Social Marketing

Facebook, Youtube, Blogspot, ... social marketing is free and easy.
Yeah Right... Spent the last 2 days on figuring out several stuff. Connecting Facebook and Blogspot, should be easy, but isn't. NetworkedBlogs came to the rescue.
Creating a Facebook page on your company, pretty straightforward, getting the blogposts in, and adding videos... Not that easy. Maximum upload size to Facebook for videos is 1MB... So decided to use youtube... Which has a nice feature btw: audio swap, you can add audio to your movie.. But it's fairly slow and I didn't manage to hear previews...
Anyway, this message is just to check if it gets promoted to the fanpage :D

News & editor-rights in CMSMS

Note to myself: Make sure editors have the right to publish news in new CMS-installations...

Apparently, Editors (which is the default right we assign to CMS-users) do not have the ability to publish their news. They can write newsmessages, but an Admin or superuser needs to approve the news to publish on the front-end website. Somehow logical for large websites with lots of users, but useless for websites with 1-5 content editors...

Networkedblogs: Integrating Blogspot in Facebook

To open up this blog to a larger audience, I was looking for a nice solution to integrate this feed into Facebook.
Facebook offers a way to integrate one blog-feed using Notes, but the messages are pulled into facebook, losing every link to the original blog.
Networked Blogs however is a nice Facebook app, that shows a short summary of the blogpost and adds an URL to the original blogpost. Exactly what I was looking for...

Help Kill IE6

This morning, one of our customers called, to ask why IE6 wasn't supported in our newly developed software application to manage taxi-transfers (airportservice.be)...
IE6 is like a pain-in-the-ass to all webdevelopers, that just doesn't seem to go away. Well, from now on, Agito will start fighting against it, instead of trying to fix it.
http://ie6update.com/ is a brilliant plugin, with a very subtle, but extremely well built suggestion to install a recent browser. This plugin will be included in all of our future websites.

IE6 was launched on August 27, 2001. It's unbelievable that in february 2010, 20% of internet users is still using IE6. IE6 is equivalent to slow loading of pages, high security risks, extremely crappy support for javascript, ...

For our customers... Some figures:
Browser Stats
Tide turns against IE 6 as usage drops
Google announced it's discontinuity to support IE6 in google docs
IE6 Risks

Enough said. Please, upgrade.

CMSMS upgrade

Recently I reported the problems we were experiencing with PHP 5.3 being adopted very fast by some large hosting companies (one.com).
Well the people at CMSMS did a great job with version 1.7 Cape Verde. I've updated our website without difficulties. In the coming week, our customers websites will be upgraded, and modules we adjusted will be checked...

Mantis Bugtracker Upgrade

Recently upgraded Mantis Bugtracker to version 1.2.0. Finally they got rid of their extremely basic color scheme!
Interface could be more 2010, but it is and stays extremely functional.

Subdirectories and URL rewriting

When we install CMS-systems, we always create them in a seperate subfolder on the webspace. This to keep things clear, and logically structured.
However the problem that then occurs is that URLs tend to get ugly.
E.g. our webspace looks like: http://www.agito.be/CMS/index.php, instead of http://www.agito.be/index.php

.htaccess files are an ideal solution, but often difficult to use. Today I managed to remove the /CMS/ part out of the URL without side-effects. Here is the code:

RewriteEngine on
#
# Internally rewrite requests for all pages in "/" to pages in /CMS/
#
# If not already rewritten to /CMS/
RewriteCond $1 !^CMS/
# Prepend "/CMS" to the requested URL-path
RewriteRule (.*) /CMS/$1 [L]

If CMSMS would remove the index.php to be shown, I would be completely happy :)


Toggl

Estimating the budget of a software project is extremely difficult. It becomes even more difficult if you don't have any idea how much time was spent on previous projects...
Therefor we decided to look for an easy to use time-registration system. There are numerous systems available, some paid solutions, some free, some require installation, some are service-based.
We decided to go for Toggl (www.toggl.com), nice interface, desktop applications for windows and mac, Iphone tool, ... Everything we need. Too bad my Nokia E71 doesn't have a Toggl app.

From now on, we will be tracking every software development project we realise.

Pretty URL's in CMSMadeSimple

Pretty URLs can be achieved quite nicely in CMSMS. I've used the following guideline, and I'm quite satisfied with the results:

http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/User_Handbook/Tips_And_Tricks/Installation