I found this site the other day and love the concept of using code — CSS — to make rounded corners. Nice work. It will solve several code and workflow issues for me.

SpiffyCorners.com

I’ve been re-introduced to some social networking tools this past few weeks. I was thinking I’d build a custom Joomla website for the Patagonia Tools for Grassroots Organizer’s Conference I’ll be attending at the end of the month, and then had the idea that I was really missing an opportunity to do something better — and easier.

Instead of a Joomla site, I’ll be using Ning. Read More…

I really love the power and flexibility of Joomla. (I know that I’m suppose to write Joomla with an exclamation point at the end, as that technically is the name for the project, but I just can’t do it.) The system is so powerful to begin with and so easily modified, I can’t imagine building a site today with out.

One simple hack I do to nearly every template I work with is to modify the call for the breadcrumb trail that one can use. That’s the so called “pathway” function within Joomla. Most of the time, you’ll find a line in a template that says:

mosPathway();

I change this to be:

if ($option!="com_frontpage") { mosPathway(); }

The results of this change is to simply hide the pathway on the home page. Why would the user need a breadcrumb on the home page? They are at the top of the tree and if that’s not already obvious, there are bigger problems with the information architecture and design.

After six months, I’ve finally gotten back to some work on Advocacy - my Joomla component for providing non-profits and NGOs with a tool for creating email and letter writing campaigns. I originally worked on this component for the Nevada Wilderness Project during a Patagonia Internship and it was pretty bare boned at that time.

Now it’s feeling pretty polished. Read More…

Not long ago, I changed my Joomla template to one from RocketTheme.com that has their RokZoom feature. RokZoom is a customized version of the popular slimbox javascript tool. It works great and I plan on using to update my site content where I describe what Open Source projects I work on and show samples of past work. However, one place it didn’t work was in my MojoBlog. Now I have it figured out though.

Read More…