Easy websites for the newly elected MP's

Tuesday, 11 May 2010 03:10 Written by Grant Melrose

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Automatic Update to your Website Copyright Date

Friday, 01 January 2010 00:00 Written by Grant Melrose

Have you remembered to check that your website copyright statement has been updated to 2010?

Your Copyright statement is usually at the bottom of each page and may look something like this:

If you are using a Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla, this is usually published in the Footer, or Legals position. For example, the screen-shot below shows the Joomla Administration screen while I am editing a Custom HTML Module in the footer position.

If you are wondering how to get the copyright symbol, it is character number #169 in the Standard ISO Character Set used by most browsers (ISO-8859-1).

In HTML, we can use © or © to get the desired effect.

For example:

<div id="thiscopyright" style="text-align: center;">
    Copyright &copy; 2010 Your Business Name Here. All rights reserved.<br />
    Company Registered in England. Company No. nnnnnnnn
</div>

Some websites automatically calculate the date and display the new year from January 1st onward. If you want the same effect, you will need some script like this (assuming your webserver is a php flavour):

<div id="thiscopyright" style="text-align: center;">
    Copyright &copy; <?php echo(date('Y')); ?> Your Business Name Here. All rights reserved.<br />
    Company Registered in England. Company No. nnnnnnnn
</div>

You could copyright from the date of your incorporation to the present day using something like this:

<div id="thiscopyright" style="text-align: center;">
    Copyright &copy; 2008-<?php echo(date('Y')); ?> Your Business Name Here. All rights reserved.<br />
    Company Registered in England. Company No. nnnnnnnn
</div>

Just change the 2008 to your start-up year.

So, hopefully you can now update your site Copyright this year, and relax on the 1st January next year, and the next, knowing that your dates will automatically change.

Or if you are happy to part with £10 to save you some time, Business2dot0 can do it for you.  

Choose web pages or template

Price per web page £10.00 Joomla CMS web template £20.00

If you wanted to put a registered trademark in your footer, like YourBusiness®, you need character number #174. In HTML use ® or ®.

How to Create Clean ZIP Archives on a Mac (OS X) with no .DS_Store Files

Saturday, 24 October 2009 00:00 Written by Grant Melrose

Pesky Hidden Files

As part of my web plumbing, I often need to transfer files from my local development machine (my Mac) to a web server out there. For a few small files, my favourite ftp program is great. However for larger applications, which may contain hundreds of directories and ten's of thousands of files, this just takes too long.

So I create an archive file and send this instead. Much quicker. On the Mac (OS X), the archive can be easily created directly from within the Finder application, using File > Create Archive of ...

However, when I unzipped | expanded | extracted this archive on an another machine, (including Windows - forgive me), I found a whole load of .DS_Store files and __MACOSX folders had been created.

These "hidden" files are of no use to my webserver or Windows. I am not sure if they do any harm, but they are not required. I don't want them. I want a clean build. So I could go round and clear them all off afterwards, but I would rather not have them there in the first place.

So what possible solutions are there?

Well I could go back to my FTP program, and set the options not to display the .hidden files, and then send my directory across. But there are some hidden files that I do want to send, for example, .htaccess files. Very important!

Some FTP programs allow you to specify which kind of files to ignore, so I could avoid sending the .DS_Store files. However, large applications would still take too long to transfer, and the FTP would usually time out. So, for my large applications like a Joomla Content Management System, or a SugarCRM system, this is unreliable and too high a price just to get rid of those pesky files.

Instead, I need to make a clean zip file. Here's How.

Well I could buy StuffIt which would do the job. Or according to some forums, I could get 60+ lines of unfathomable Apple Automator Script to achieve the same. Or I could bounce around the Internet for a few hours looking for free archive programs.

But there is a simple one line command I could use. Its been there all the while on my Mac, for free.

I simply open the Terminal utility, go to my working directory where the stuff I want to archive lives, and enter this command:

zip -r create_this_zipfile  my_directory_to_zip

The -r option means, recurse and delve deep into all my sub-directories too. Which is exactly what is needed for complex structures like Joomla and SugarCRM.

Example

I have a local working directory on my Mac where I keep all my development code. Each project will have its own directory which contains many sub-directories and script files. 

my_code_directory
  joomla_application
  joomla_component
  joomla_module
  joomla_plugin
  plg_yoo_effects_1.5.1
  really_big_crm_application

I now want to zip up one of my projects into a package to transfer quickly and easily to my web server. Lets take the plg_yoo_effects_1.5.1:

1. Open Terminal (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
   
2. Change Directory to my_code_directory
3. Create zip archive of plg_yoo_effects_1.5.1
4. Check that a zip file has been created

This is what it looks like in Terminal.

The cd command changes my directory.

The zip command creates the archive, and the -r option makes sure I get all the files within my project. You can see all the individual files that have been compressed (deflated).

The ls | more command lists my current directory (a page at a time if there is a lot of stuff), and there I can now see a file called:

my_production_joomla_plugin.zip

plg_yoo_effects_1.5.1

zip -r my_production_module_1.5.3.zip  my_joomla_module_1.5.3

cd Business\ Tools