Water for all - the LifeSaver

Trust!

A mutually satisfying business arrangement is the foundation of trust between businessmen. When either of the parties feels that they must comply to an unfair agreement, the seed of mistrust would have been sown then and there.

Joomla! Link Structure | Inter-Content Links

The Joomla! link structure has been mystifying me off late as I try to create some links in the content area without the template, menus etc. changing. Until now the only links I used were in menus, but never "inter-content" links.

According to Alledia's Understanding Joomla ItemID, there are two identifiers that are key to calling Joomla content - the ItemID and the ID. What these correspond to are alluded to in Alledia's article.

Key questions are:

• Where to get the Id from
  
• Where to get the ItemId from

The Id is the content identifier, which can be noted from the Article Manager.

The ItemId is the unique identifier that Joomla! uses to construct your page with the different modules, their positions, and other such page-structure related decisions the CMS has to make.

In addition the option=com_content request parameter is needed to be passed in.

References

• Understanding Joomla! URL' s and ItemIDs
  

Fun Stuff

Picked these up on the Internet..

They wade through pestilence
We call them wasted youth
The kids are running restless
Not a single f..king thing to lose
Give them enough rope
They'll f..king hang themselves for lack of things to do

Question of the day

Who's Jesus?
A pretty cool guy whose reputation has been run down by his fan-club!

Groups: Deviating from Google Quality of Service

I administer some 10+ mailing lists using Google Groups and it has been disappointing to see that the service continues to carry bugs which had originally floated over an year ago and users have been complaining all along.

Case in point: Owners of groups are getting their messages to the group bounced back with the message:

We're writing to let you know that the group that you tried to contact (eb_xxx) either doesn't exist, or you don't have permission to post to it. There are a few possible reasons why this happened:

* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
* The owner of the group removed this group, so there's nobody there to contact.
* You may need to join the group before being allowed to post.
* This group may not be open to posting.

If you have questions about this or any other group, please visit the Google Groups Help Center at http://groups.google.com/support.

Thanks, and we hope you'll continue to enjoy Google Groups.

The Google Groups Team

This can of course not be true for owners of groups.

The problem has been reported many times to Google Groups Team on mailing lists, but is apparently being ignored.

Poor Email Integration in Zoho-CRM

I've reported in the past about Zoho-CRM and my on-going love affair with the tool. See past posts.

Recently one of the technical support staff helped me setup POP3 access with my Apps/Gmail account. Having used it, email integration using this the POP3 mechanism seems quite rough at the moment. Following feedback for folks at Zoho and their user-community.

Pro's

1. Well, we finally have some email tracking in Zoho-CRM.

Con's

1. Only received emails into Gmail account appear in the contacts list. What about CRM record of messages that originated from me?
   
   Zoho's standard answer to this is: "Use ZohoMail to send all your emails, and we'll sort those the CRM ones under your Contacts". It's near to impossible to move to ZohoMail for us since we have long standardized on Gmail, and hence this is not really an option.
   

Feature Request

1. Not all conversations are releated to CRM (ex. emails relating to project work). It should be possible to hide/delete such mails from the CRM records.
2. It should be possible to view messages pertaining to _all_ email addresses listed under a contact name.
   

Microsoft Schemes the Next Big Wastage

This is in response to Joelle Alaya's article - Yahoo and Bing Teaming up Against Google

I'm not sure if I'd call it a struggle between David and Goliath; this is more like three Goliaths in combat. But as you said Google is ready! I'm one of those people that has come to trust Google over the years, simply because of the merit of their services. Though I've used Microsoft products for twice the amount of calendar-time, I can't unfortunately say the same of them.

Google's incessant focus on search throughout their history is IMHO the sole reason why they continue to be the best search engine out there. Sure they have done tons of other stuff like Apps, Gmail, Android, Wave etc, but all of it is related to improving search. Here's a clue for Microsoft to stick to core-competences, instead of madly obsessing about domination in every new market that develops in course of industry evolution.

If Microsoft should take cues from the best ever Internet company there was, it should be to improve their core-competences, namely Office Apps and consumer Operating Systems. That will for sure make us customers happy (coz we can stop wasting money on failed products like Vista), maybe even some day love M$ products (which honestly very few of us currently do), and help gain market-respect.

CMS for OrpheusDialog.de

CMSAfter reviewing Pligg for some 3 hours now, I'm tipping to not deploy it for the new OrpheusDialog.de site.

Pligg is a really nicely done PHP/MySQL based CMS which allows maintaining a site of articles contributed by a community. A large and growing community of article contributors can use Pligg to pool the knowledge into the community.

Exactly that seems to be the reason I would not be able to use it to deploy a "regular" website, with a number of purely-static pages and some dynamic pages such as Blog and integration with Twitter, FaceBook etc.

Requirements for OrpheusDialog.de

• Easy managability of static content pages
• Integrated Blog
• API Artchitecture to connect with external systems, ex. FB, Twitter

CMS Evaluated So Far

• Pligg (PHP/MySQL)
  
• Contenido (PHP/MySQL)

To Be Evaluated

• WebGUI (Perl)
• Bricolage (Perl, PostgreSQL)
• Web-App (Perl, flat-files)
• BigMedium (Perl, for-cost, open-source)
• Cyclone3 (Perl and XUL based)

Mother-load of all/most CMS.

My Google Checkout Wishlist

Google does an awesome job with most of it's products, but has left me begging for more when it comes to Google Checkout (GCO), especially the administration tools of this service. Here's my wish-list, in order of priority, and hope one of the GCO developers takes a look.

1. A way to submit tracking numbers for multi-line orders using GCO > Orders > specific_order
   
2. View invoices that have been sent (manually) from GCO > Tools > Email Invoices.
   

Is Europe Changing Faster than we Notice

The distribution of world religions is as below: