Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Match Maven

Collabowrite recently developed and launched The Match Maven website, facebook page, twitter feed, and blog. The Match Maven, also known as Briana Shestack, is an online dating coach, located in New York but serving the world.  Briana assists her clients in shaping their profiles and dating communications into a true reflection of themselves and the partners they are seeking. Dating with confidence is easy with The Match Maven.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Trying out Joomla 1.6

Joomla 1.6 has finally advanced to the beta stage so we are testing the product now. J 1.6 builds on 1.5 but offers advanced workflow, which is sorely lacking in the current version.  Joomla! 1.6 key features are:
  • New Access Control System - Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content (including extension permission management).
  • Unlimited Depth Organizational Model - Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.
  • One-Click Extension Updates - Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.
  • Semantic XHTML Layouts - Provides a better baseline for content presentation. 
Look for some documentation and a review on the Collabowrite site in the coming weeks.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

CAP Photo Gallery

Citizens for Animal Protection is now able to display photo albums from its Picasa account on its site without using server resources or using yet another third party component to manage and upload photos.  From the menu, site visitors can click through to an album from the main gallery list and then open a particular photo in lightbox mode on the site without ever seeing Picasa.  On the administrative side, staff can easily access Picasa online to manage photos or use the Picasa desktop tool to edit and perform large scale uploads.  See how this implementation works on the CAP Photo Gallery page and contact us if you are interested in displaying Picasa albums on your Joomla site.

Monday, April 19, 2010

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://blog.collabowrite.net/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://blog.collabowrite.net/feeds/posts/default.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Custom Domains on Blogger

Blogger recently announced that it would no longer support FTP publishing.  What this means for users that have a Blogger blog on their domain (ie - www.collabowrite.net), is that they must:
  • Move their site's content publishing to Blogger hosting (if they want the blog on the home page)
  • Move only their blog page to Blogger hosting on a subdomain (ie - blog.collabowrite.net)
  • Use blogspot for blog hosting (then display in an shtml page or potentially as an RSS feed)
  • Use a different service (ie wordpress.com which charges for FTP publishing) or install a blog application on their server
This is both a burden and an opportunity for FTP users.  For many of us, FTP was working acceptably if not optimally, so changing over to any of the above solutions may not result in much net gain.  Over the long run for clients who want to use Blogger custom domain service to host all of their pages, the cessation of FTP publishing support may be the impetus you need to finally get free (albeit limited) content management.  Each solution has its own benefits and drawbacks - contact us today to discuss which Blogger approach is right for you.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Project Footlight Festival & Network Site Launched

Last week Collabowrite launched the site for Project Footlight Festival & Network. Project Footlight serves musical theater writers and directors in the New York City area. Projectfootlight.com has a blog for news and uses ning for the social network. The site, a fully XHTML-compliant, tableless CSS-based design, has a dark gray background with the names of famous musical theater collaborators and riffs on the typewriter motif to speak to the role of the writer, meaning the creator, in the development of musical. Collabowrite also developed a facebook fan page for Project Footlight.

The Project Footlight festival is a camp for emerging musical theater writers that focuses on the developmental process and the art of collaboration. This year the festival performances will take place on February 6 and 7 in the new Dixon Place theater at 161 Chrystie Street. The festival and other events will work in concert with the social network, which enables New York lyricists, composers, bookwriters and directors to find partners and projects, discover new resources, promote their shows, and generally socialize with their peers


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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Welcome to the new Collabowrite!

Another server move, another face for Collabowrite. But we are not just prettier and hipper (though we thought our old site was awfully pretty too), we are all simplicity under the hood. No longer on Joomla! CMS, collabowrite.net has stripped down to the bare essentials the Web 2.0 way for the company information site. We also wanted to focus development energies on our demo sites for Joomla! series 1.0 and 1.5, while maintaining design flexibility for the informational site. You should still be able to find everything you need and stay tuned for updates about Joomla!, Joomla! plug-ins like VirtueMart, sh404SEF and EventList, and other open source or free web technologies essential to non-profits and small business.

Friday, November 30, 2007

Sidling Up to Search Engines

Want your pages showing up in Google? You can increase the likelihood with SEF URL's and sh404SEF. sh404SEF has great support for all the top Joomla! plug-ins, like VirtueMart and Community Builder, offers enhanced security protection, and features fast caching and low overhead. He updates frequently though so be prepared for maintenance on this plug-in.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Security and Joomla

Recently many Joomla! sites, particularly those that have not performed the 1.0.13 upgrade, have attracted hacker attacks. While using open source software has many advantage and is especially well-suited to non-profit organizations, OSS content management systems like Joomla! require special attention to security.

If you have not upgraded your Joomla! installation to the latest version and checked all your plug-ins for security patches, you may want to do so as soon as possible - hack attacks cost time, and sometimes data as well as users. In addition to upgrading, several server features, like a hardened php.ini (including turning off register globals, magic quotes, and safe mode) and htaccess file, as well as other settings, should be in place. Regular backups outside the www folder should also be part of any good security plan - joomlacloner is a good bet for backups and has a chron tab for scheduling regular backups. Any time you or the webmaster uploads files to the site, he or she should use SFTP not FTP as FTP is not secure.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Elegant Additions SEO

Elegant Additions is looking to move up the ranks in keyword phrases like designer kitchens and baths, european and contemporary faucets, and related industry terms.After a revamp of the Elegant Additions site a year ago, where we put them on the Joomla platform and added a product catalog, Collabowrite is doign search engine optimization for Elegant Additions. We will be adding a blog on design ideas and product trends, and other content, putting in search engine friendly URL's, as well as going through the usual SEO paces. Look at elegantadditions.net for more great content on bath and kitchen plumbing and hardware in the coming months.