John Crumpton

Adobe is working on a web-based PowerPoint alternative called Presentations, built in Flash.

It seems to have the same feature set as PowerPoint, however it’s all through the browser so different people can login and review/make changes. I like the fact you can share your work-in-progress presentation with your designer then login again to see what design improvements they’ve made. Saves sending all the back and forth versions through email for little changes.

It exports to PDF, however you can play your presentation through the browser.

It’s also completely free and they don’t have plans to charge for it as yet.

Try it out yourself at Adobe Labs.

If you use several templates on your Joomla site, such as a homepage template and a global template, you’ll know that the search results page irritatingly uses the homepage template and not your global template.

It is possible to change this by adding a hidden field to the search module, here’s how:

Within your homepage template folder create a new directory called “html” and then “mod_search”

Copy the “default.php” file from /modules/mod_search/tmpl/ into your newly created “mod_search” folder under your template folder.

Open this file at near the bottom just before the end of the form add:

 <input type="hidden" name="Itemid" value="2" />

The value refers to the menu item, we need to create a new hidden menu in the administrator, add a search menu item, make a note of the menu’s Item ID, then add this to the above code under the value.

Don’t publish the hidden menu in the module manager, we’ve just creating this to get the Item ID of the search page.

A quick security checklist for your website, whether you’re running Joomla, Zencart or a bespoke content management system.

1. Choose a complicated password, at least 10 characters alpha-numeric including letters, numbers and upper-and-lower-case. Use Goodpassword.com to generate it
2. Create a new login for each person that needs to administer the site and don’t share login details. That way you have an audit trail to track down the source of the compromise
3. Use encrypted connections for accessing server files, such as FileZilla which supports SFTP or WinSCP
4. Create a administrator user account with unique name and delete your administrator user
5. Rename your administrator or admin folder to something unique and include numbers in the name
6. Once your content management system is configured, change the configure.php file to chmod 444 (read only)
7. On folders you’d like to protect from being accessed, for example the images folder, use a .htaccess to stop browsing with the following code:

   Options -Indexes

8. Keep all files CHMOD 644. If you need to edit the files, set to read-write before making changes.
9. Keep all folders CHMOD 755
10. Stay up-to-date with the latest software and patches for your CMS
11. Check log files for suspicious activity regularly
12. Remove unneeded templates
13. Backup regularly

A leading enewsletter provider has analysed the last six months of data covering more than 250 million emails opens and compiled the most popular email clients as of February 2009.

33.0% Outlook 2000, 2003, Express
16.5% Yahoo! Mail
16.0% Hotmail
6.1% Outlook 2007
5.5% Apple Mail 3
5.1% Gmail
3.6% iPhone 2.0
2.1% Apple Mail 2
1.7% Lotus Notes 6-7
1.7% AOL Mail

It’s intersting to note than Outlook 2000, Hotmail and Yahoo are the most popular, as coding enewsletters is slightly different for each system. Ensure you test your enewsletter in each one.

Some useful HTML codes for making a website look good, best used at larger sizes for example in headings.

Just insert the code instead of the usual character. The most useful being the apostrophe or right single quote ’ which looks alot better than the prime or rat’s tooth ' as it’s sometimes called.

’s compared with the usual 's