Vyoma

I think I have almost made up my mind now - I would be going for a Content Management System. I am at present trying out Drupal. It seems to be quite robust and flexible. I had installed it in the Xisto account using Fantastico - and it installed Drupal 4.5. I experimented around and liked it. I went over and checked at https://www.drupal.org/ and noticed that the stable version Drupal 4.7.2 was out. So, I removed the installation I had done (not a worry, as I had not yet put any content in it), and then installed it. It was quite a task, and I now know the cPanel pretty well. While installing Drupal 4.7 manually, I faced problems using the MySQL that was already installed for 4.5, so I removed that too. I then created another MySQL database. I was a bit perplexed as to how I should be loading the Drupal database schema. Then, I saw the solution was to use the SQL input in the phpMyAdmin module of cPanel. All I had to do was run the script given in the drupal/database/mysql something script file and run it. The database was created without a problem. I could even go ahead and install few themes. I also installed the Adsense module - have to configure it yet. unimatrix, I notice that you have quite a bit experience in configuring and tailoring CMS for websites. You said that Drupal was good for personal stuff - but I find it not the case as I went through the Drupal.org, and the admin panel of the one installed in my Xisto account. I find it quite scalable. But please do not take offence - it is just a view of a newbie. :( Now, I think I should go ahead and cofigure it properly. Before that, I assume the logical step would be to crystallize the mission and purpose of my website, and also setting the parameters. Configuring it seems quite a tug on the learning curve. I figure that since I am making an article library of sorts, I should understand the workin of Taxonomy module properly - a huge bunch of articles that are not properly categorized would be a waste. Any Drupal users out there who could throw in some pointers?

Fellow AstaHoster! I got my own domain name: wisetome.com This is my first considerably large endevour on the web. I have been doing a bit on forums and blogs, but I have kept it low on pulicity. People have just stumbled across them and that is it. But now, I am thinking of doing it a bit larger. I have been already discussing about this here in Xisto forums with you all. (http://forums.xisto.com/topic/90376-topic/?findpost=1064349267). Anyway, I registered this domain name, wisetome.com. I went to the company website where it is registered, logged into their control panel, and then put up the name servers as ns1.astahost.com and ns2.astahost.com. I belive I should be waiting for atleast 24 hours before the name propagates and gets updated on the Domain Name Servers. After that, I should proceed to park that domain in the Xisto cPanel, right? And I have another query: I have been trying to setup the website at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Now, how do I park it such that, when I type wisetome.com in the browser, it goes directly to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/?

What is the size of Drupal, by the way? I mean, I have only 150 MB ain my Xisto account and I need to consider that before going for the option of a CMS or a Blog Software. And can I install it through Fantastico in Xisto's CPanel? Edit: Ok. I found it out myself. It takes about 2 MB to install and can be installed from Fantastico.

Going through Dhanesh's and seec77's posts, has crystallized few of the needs that I need from my website: (1) Publish articles, initially in few categories (2) Taxonomy of all articles (3) Initially single author / after some time multi-author (4) Placements of ads after some time (5) Feedback and discussion on articles (6) Expansion of articles to more categories (7) Delegate parts of roles to others incase of expansion I know the above is a jumble with no chronological order of how I want to achieve, but at one point or other I would want to do those things. (1) and (3) can be achieved by blog software quite easily. To some extent I should be able to do (2), (4), (5) and (6) with some effort. But I am not sure of (7). Though, expansion in terms of site administration is way ahead, I still need to consider that. All that said, I still have a tendency to go for blog software now. I will be putting articles initially only in categories like 'Art and Design', 'Computers and Internet' and 'World Builing'. And only I will be authoring them. But I dream a bit big, and I see the site as a repository to good articles ranging into more categories, and obviously I cannot be doing that all alone. May be I will install Drupal or some other CMS. I am not sure how I may publish articles in them. But I will keep it to a minimum configuration. As seec77 said, I may need to put in the blog module as I am versed in it, but I do not know. The issue is, it seems optimum now to install Blog Software, but in the very near future as I expand the article and category base, I think, I will surely need more than Blog Software to handle everything. But going for a CMS may be an overkill - I do not know, I have not used one yet. Ah! The more I think, my head aches! Anyway, I think the footprint of WordPress is just 2 MB or 3 MB. What is the range for size of CMS software? 20 MB to 30 MB? More or less? Edit: I found out that Drupal aswell takes just about 2 MB. And I think PHP-Nuke takes about 25 MB. So, I think the range may be safely put around 1 MB to 30 MB depending on the particular CMS software.

