here is that it places the link to your main page in the blogroll.  This will improve usability for all parties, but especially first time visitors to your site.

It’s time to put CETS Simple Dashboard in to play. Download, and place in your mu-plugins folder.

Next, you need to navigate to Site Admin -> Options.  Here, you need to change “Allow New Registrations” to Enabled (assuming you followed my instructions in part 1) and also change the text in the default first post, enable third-party plugins, and deactivate those annoying dashboard feeds thanks to Simple Dashboard.

At this point  I would also recommend Plugin Commander.  This handy little sucker goes in your /wp-plugins/ folder (with plugin-commander.php going directly in the folder, and it’s subfolder in there too).  This tool will allow you to bulk activate, bulk deactivate, and manually assign plugins to any and all blogs.  Handy if you want to enable wp-cache or something like that as a feature on all blogs.

Next time, we’re going to look at widgets, admin plugins, and some other handy plugins for your users you may want to give up.

Part 3 – Widgets, Plugins, and More Plugins (Coming Soon)

Today I’ll be writing about how to ensure a safe fresh install of WPMU.  This assumes that you know how to configure a wordpress installation and that you’re comfortable with the creation of new databases through whatever hosting service you use.  I’m going to be focusing less on technical how-to’s,  and more on pointing you to the resources and configurations that work best to secure your site.

Ideally, we’re starting fresh after a clean install of Wordpress Mu (currently ver 2.6.5) and ready to upload plugins and change settings.

Part 1 – Secure Registrations

Let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not about to break virtual ground on the next edublogs.com or talkislam.com or other major blog site.  You’re probably wanting to start one for a family, group of students, small corporate site, special interest group, or local school.  For this reason we need to understand that our user base is a known quantity. It is a group of people – a finite number of users – if you will.  This means that it will probably be within your or your fellow admin helpers ability to authorize individual blogs.

Currently, on LCHSTeachers.com, because we have someone “on the inside” and we only want those people who are known to them to be able to access it, we simply have registration disabled and comments turned off.  Anyone who wants a new blog on the sites has to request one.  If this is a feasible concept for your install, then I recommend it.  It will save you tons of spam fighting and comment heartache.

The second best solution is to use wp-reCAPTCHA and Moderate New Blogs together.  This creates an environment where you cut down as much spam registration as possible with a CAPTCHA application, and simultaneously reinforce it with a “click-to-activate” option for all new blogs created from the admin area.  You’re going to (I hope) get an email every time a new blog is created anyway, now you can choose who is and is not activated by going to Site Admin -> Blogs.

Beyond that, the minimum I would use is the wp-reCAPTCHA plugin by itself.

Part 2 Will Be: New Blog Settings

All this can do is create entrenched internet media titans akin to broadcast networks whose power is unquestionable – and forces new media creators to seek out these juggernauts to get their media out, thereby creating some oversight/editorial process that will kill the essence of what the internet really is.

The internet is freedom. The internet is the ability to get the word out to millions of people with the click of a mouse.

Save The Internet

DallasGilliam.com – setting up the website for my best bud. helping to get some good pagerank.

Every time I do this I remember why I didn’t go in to tech (per se).  Managing a network is bad enough, but I can’t imagine going back to having a room full of dead white boxes trying to bring them back from the dead.

All this empty drive space allows me to do some regular backups, though.  The friend didn’t lose anythinig crucial on the failed drive, but next time we won’t take chances.  It’ll be redundant thanks to MS SyncToy and a couple other items.

Anyways, if you’re curious, going from XP Pro SP1 to Pro SP3 requires 148 updates and counting, plus the SP2 and SP3 downloads.  FUN TIMES.

BannersManager is the most robust banner management system for Joomla that I have found yet.  The big drawback is the lack of reporting, but I don’t guess you can fault them in that they’re doing this inside someone else’s system as opposed to OpenX which is an independent system.

With BannersManager I was able to get my average cached page load time down to just over 1 second.  Un-cached times are averaging just under 4 seconds.  If you’re a purist, you want the whole page to load in under 2 seconds on a dial-up connection, but with the massive amount of information we have displayed I don’t think that’s going to be feasible.

So, in summation:

Pros

• has seperate clients, ad positions, and banners for maximum flexibility
• loads quickly

Cons

• doesn’t send out reports to clients.  Bummer.

During this process I’ve had to call on friends all over the place to Beta test for me so I knew where the bugs were.  Nobody can find the flaws faster than someone with fresh eyes.

My good buddy Bofe commented on my just-barely-better-than-craptastic load time on the site, so I’ve been engaged with speeding up my sites.  I find that my experiences with Joomla center around mastering one aspect at a time, so this time it’s optimization to reduce load time.

Right now, I’m using the 23-odd domains that I have to experiment with different caching techniques in Joomla so that I have a good basis of comparison.  The Extensions section on Joomla.org led me to a tool called PageCache 2.0.10 from JoomlaPerformance.com and the immediate results were good.  I saw, according to their measurements, auxillary page load times decrease to almost 1/5 what they were.

The problem was the index pages.  On one domain, RDL-USA.com, I saw page load time soar from 9 seconds uncached (high) to 17-19 seconds cached (outrageous).  Still haven’t figured this out yet.

So, after reading the usual “I know more than you ever will” banter on the Joomla forums, I found that I might have another issue: just watching the page load I saw that ads.mylogancounty.com stayed in the status bar in the bottom left of Firefox for quite a while.  When I unpublished the modules containing those calls to OpenX, the page load time dropped DRAMATICALLY.

So, if you’re out there, please- I’d love to hear about your experiences with managing a Joomla site with Cache enabled and banner management.  Thanks!

All my Google searches for how to edit the default list yielded nadda for Windows, so I did it myself.

1. Make sure PS is closed.
2. Navigate to Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CSx/Required
3. Make a duplicate of “Default New Doc Sizes.txt” so it says “Copy of Default New Doc Sizes.txt” – Safety step so you don’t foul up.
4. Open the file “Default New Doc Sizes.txt” in your best text editor, preferably something like Notepad++.  Windows Notepad will screw it up.
5. In my case, I copied from line 33-38 and pasted a copy of this on line 40, changing “Default screen sizes” to “banners” and changing the sizes accordingly.
6. Save, close, and then restart Photoshop! See your new sizes listed!

www.RDL-USA.com

RDL is a premiere supplier of high-end implant restorations, especially full arch implant supported cases with immediate loading.

We’re still adding content as we go.  Be sure and check out the new “How-To” section see the videos we added.

I have to give a big shout-out to the following commercial Joomla components, though

Phil Taylor’s Phil-A-Form – absolutely amazing customer service – looks like it has been replaced with the new version, FORMS

Artio JoomSEF Commercial Version – lackluster customer service, but awesome component – worth it to not have their embedded advertising

JoomlaWorks Simple Image Gallery – a fantastic all around gallery system.  Easy doesn’t even come close to describing what it is.

Right now, we have the following features:

• Community Calendar
• Marketplace Photo Ads
• Job Board
• Business Directory
• News

All of the above features are free.  This really catches the people around here off guard.  I stopped in three places in the last week and every time they ask “Well, how are you going to make money?!”  I tell them I have a job, and I’m really trying to do something for the community.  I get a funny look…

Beyond that, future plans include having paid home and property listings and possibly a sponsor membership for those that really love it.

Looking at the stats I see that we’re already getting good organic search results and I believe it will only get better with time.

The site is running WordPress Mu 1.5.x and it rocks hard.  The flexibility of this thing is downright amazing.