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Written by Josh Lyon
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Tuesday, 27 March 2007 17:58 |
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In case you haven't read my other posts about search engine optimization, I've been on an SEO kick lately. I've renamed all my images in the photo gallery so they all have some context now. Google indexes galleries, but the next step was to be able to search the images from within my own site. I installed the gallery2 search mambot plugin for joomla, but it wasn't doing anything. Here's what I did to get it working. - Install the mambot
-Administrator Backend: Installers > Mambots - Enable the mambot
-This is the part I was somehow forgetting, but it's critical - Admin Backend: Mambots > Site Mambots
- Click the X icon next to the Gallery2 Search mambot to publish it
- Change some code that comes default with the Jan 6 release:
-Go to the searchbot PHP file
mambots/search/gallery2.searchbot.php
Look for the code around line 63 like this:
$info->created = utility::g2DateToMambo($time);
Change it to this:
$info->created = utility::formatdate($time);
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Written by Josh Lyon
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Wednesday, 28 March 2007 04:31 |
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I decided to disable the PDF creator on the website. The current version of Joomla doesn't support nice looking PDF output anyway, so any content that is converted to PDF ends up looking like crap. The decision to disable the functionality came from my recent kick on search engine optimization. The URLs on the site are now easy to read, understand, and remember by a human thanks to OpenSEF. Using some tips from JoomlaAtWork, I've modified some of my core code so meta-tags for pages are now dynamically generated based off some tags I enter. For those of you unfamiliar with this technology, meta data is basically just "data about data". For websites, it's typically used as a short summary for a page. I automatically generate the summary's based on the article I've written and I usually go in and manually define the keywords. I just recently did this, so hopefully google will crawl my site soon and get the new data. When they do you can type "site:boshdirect.com" in a search to see how the meta tags create the search engine descriptions. Anyways, back to the issue at hand. I was looking at all the content listed for boshdirect.com on google and I noticed that the PDF content was showing up higher than the actual content. This is an issue because the PDFs (1) dont look good, (2) dont link back to the site, (3) aren't as interactive. I could have simply modified the robots.txt file so google wouldn't index the files, but they still look like crap so I decided to just get rid of them. I'm still considering removing the Print option from the pages to reduce the amount of "duplicate" content that search engines like yahoo, google, and dmoz see, but that will wait for another day. edit: For those of you who never even realized there was a PDF and Print option, there is also an "E-mail this article" option as well. All of these options are dynamically created at the top right of blog article pages. (However, they are not currently on the front page)
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Written by Josh Lyon
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Monday, 09 April 2007 04:34 |
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I had some issues using the first set of instructions I found for setting up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on my 1and1 account. I had renamed the htaccess.txt to .htaccess and made some small changes, but I was still having issues. The information below got me up and going. Setting up .htaccess file
Rename the htaccess.txt file bundled with the installation to .htaccess. You will need to make a few changes to the .htaccess file so it is configured correctly. The change descriptions are noted in bold below. Also, note that RewriteBase is relative to the URL of the site, not the absolute path. If you have Joomla! setup in the root directory, this shouldn't be an issue for you. ## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above.
Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On # Uncomment following line if your webserver’s URL
# is not directly related to physical file paths.
# Update Your Joomla/MamboDirectory (just / for root) # Uncomment this line RewriteBase / #comment all of the lines of the below section
########## Begin Standard SEF Section
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
##RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php
########## End Standard SEF Section # Uncomment all lines
########## Begin 3rd Party or Core SEF Section
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/vietnam/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
########## End 3rd Party or Core SEF Section |
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Written by Josh Lyon
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Friday, 01 June 2007 09:17 |
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As I’ve mentioned before in other posts, I’m not a really big gamer. I use my original xbox as a media center and use it to play NES, SNES, and other old console games. Ignoring my status as a non-gamer, I decided to get an Xbox 360 elite when it came out. Microsoft finally decided to include an HDMI port and I think that’s what really set me over the edge.
Man am I glad I got it. The graphics are absolutely amazing. Before getting one I really didn’t think of the next-gen consoles (Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360) as a revolutionary change in the gaming industry like other consoles generations have been. I knew the technical specs sounded great on paper, but I didn’t think the graphics held up to my standards. After playing Lost Planet for a few hours, I can say the graphics / visuals are definitely revolutionary. Need For Speed: Pro Street
The amount of “jaggies” on the screen has been reduced incredibly, the lighting technologies are amazing, and the character interaction/movement is amazing. I am really disappointed every time I play an Xbox 1 game and jagged edges on object are sticking out like a sore thumb. This is really annoying on games like Need For Speed, where you always have a car on screen and it has jagged edges all over the curves. The same holds true for one of my recent favorites Star Wars: KoTOR (Knights of the Old Republic) – the clothing and robes have a lot of jagged edges and really detracted from the overall graphical ambience of the game.
Regarding lighting technologies, it seems like the console can really produce much more realistic lighting. I’m not sure if it has to do with the processing power of the multi-core “brain” of the unit, the graphics card, or some other aspect, but it looks great. Lighting has always been one of those things that is hard to capture and reproduce – this was even a large topic in the painting class I took in college. However they do it, the 360 brings us one step closer to reality.
Lost Planet - Xbox 360
I don’t think I’ve noticed a single CG scene that is a simple movie playback. All the plot scenes look like they are all done with game objects on the fly. In older games, like Final Fantasy on the PSX, you would play with your normal game characters with jagged edges and all their imperfections throughout all the game play. Basic plot-scenes with interaction between characters were sometimes done with in-game characters, but large / action plot scenes were pre-recorded CG being played back. In Lost Planet, all the scenes are done with in-game characters. The graphics still look just as amazing and have a better effect in my opinion. Instead of feeling like there was this abrupt change in styling, the whole game just flows together much better. I assume it also takes less disc space to record an action sequence with in-game characters than it does to save a CG video.
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