Arbitrary, I totally agree with you. I do not find it wrong to do a link exchange with relevant site, but to do so with irrelevant site is really ridiculous. For example, I have this blog, that I run with the intent of providing quality content. I have had a few people contact me to do a link exchange, but I had to turn it down because I did not find any of them in relevance with the topics I blog upon, and neither did I find them to maintain a level of quality.

Hmmm... I did not think about it like that earlier. So, for a particular keyword, it shows which part of the world people are more interested in, and with that we can target something specific to that geography - right? Oh boy! This demographic analysis is a real head-wrenching one!

Ok. I am puting this thread here 'casue szupie told me to put it here. I like it when I can point the fingers at someone else. I have been around having a Asta Host account and doing nothing with it but experimenting with PHP and MySQL. I even tried my hand at desiging a CMS, and I am pretty sure, I can get a very basic one ready. But I have got my attention diverted to various other things. Anyway, as I said, I had Xisto account with 150 MB lying there, and I came across the thread made by Dhanesh: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/89067-topic/?findpost=1064340456. It that thread, Dhanesh did not know what to do with the site, but in my case, I am now pretty much focused on what I would be doing with it. I have been blogging at Splat, on various topics. The issue is, all the articles there have been coming in a kind of sputter - not many coherent articles. What I intend to do with my new site is make it an article bank containing quality articles that are extensive. I intend to start of with only few topics, focusing on quality and authenticity, and then later spreading to various other topics. I may place some content targeted ads on those articles. Now, I have the option of putting these articles on the website using either a Blog software or a CMS software. I followed Dhanesh's advice as in the thread indicated above, and have installed WordPress. I am quite well-versed with blog softwares as I have been doing it for the past few months. But, noting that the mission of the website that I would be setting would be "to give quality articles" and I would try to earn a revenue by placing relevant ads, I wondered if I should be going for a Content Management System. Thus, I am thinking between the use of CMS and Blog (WordPress) Software. Or am I thinking too much about this? Is Blogging software not a special case of CMS? I would like your views regarding this. If suggested for going for a CMS, I would like to know what all options I have. I would actually like the one that I can easily install using the Xisto account's CPanel's Fantastico autoinstaller.

Well Alegis, that is what I thought when I tried few kewords on their engine. Then, I thought, I must be a bit stupid and not using the tool properly. So, I put it up here in the forums so that I can get other view points. I am not sure how one may use this. Atleast, I think they need to get more volume of data into the samples for it to be useful.

I came across another of Google's tools. I think it is still in its Beta, but so what? Even GMail is in Beta. Any way, you should check out Google Trends. You can given in keywords and it gives statistics on the search done with lot of associated demographics if it gets a sizeable sample for that keyword. Now, what use this could be for lay users? I am not sure. But this is how I hypothesize I can use it. I basically publish articles in my blog 'Splat!', and it has few categories (Nature, Art and Design, World-building...). If I am able to key in these category or some other keyword that belongs to the category set, I should be able to see how the world's interest in that topic is doing. I am not sure if I can exactly map the demographics of Google to my own visitors. I do not think I can do that now, because I do not get a lot many visitors. But once I do that, I should be able to say if the article I write is of any relevance to everyone else or not. I am not sure if I am getting the process exactly right with the above hypothesis of mine - but I would like to know the views of you all in this approach.

So, now it works on IE, Opera, Firefox and on Mac. Good. Because here is my Browser Split up got from Visitor Analysis: 55% Firefox 35% MS Internet Explorer 6.0 5% Mozilla 2% MS Internet Explorer 7.0 1% Netscape 7.1 1% Opera 1% MS Internet Explorer 5.5 Now you may really understand why I freaked out when they said it did not work with Firefox. Thanks for the help, szupie.

szupie, thanks for pointing that out. And thanks a lot for giving a solution. When I gave my blog for review to some of my friends, they said it was a total havoc in Firefox. I was working like a frenzied rat trying to figure it out. One major disadvantage I had was that I could not get the Firefox downloaded and installed at the moment. Anyway, I have done the 'two' changes you have indicated, and uploaded the template to my blog. Could you please check it up again in Firefox and could you please let me know if it is doing fine now? URL: http://www.blogcharm.com/splat/

Oh boy! Can we install a blog software in our Xisto account? Oh my! I have been using a free host all this while. How do we go about that, Dhanesh?And I started of my blog intending on publishing quality articles, putting Adsense code there, and then earning something out of it.I would say, you can start some thing like that.Try to first focus on some ideas or a handful of topics that you like. Categorize them properly as you post regularly in those topics (tagging). And then, present them to target audiences depending on the tags, and seperately.

