I have been busy and noticed I hadn’t got around to posting to this site in several months. Of course, unless I post some information on here nobody that stops by this site will know if I am still here or not.

Its Another Portland Skyline

Also, several months ago I converted this site over to a Wordpress site and also have my old Rants, Raves & Insights blog up and running on this site, too; notwithstanding that I have not posted to it in almost forever it seems. What I noticed was that I had grown tired of the theme I had been using and decided to build a new Wordpress theme from the ground up. You are looking at it. I call this Wordpress theme, Skyline Two. Website design, coding, Photoshop design and slicing, Flash design and a bunch of PHP coding all go into developing something like this.

This is the second Wordpress theme I have built from scratch in the past few weeks. You can see the other theme at Portlands Foreclosures. I also created a landing page for them too. Check out the “Coming Soon” link on that site to see a Real Estate Listings mockup with a nifty Flash intro.

Speaking of Flash … if you haven’t clicked on the PLAY INTRO link on the header image above … do so now. That’s another Flash intro that I am using here; because I Flash adds to a site, but an entire Flash Driven site is not so good for most sites, because Flash still is not as search engine friendly as standard XHTML and CSS driven sites. Nonetheless, Flash still looks cool and adds some pizazz to a site. In fact, I have recently put together a couple other sites that include Flash banners. Check out Just Settle My Debts and Renegotiate My Home Loan websites.

Rather than run on a bunch on this post, I will keep it short by saying that I have also been doing some social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter, some online classified marketing, developed some landing pages, tying some of them to lists and autoresponders. I also put together a few ebooks and done a little bit of work with Joomla, too. I will write more later to update the site.

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I am talking about this now, because, you may have noticed my site was down for a few hours today. I didn’t really want it to be down. However, the upside is that I am now working with a really great web hosting service that should make my life easier; so I can focus on positive activity rather than spending my time trying to troubleshoot server and support issues.

I transferred several domains over to my new hosting partner today; and for the most part, everything went off without a hitch. In fact, on one of my other domains I was able to quickly install and configure the newest release of Joomla in a matter of a few minutes. This would have taken me several hours with my former web hosting partner. The biggest issue I had with transferring this site was that my database import said it went okay, however, it missed chunks of data here and there. Also, I did not use shell access and ftp’d everything; which, normally is fine. However, I did discover that some files did not upload the first time around. So, this caused me a little grief. Fortunately, I have experienced that before and was able to recognize where the potential issue was at.

All said, I don’t think I lost more than three or four hours, with the transfers and setup. Now, with a great hosting partner, I can focus on design and marketing.

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If you are familiar with Joomla then you are probably also familiar with Community Builder; a highly favored extension by thousands, to the Joomla CMS. I received word from the Joomlapolis Security Team that Joomlapolitan has advised anyone still using CB 1.1 to immediately update to 1.2.1 for security reasons. If you are running CB 1.1 make sure to update A.S.A.P.

For Joomla site owners and developers that are looking for a classified ad solution, JoomClan Classified Listings component has just released news of several fixes, including:

Fixes that address the following:

• ‘uddstart’ is undefined and other errors in IE8
• Unable to select my PayPal account
• Drop Down Select Option
• Free Ad Post Issue

I purchased and downloaded this component not too long back. I think it had the potential to be one of the best, if not the best classified listings component that runs native on Joomla 1.5.10 rather than the legacy Joomla. However, when I downloaded it (I believe it was their beta version, it still was a bit buggy) there were issues with that version that made in unworkable for my application at that time. I removed the application and they refunded my money promptly. There are only a small handful of options for classified ad extensions to Joomla. The JoomClan component, in my opinion, has the most to offer in its environment.

With that said, I have already downloaded the newly released version of Joomla; and I believe I will go ahead and get it setup and give it a test run on another site.

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In short, the answer is no, it is not a quick process. Joomla contains thousands of files and if you are upgrading, you should set up a test server that is configured as closely as possible to your live Joomla site and then set up the test site. It can be fairly risky trying to update your live site; and bypass this step. It will take time of course. But, it is better than losing all of your work and countless hours invested.

If you are planning on a fresh install of Joomla, it is best if you have shell access. If you do not, trying to upload the files via ftp is a bit tricky. In fact, I have read that you cannot set it up via ftp. However, that is not entirely true. You can use Dreamweaver or other similar IDE to upload your Joomla files via ftp. However, you will need to open each folder and each sub-folder or sub-directory, and each of the sub-directories below and then only select part of the files to upload at one time. You will need to repeat this process as many times as necessary to upload all of the files. If you simply try to upload all of the files at one time, it may appear that the task completed okay; and you may even get a report that all files were uploaded. The fact is, not all of the files were actually uploaded. This can cause a lot of frustration trying to setup Joomla, if you think all the files are there; when in actuality they are not. So use SSH if you can.

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