So I’ve been battling an issue on and off for several weeks now with a development site that is about to go live.

I’ve installed the latest and most powerful version of the CssJsCompress plugin and, when fully enabled, I’ve seen a drastic increase in my PageSpeed numbers. But when Javascript compression is enabled, I get an impossible failure that would have been devastating to the core functionality of my site.

None of the popup windows worked.

So, I nearly felt stuck with the prospect of sacrificing functionality for speed. No can do.

Then I found this: CssJsCompress X, an updated version of the plugin from the guys at ideas.forjoomla.net.

I’m not a programmer, so I do not fully understand why this makes a difference–something about loading the Javascript below the Title rather than at the end of the head.

Here’s the verbiage:

CssJsCompress is a great extension that you can reduce the loading page for your Joomla site.

However, I had have a problem with the extension in which it is not aware of the page having javascript written directly when it is using framework (e.g MooTools) because the extension loads the compressed javascript file right before the HEAD tag is closed.

That way javascript using a framework becomes error because the framework is loaded after the logic is executed.

So the other day I customised the extension as it loads right after TITLE tag instead. And tadaaaa, this website works with the extension now

Best part is, it’s free. You just have to go through the typically, very annoying, registration process where you have to access your email to confirm registration, then log back into the site, and proceed to the download page.

Good luck. And please comment if this post solves a similar issue for you.

Although it’s a rather bland title, it is not mine. I stole it from Chris Abraham, who may have taken it from another, and then another. It’s an ongoing discussion, and as I’m writing this, the battle wages on.

Check it out here: http://chrisabraham.com/2010/11/22/can-you-outsource-your-social-media-presence-to-an-agency/

My answer to the battle, is resoundingly yes, absolutely you can outsource social media. Social media is a giant evolving nebulous that takes years to understand, except that years do not exist in social media.

Anyone who boasts over 10 years of experience in social media is a fraud because it simply did not exists in the same capacity that it does today.

Once we have mastered a skill set or written the SOP for our businesses around the SM platforms of choice, we are trumped by a new set of user demands and technologies at our reach.

As for measuring your SM success. Go ahead and give that a try without industry knowledge of what analytics truly make a difference.

This is where the agency begins to play a role.

“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”

Great question, and any good agency would tell you absolutely not. Nor should you. But to prepare the meal, carve the table, dress the turkey, send out the invites, collect RSVP’s, and all the others, you may absolutely count on outsourced resources.

Should the agency handle every aspect of social media? No. A good agency will help a company, big or small, strike a balance that makes sense to the company model.

That equilibrium changes from client to client. In some structures, it makes sense for the company president to peck away at his HootSuite from behind his Wallstreet Journal, while for others, it means customer issues are escalated to an internal resource.

It’s like a prescription for medication. The dosage, the combinations, and the conflicting drugs should all be advised by the agency. Rely on the agency to be a voice and to provide the guidance you need to make educated choices in how to proceed with Social Media.

In my debate for doing this favor to the citizens and my friends of Greenville, I came up with many reason to share this valuable knowledge.Here are my top 3.

1. Fuel Economy. I figure if 15 people see this and it saves them 30 minutes of idle time in their cars each, then I’ve saved the planet from 150 Trillion gallons of wasted fuel. Ok, so maybe not that much, but you get the point.

2. Gambling and winning. I like to win. So this way you can make a bet: “I bet I can get from Best Buy to Garlington road in less than 8 minutes on December 23rd.” Bet your snotty teenagers: They’ll buy you a smoothie.

3. It no longer affects me. I used to work there, but now I don’t. And I don’t ever plan of returning their during Holiday traffic…. EVER!!! So, use this to your advantage.

Get out of Hell Free Card... Here's the Map

A couple of tips on this. This is easy access to almost all of the shops. Even if you’re going to one in the middle, I assure you it can be accessed easier by going around.

Pay attention to the exit strategy. If you cut through the end of the Lowe’s parking lot you will not have to make a left turn from a stop sign followed by cutting across two lanes of none stopping traffic from a stop sign. Trust me.

Be careful making the turn around the backside of Total Wines. It’s tight and people speed because they don’t expect anyone to be there.

Wahoo! Enjoy!

I grabbed this 2006 post off of a Google search on a small problem I was having in the Mac browsers: Every time I’d fill in a web form, the Tab button would skip over a dynamic form field such as a drop down box. I prefer hotkeys and this was just plain frustrating. So here’s a quick fix.

This has been one of those super annoying things about switching to the Mac OS X. When filling in a form on a web page I like to use the tab key to advance to the next form field. This allows me to avoid picking up the mouse and making my carpal tunnel any worse than it currently is. Unfortunately when tabbing in a form, it always skips over select lists such as a drop down list of states therefore I have to pickup the mouse. Ugg. This is the case in both the Safari and Firefox (Deer Park) browser.

Here is the solution: Open up System Preferences, click ‘Keyboard and Mouse’, and select the option “All Controls” at the bottom of the window next to “In Windows and Dialogs press Tab to move the keyboard focus between”.

It even works for dialog boxes such as javascript popup confirmations.

Oh happy day! I’m starting to truly feel like this Mac really can do everything that I could do on my PC. Its just a matter of learning all the tricks.

Pssst– Hey Apple. Make this one default.

Every now and then we get a chance in the professional world to mix a little personal life with business. And this, for me, will be one of those times.

For those of you who know me, you may be aware that just a bit more than a month ago, I left the only stable form of income I had to turn my attention 100% toward my budding business. Granted my stable form of income fell beneath poverty and made the arches of my feet feel like they were being ripped from by soul, I still felt apprehensive about departing my nemesis.