Until the analogy of teacher-classes-students, I was wandering about the jungles of ignorance. Now, I get a basic understanding. Thanks vujsa, this definetly helped - though I do need to learn a bit more on this. I will follow your advice on searching the internet for the articles. And vizskywalker! That post of yours up there nearly chased me back into that 'jungles of ignorance'. I can barely understand that - but that is fine. I will go on and understand more about classes and ids - may be then I will understand that. lonebyrd, sorry for piggybacking on this thread. I think that will be it from me (until next time).

I am afraid I wont be able to use Javascript, as I am using a free host to host my blog. For the images I use Imageshack to hotlink.Another thing is, for now, I have not yet known CSS enough to use CSS+Javascript.But tell me, I am better off than using tables now, am I not?

OK. I know I am making a double post here, but I conveyed it to a moderator and he said it was fine. Well, I am too eager to explain how I got it working! Here goes the CSS. You may see that I have put most of it what was earlier: <style>body { text-align: center; background-color: #000; }#container { margin: 0 auto; width: 700px; background-color: #fff; background-image: url('container_bottom.gif'); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: no-repeat; } #containertop { background-image: url('container_top.gif'); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: no-repeat; }#content { width: 480px; float: left; margin-right: -160px; padding: 10px;}#sidebar { margin: 0; margin-top: 10px; width: 160px; float: right; padding: 10px; background-image: url('sidebar_bottom.gif'); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: no-repeat;}#sidebartop { background-image: url('sidebar_top.gif'); background-position: bottom; background-repeat: no-repeat; }</style> And in the HTML:<body> <div id="container"> <div id="containertop"></div> <div id="content"> .....All of the content goes here..... </div> <!-- /content --> <div id="sidebar"> <div id="sidebartop"></div> ... side bar content here.... </div> <!-- /sidebar --> </div> <!-- /container --></body> For before and after images of the use of this design, check out this permenant link, at my blog. As you can see, I have not put the rounded edge for the content part and have only put it for the full container and the sidebar. But the same technique, I suppose can be used to put rounded corner for the content column too. That was about all I did, to get the things done. (Note that the above code may require a bit of twiddling with the padding and margins depending on the image widths). The solution involved no hooking the background pictures to any other tags or something like that. I do not know the ramifications of this yet, as I have not tested it in other browsers than a particular version of IE. I do not even know why I used a ID instead of a class. As I said earlier, I am not that well versed in CSS, but this seems to work.

Hey vujsa , I have one more question. I had a similar problem that was faced by lonebyrd, and I solved it (rather, did a trial-and-error), and for doing that I used IDs instead of classes. For illustration, I used the following CSS: #banner { background-image: url(banner_y.jpg); background-repeat: no-repeat;} and then later used it in the HTML as follows: <div id="banner"></div> I just wanted to know what are the differences between using a class or an ID. I am sorry if this sounds dumb, but I have not gone about studying CSS in detail. I used it just to get some work done instead of relying on tables. Could you please clear the two concepts of classes and ids?

Well yordan, thanks! I actually though, used another one that my friend gave me. It fit in nicely. But please do not get offended that I did not use your 'splat' picture. I have kept it aside safely, and may use it for future redesigns of my blog. I tend to do that, and I am sure, I will be putting in more splats around the design, and I will use that. Here is the link for my blog: http://www.blogcharm.com/splat/ You can see where I used it - it is at the top-left of the pane. Again, thanks to all of you for your support.

I tried that, but do we not need to hook it up with some HTML tag? I am not that good (I am not any good, actually) with CSS, so could some one explain it to me?

