This doesn’t mean cynergise.com will die a slow, lonely death however; I’ll probably still update with relevant content though if you really want to keep up with me come along to www.ChandeshParekh.com.

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One component I came across just last week is RokDownloads. This is a file-download management component for Joomla 1.5 and as the name suggests it rocks! Developed by the same team that create the brilliant templates for Joomla, RocketWerx (RocketTheme) I guess it’s not that much of a surprise what a quality component this is.

I was using a popular component called DOCman however when it came to customising, it proved pretty difficult mostly due to the fact that it had first been developed for Joomla 1.0x and the team that created it only ported it to work in Joomla 1.5 Legacy Mode; meaning basically that they hadn’t really used the MVC (Model, View, Controller) protocol the way it’s used for Joomla 1.5 Native components.

RokDownloads is proving much easier to customise and even if you don’t need any customisation it just works really well.

So, if you’re looking for a great, free file-download manager hit up RokDownloads.

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Read more about it at C-Net…

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Well now I won’t be spending as much time doing that since I discovered iconzworld, a free icon resource web site. They put up new icon sets every couple of days and the quality is amazing.

Go to iconworld now to see the great range of free icons sets…

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Currently working on a pretty big, and complicated, project involving multiple Joomla sites, I went off in search of relevant material that would help me design and build custom components and modules for version 1.015.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any single document that provided me with the information I needed, that is until I happened on a post on the Joomla Forum where someone had helpfully posted a link to a PDF of the Joomla Developers Manual.

Now, this guide for version 1.0x is incomplete, and will remain ever so since the Joomla Documentation Team are concentrating on getting a comprehensive Joomla 1.5 guide ready, however it does offer a lot of important information that you’ll only otherwise get by spending hours on the Joomla Forum and on other sites trying out tutorials.

So, if you’re looking for a ,somewhat, single document in PDF format that can help you understand the Joomla CMS engine a little better and help in building your own components and modules, look no further - click here to download the Joomla Developers Manual.

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Setting up your own system e.g. using something like PHPList is often tedious and  takes some technical knowledge to set up properly and working just right.

MailChimp, SurveyMonkey’s little brother (or sister, who knows?!), offers a Pay As You Go plan so that you can budget how much you spend on your email marketing campaign. The price plan goes from $15 for 500 credits to $2,500 for 500,000 credits.
This kind of plan is especially suitable for businesses that don’t have a periodic mail-out as credits can be rolled over and the there are no standing fees e.g. monthly charges.

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This week Matt Linderman has written the article “Advice for entrepreneurs: Throw out that five-year plan, build something now, and don’t take any money” where he’s brought together thoughts from 2 articles, in this month’s Best Life magazine, by Greg Gianforte and Mark Cuban respectively:

Gianforte describes how to build a company from sales rather than enlisting professional financiers. The secret is to stop sweating your five-year plan and start moving the product from day one. If your business idea requires more money than you have at hand, then shrink the idea.

“An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.”

… and from Mark Cuban:

Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”

As always, it’s the comments that the articles at 37 Signals inspire that are really worth reading as they tend to be from people like you and me at various stages of the entrepreneurial game.

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Most of these are from one site, the brilliantly named “ILoveJackDaniels” by UK web developer Dave Child:

1. Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet
2. PHP Cheat Sheet
3. MySQL Cheat Sheet
4. CSS Cheat Sheet and more from the same site…
5. The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet by Danny Dover of SEOmoz.org 
6. Conversion table for em, px, pt & % in CSS by Suresh Jain

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Founded in 2000, Threadless is set to hit $5million is sales this year selling, wait for it, t-shirts! Yep, and they’ve never had a single design that hasn’t  sold out!

So how has Threadless managed to sell out every design? By asking their market what designs they’d buy! Simple!

Using a social network, Threadless runs design competitions and whichever designs are most popular make it onto a t-shirt. The t-shirts are then sold through the same social network to the very people who voted for the designs. This way Threadless supply the market with exactly what they demanded in the first place!

The power of social networking is only now becoming apparent and businesses are beginning to understand just how well ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, the best and cheapest kind of marketing, works within the semi-porous walls of a social network.

Most think of social networks as the domain of bored teenagers but considering that Facebook, a social network that targets the 25 to 35 demographic, outpaced MySpace, a social network that does target teenagers, in May with the most number of unique visits many will need to re-assess their opinions of the importance of social networking to business.

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Both Ruby and PHP are open source and therefore it comes as no surprise that both these languages are being taken up far more quickly than established languages like Java.

There are other factors too; One of the main ones is that many new web applications need to reach their market as quickly as possible. Applications developed in compiled languages like Java cannot be rolled out iteratively as compared to those developed using interpreted scripting languages like Ruby or PHP making them far less desirable.

There are also quite a few web development frameworks built on these two languages around now, Rails based on Ruby and Symfony based on PHP are two that I know of. This makes it even faster, and easier, to develop and deploy a new web application.

Find out more about:

• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• PHP
• Symfony
• Java

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Joseph LeBlanc has a great article on his site making it very simple to understand the main differences…

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Most Internet users are aware of the usual information collected but here Danny Dover has put together an exhaustive list from how Google collects information to what it does with it;
If you’re incolved in Search Engine Optimization or even responsible for your organisations information security this is a post well worth reading.

Check it out here…

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This has raised the question whether the digital divide is growing bigger as those who can afford to stay updated with the latest technological know-how and those who can’t are left ever behind.

However new research from an American university shows that exactly the opposite is happening. It shows social networking is popular for students from all backgrounds and not just those who are well-to-do. With access to the Internet becoming increasingly cheaper more and more students are able to ’socialize’ on the ‘net.
This means that students across the board are picking up key technological skills, those skills they’ll need to help them be successful today and tomorrow.

Further reading…

Facebook is “educational” says US uni

Digital divide has not disappeared

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With billions of web sites populating the Internet it’s really no wonder ICANN are doing this - I can’t remember the last time I registered the exact domain that I or a client wanted. Practically every good top level domain has been snapped up, a lot of these by cyber-squatterswho register a domain early on and sell it to the highest bidder.

The new rules will allow the registration of ‘anything’ as a TLD e.g. .ny for New York or .ldn for London. I could register .chandeshparekh as long as I had a good enough ‘business’ reason for doing so.

As the TechRadar.com article notes, it’s hard to know whether this will improve the Internet or hinder it; consider the number of yet to come ‘dead’ websites that will litter the Internet landscape as a result of the new rules.

Read more about this on the ICANN site…

Read the TechRadar.com article…

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Seeing an increase of 162% on May 2007 compared to only 5% for MySpace it’s no contest as to which of the Social networks is the most popular.

Read the full story from PCPro here…

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