Category: Technology

We use Microsoft Publisher quite a bit at work, I am finally getting to know my way around it properly – thrown in at the deep end really, I had to produce the quarterly newsletter while Gayle was away. Since updating my Microsoft Office suite at home, I’m enjoying all the new features of the latest Publisher version.

The Hospice auxiliary group, Friends of Hospice runs a second-hand bookshop and asked me to produce a flyer for them. In just over ten minutes, basing the design on a Publisher template I produced this one:

Salesforce is a powerful online-based CRM client from US based Salesforce.com Inc. I learned about it in a recent Our Community newsletter and after trialling it, was successful in getting a non-profit licence for the Hospice. The licence will be renewed each year for free as long as we are using it. I’m aiming to use this system to help me manage records and track donations.

There is a great deal of training material available, I’ll be documenting my progress here as I learn how to use this fantastic system.

Useful links:

• Salesforce Foundation – the philanthropic arm of Salesforce
• Non-profit Success Guide – Salesforce non-profit documentation in the form of a wiki
• SuccessForce – best practice and online user community help

My Cook-e-licious feed in the sidebar here has been playing up for no apparent reason, I think there is a gremlin somewhere. It is working again at the moment, but if it misbehaves again I shall try the solution suggested on the WordPress support forums which changes a line of code in rss.php.

Feeding of a different sort, on Sunday the final event for Hospice Week – a fundraising barbeque went really well. About 400 people attended. The food and the music was great. Took Jo along and we had a great time.

For the last five years I’ve been using the same company for all my domain registration and web hosting. Their idea of customer service is pretty poor, but up until recently the benefits of being with them outweighed that. Pricing was good, reliability was good, and their servers are based here in Australia, which was great.

Lately they have really been giving me the willies and I’ve decided to give them the flick. They stuffed something up with cPanel during an upgrade a few weeks ago and still haven’t fixed it. Pretty major problem – it is preventing me from creating new accounts. No reply to any of my emails, I rang them and still got nowhere. It’s the final straw.

So I’ve now signed with a new company and I’m pretty impressed with the level of communication and support (they have an active public forum and support ticket system which I checked out first).

They even gave me a free domain name, which I’ll be using for my blog – so in future my web address will be www.hamjak.com.

A personal project this year is to develop the online community site I began a little while ago. The site is presently made up of a discussion forum using phpBB3 – a popular suite of Open Source software. PhpBB3 is the successor to phpBB2, which I am more familiar with. The two are vastly different so I am on a bit of a learning curve.

My first little tip for phpBB3 concerns making changes to the template files. The templates are what drive the appearance of the forum. To make the forum run faster (I guess) the files are “cached” to the database. This means if you make any changes to the template files, you have to somehow refresh the database cache.

In my case I wanted to add some meta tags to the overall_header.html template file. I found when I uploaded the altered file and refreshed the page in my browser, it still displayed the old version of the page. I even tried manually removing the cached file from the “cache” directory (which used to work in phpBB2) with no change. It was kind of perplexing.

Then I discovered you need to refresh the cache via the Administration Control Panel, in the Styles section. Under the Style Components heading you click “Templates”, and then on the far right under the Actions heading you click “Refresh”. Return to the forum, refresh the page in your browser and wa-la, the new version is there.

I love Google, it is so Useful. With a capital U. Great search engine, great webmail, great calendar, great custom-homepage, great maps. Google is such a popular household name it has become a verb. There seems to be nothing worthwhile online that Google isn’t a part of, in fact occasionally I have had misgivings about the insidiousness of Google – if I was into conspiracy theories I would think that Google was well on their way to world domination.

And that seems to be what Microsoft hates so much about Google. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has allegedly vowed to “f—ing kill Google”. And the latest ploy by Microsoft is to make a bid for Yahoo. The plan is to crush Google with the combined strength of its biggest competitors, which Microsoft says will make a “more competitive marketplace”.

Google says Microsoft is bad news for the Internet and can’t be trusted. I’m inclined to agree, but I will also be keeping a watchful eye on Google!