Alas, it was a job.

One thing absolutely devoid of this career path was my weekends and especially holidays. They were non existent. I remember distinctly one Thanksgiving dinner, spent 800 miles away from home where I left the table early to take a nap before reporting to work that night at midnight for a 12 hour shift. I had already worked until 4 a.m. that Turkey day.

So here I am, free to focus, develop my business, and enjoy my new found weekends.

I am happy to report that business has exploded. I am on the cusp of launching a new Marketing as a Service (MaaS) with a new partner. And my weekends have been enviable.

I spent two days at the Greenville Hospital System’s USA Cycling Championship.

Took my girlfriend to her first Clemson game (though we lost).

Enjoyed a fantastic weekend at Fall(down) for Greenville.

Spent 3 spectacular days in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. (It was here that we were ‘forced’ to become participants in a broomstick ‘horse’ race at Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede. Yes, video is available.)

I hope it’s true for all of you, my friends, clients and otherwise: take the time to enjoy a weekend. This upcoming one will be the first that I’ll be sitting around the house, not doing much of anything. There’s football to be watched and spirits to be had.

In case you’ve missed the memo, the leaves have changed, so take a drive and just watch ‘em.

While this video is a little choppy, and the audio is pretty rough, it provides a pretty good overview of what Facebook is doing to push it’s capabilities for business and organizations in the very near future.

Currently, we work with the mindset that our business need a fan page, and without a fan page we cannot exist in social media. The problem with this is that Fan pages work with the old school blast out information and hope it gets read mentality. Here we shed a little insight on this new improvement and what it might mean for Story Telling engagement

This document walks you through configuring a Joomla configuration for optimal performance and the K2 component on an Apache server.

1.       Setup Hosting and MySQL Database. Note DB name, Username, and Password.

2.       Copy latest Joomla installation files to root folder. www.joomla.org.

a.       You will need an FTP client to do this. My preferred program is Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/) and is free to download. They also have a virtual server available for those who want to host a local test server.

3.       Access Site URL or Testing Server to Install Joomla and follow instructions.

a.       DO NOT INSTALL SAMPLE DATA.

b.      Do not configure FTP layer.

4.       Upon success, use FTP client to rename the /installation folder to /installationX.

a.       Joomla tells you to delete the directory, we chose to keep it just in case.

5.       Set up Site in Dreamweaver.

6.       Modify htaccess.txt.

a.       Uncomment #Rewrite base / (may be necessary for apache servers.

b.      Add GZIP hack from .txt. file.

c.       Rename File from htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

d.      Note: If .htaccess causes a 500 Server Error, try commenting “Options +FollowSymLinks” on line 23. Simply add #.

7.       Log into Joomla Admin.

8.       Global Site Config

a.       Enable GZip

b.      Session Lifespan: 180 (So you don’t constantly get kicked out every time you walk away for 10 minutes.

c.       Use SEF URL: Yes

d.      mod_rewrite: yes

9.       Install Core Components

a.       Sh404sef (http://dev.anything-digital.com/sh404SEF/ )

i.      Configure with .htaccess.

b.      JCE editor – Very cool upgrade to the built in editor (http://www.joomlacontenteditor.net/downloads/editor/category/editor-2)

c.       Query Cache (http://www.joomlaperformance.com/component/option,com_docman/Itemid,39/)

d.      Install K2 (http://getk2.org/) Optional, but we prefer it over the native system. More on this in a future post.

To be quite transparent, we are looking to build an audience, an audience of you.

We enjoy the conversations our customers, fans, and twitter followers are having and wish to continue to feed that group with this blog. I recently heard an expert reference the positive impact of daily blogging to provoke and retain these conversations in the social sphere.

And thus, here begins our little experiment.

In the very near future, I will be posting our core arsenal for basic Joomla 1.5.x installation. But at the moment, I have a valuable resource that I found buried within the Joomla threads that has delivered a huge boost of speed to nearly all of my Joomla installed websites.

It begins by enabling GZip compression from the Admin>Site>Global Configuration panel. This little feature in itself has never provided much of an asset to me. I use the Page Speed plugin for Firefox (http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/) and have consistently had mys site rank between 70 – 76 with noticeable performance issues.

Then came this: an additional code source for the .htaccess file that delivers the all important expiration for long list of files that Page Speed consistently complains about: “The following Resources are missing a cache expiration.”

So assuming your hosting provider has Gzip enabled (Rackspace does), and you are using an active .htaccess file, place the following lines of code in an active area of your htaccess:

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/ico A15552000
ExpiresByType image/gif A31556926
ExpiresByType image/png A31556926
ExpiresByType image/jpg A31556926
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A31556926
ExpiresByType text/javascript A31556926
ExpiresByType text/css A31556926
<FilesMatch “\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=31556926, public”
</FilesMatch>

Voila! My pages now consitently rank in the 83-90 range and load approximately 150-250% faster. Good Luck!

We’ve been a bit busy here at Pure Ink over the last few months and a lot of changes have taken place. As with a lot of small businesses, especially those that are service based, we continue to grow and evolve into the business model we want to represent.

In this process and the time consuming projects we have taken on, we’ve seemed to have abandoned one resource that is vital to keeping you and our audience informed and entertained: our blog.

We renewed commitment, we are setting our sites on Q4 and 2011 with high hopes of frequent and regular updates to tell our Story. We look forward to keeping you in the know and discussing those issues from social media, business mantra, and design issues.