So this is a comparison chart (at least in my opinion) of 3 major joomla template/extension providers.  When I'm less caught up in work I'll try adding to this article.  But here's some lazy stats:

Basically so that you can set all those SEO settings in the global configuration tab to YES.

Note: you need the permissions to rename the file ("htaccess.txt" to ".htaccess" in your website root folder). You'll need ftp access or a file manager with all your website files in).  Do not continue if you ONLY have control of the Joomla CMS.

Watch the youtube video below which shows you how to do it

To open a web-browser window or tab with this preview, type the following in the address bar after your website URL:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/index.php?tp=1&template=thetemplatename

• where yourdomainname.com is your domain address
• and thetemplatename is the name of the template (without spaces).

Basically if you've just started using "incognito" mode with the Google Chrome web-browser, this article is just how to switch the quick launch shortcut (next to your start button).  All the articles I googled were windows vista so I thought I'd share one for windows 7 here.  I'm actually only saving you a click as you can just right-click on the google chrome icon and select "New Incognito Window".  This is just how to set it by default (useful if you do online banking, shopping, etc).

Ok is it just me who does everything slowly and badly until someone comes along and says why are you doing it like that?  My justification is that the job has to be done no matter what.

If you've ever sat there with phpMyAdmin or a MySQL Administration Tool (like Navicat or SQLYog), and still there at night editing each field so that it displays correctly... well that's usually me.

Found it a bit boring but here's a short bit of code to speed it up which I now use:

update table_name set field_name=REPLACE(field_name,'string_to_find','string_to_replace');

Source: http://www.mediacollege.com/computer/database/mysql/find-replace.html

This is if  you have an FLV file and you don't want any fancy management system, you just want your FLV to play on your webpage.

The following example is a demonstration of how to do this without installing anything on your webserver.

 I like to use flowplayer for this example but my own systems can't use a solution as crude as this.

1. Copy the below code (beginning and ending with object tags)
2. Paste it into your HTML page
3. Replace both instances of the text "http://my.video.com/myVideo.flv" with the full url of your own FLV.
4. Save the HTML page and publish

The Code:

 This is an issue relating to the Time Server Synchronization error.  Basically you start up windows live messenger and get the following error:

{rokbox title=|Messenger Error 80048820|}/images/screenshots/windows_live_error_80048820.png{/rokbox}

I could apply the PRINCE2 (Projects in a controlled environment) methodology to website projects  but most people find this overwhelming.  It's in business techno babble and I get asked what does this mean in stage 1?  And this in stage 2?  (There are over 100 stages)...  

Below is my template project initiation plan (project mandate?) for my freelance website development process.  It may look clean, clear, obvious... it's just an outline of what I picture as a perfect project; unfortunately the first 2 pages tend to be completed in just over a day and the rest of the time is spent faffing around with design and functionality. We use the ProjectFork extension to manage projects, it helps during times when we can't see face-to-face with colleagues or clients.

Suppose you have a column in your table that you use as a counter (storing the value of the counter - eg. times an article has been displayed).

Basically what I used to do is something similar to the following:

1. SELECT counter_field_value FROM table1 WHERE column1='this_article'
2. Add 1 to counter_field_value
3. UPDATE table1 SET counter_field_value=<new_counter_field_value> WHERE column1='this_article'

Combined with a PHP script this could be a few lines for something really small.

The quick trick to this is to do it all in one query:

UPDATE table1 SET counter_field_value=counter_field_value+1 WHERE column1='this_article'

I've decided to put something in here as it took me an age to find out how I could do it.

This is when using a MySQL query within a PHP script.  The process is used often to do a statistics table or top ten chart of your data (eg. movies, music, etc).

My aim is to do the following:

1. retrieve data from a table,
2. count the number of times each data exists,
3. sort it in reverse order so that the most frequent is at the top of the list
4. print out each row with the number of times that particular data appeared in a row

My old method was to:

A data type reference table. If you're designing a database then you don't need me to tell you what this is.

My personal opinion is to always try to use the minimal type and length of the value required. For example, a comment of 500 words should only be TEXT (~64Kb) rather than LONGTEXT (~4Gb).