Wow, wow, wow! Thanks Yordan. I picked up the black and white one, and I am keeping it aside. Hopefully, I can use that as I design a template for my blog. Sorry for not replying earlier. My work had gone a bit hetic and I could not find time to log on.

As I have stated elsewhere in the forum, I am venturing on designing my blog again from the scratch. At present, it uses a lot of tables to achieve a rounded look, that I want to avoid and use pure CSS. Like any other design procedure, I began by going for a rough mock up of the blog. The colours at present did not actually matter, as I was only concerned with the layout. I wanted a fixed width two colum layout, where all of them had rounded corners. Here is a mock-up of what I want: Another thing I forgot to mention in the above image is both the content box and side-bar box are fixed width. Only the height of these two boxes need to be variable. In case of achieving the rounded corners alone for a fixed width box, all I need to do is incorporate a top image and a bottom image with proper colours. For example a blue rounded box on white background would need to have the following at the top: and the following at the bottom: That is how much I came to realize with respect to rounded corners for fixed width columns.As far as having a two-column fixed width structure, I think the following code should do: The CSS code as: <style>body { text-align: center; background-color: #000; }#container { margin: 0 auto; width: 700px; background-color: #fff; } #content { width: 480px; float: left; margin-right: -160px; padding: 10px;}#sidebar { margin: 0; margin-top: 10px; width: 160px; float: right; padding: 10px;}</style> The HTML code would be: <body> <div id="container"> <div id="content"> .....All of the content goes here..... </div> <!-- /content --> <div id="sidebar"> ... side bar content here.... </div> <!-- /sidebar --> </div> <!-- /container --></body> Thats about it how much I have figured out. Now, say, I have the background images of the corners, how should I be putting it in the CSS? I am able to place only one (either the top or the bottom) for a particular column. How do I put both the top and bottom images to a column - say sidebar for this example. I know there is some concept out there about wrappers, but I do not know exactly how do I go about it. So, could anyone please help me out here?

pyost, thanks for that link. I may be able to use one of them. As a matter of fact, is the one you put up there royalty free? That almost matches the kind of image I want. If it were royalty free, I would take it and change the colour and use it in the design. kaputnik, what you say is true. I found it real hard to actully search for a 'splat' image. I do not wish to spend money on buying stock images, since, I am not a professinal designer. I wanted to just do a CSS design for my blog called, Splat! and hence I was on the hunt for the image. Thanks for those pointers on how to make it look realastic, but I actually want a flat or 2d or shadow kind of splat image. Initially, I too thought of whipping out a splat out of a image editor. But after some of the out-comes, it realized that it did not carry that physical element in how the sputters came out. Thus, I went for a hunt on the images out there in the royalty free stock. So, pyost, is that image royalty free?

Splat is just a gooey or dye containing liquid getting impacted on a generally flat surface. It usually creates a random pattern. For example, when a drop of ink is dropped on a sheet of white paper it creates a splat-pattern.I am looking out for such splat pattern, that has a preferablly very low number of splatter-excrusions, with a black or blue on white background. This, I would attempt to use with the template I am designing for my blog, called 'Splat!'.

I have presently two GMail accounts. With all the feature I do not see the necessacity of having more GMail accounts.-It gives 2.5+ GB inbox space, so space cannot be the reason-It has the neat labelling feature, that when coupled with the filter leaves your inbox totally organized.-It has a great SPAM filter. I have found only two or three mails in a month come through their SPAM filter.I love GMail. Ok. I would better stop before I start hallucinating and rambling.

I want to go about designing a template from scratch for my blog, Splat!But, for that, I would like to have some royalty free images having just that: Splat! Preferebly a single coloured splat, and more specifically a black or blue coloured splat on a uniform background. It need to be a photograph - now that I think about it, it would be good if I had a digitally created splat.I tried searching for the image in various royalty free website, but could not find. I woudl be grateful if someone could search for such a image.I have been talking about getting a royalty free image because I do not have funds to pay for such images, and I belive there should be images of splat floating around in some stock images. Thanks in advance!

I have been hearing about Ubuntu a lot lately. Sadly, I have not had much time from my hetic work, and I have not been tinkering around at my work station. More over I am about to shift from one house to another. Once that is done (and few more from the to-do list), I woudld get back to getting a Linux distro installed on my PC together with a Windows XP (a dual-boot setup). Will keep you all updated.