The Daily Technocrat

At this point, we have a perfectly-functioning web site:

http://intranet.domain.com/joomla

with a great backend:

http://intranet.domain.com/joomla/administrator
username: admin
password: whatever you put in when you installed Joomla

We’re looking pretty good with all of our sample data in there, but it’s time you learned how to administrate Joomla. Lucky for you, they have a manual for the Administrator backend. (more…)

Getting a little stressful now – I’ve used up about 3.5 hours getting a machine set up with the Ubuntu OS, setting it up to be a web server, and finding all of the Joomla packages that look like they might be remotely helpful in my situation.
This last step is actually pretty important to the ‘Rapid Prototyping’ that I’m doing. By grabbing 3 or 4 calendar modules, for example, I won’t have to waste time going and looking for another one if the first one is junk. I can just throw all four of them into the site and see which one fits the site best. This is where having a popular and modular Content Management System like Joomla is helpful.

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Setting up Ubuntu to be a web server

In the process of configuring Ubuntu to be a web server, the soon-to-be-boat-anchor machine I was using died. That’s probably why it was pulled from production… (more…)

Operating System Installation

Ok, I have my machine ready to go.. er, well, as ready as it will ever be. This machine was previously known as a Win98/2000 lab machine, rocking out a 400mhz P3, 256MB of ramdom memory modules I stuffed in there, an aenemic 4.3GB hard drive, a 10/100 NIC (with BNC connector!) a 54x CD drive (seems like the best part of the machine) and a 4MB video card (woo!). (more…)

The Content Management System / Website core

OK, so while the Ubuntu CD is still downloading (using my open-source Firefox browser, of course), I need to find an open-source Content Management System (CMS) that has a frontend, an administrative backend, and enough community support and add-on modules that I’ll be able to do everything I want to do. There are a lot of these out there, and a lot of great sites to demo a lot of these CMSs. (more…)

Internal IP’s and External Subdomains

OK, so before I do anything, I need a machine to build on. It needs to be in the DMZ, so both external and internal computers can find it. That means assigning it a static IP address, which I can look into while the OS is loading. (more…)

The concept of Rapid Prototyping in manufacturing is fairly simple: get an idea and bang it out to see if it fits your application.

In the same sense, for someone as myself who has to be a jack of many trades (NetAdmin, TechSupport, WebDesign, HelpDesk, etc.), I don’t have a lot of time to develop anything substantial as far as web applications are concerned. The bad part, though, is that I see an enormous potential for web applications at my organization. (more…)