More categories + MPEG encoding

Now that I can easily categorize posts (using labels), I feel better about posting about non-development topics here. I'll still try to keep it primarily work-related, but in addition to covering coding and tech support stuff, I'll also cover design and multimedia and anything else I'm working on at the time.

My current little pet project is to find a conversion app (not necessarily web-based) to convert a series of AVIs (or SWFs, which were the original format) into MPG files having MPEG-2 encoding.

There seems to be no shortage of little shareware apps for Windows that do file conversions like this, most of them in the $20-40 range, in fact I bought one the last time I needed to do this... unfortunately I misplaced the file and purchasing info from that. :/ But what I'd really be interested in is an open source app that can do batch conversions and/or be run from a command line.
One that I've been playing around with is MediaCoder, which seems to be an open-source Swiss army knife of multimedia file conversion. I'm optimistic that it'll be able to do the job eventually... I just need to figure out the right settings needed to make the files. So far, I can get it make an mpg file, but can't get anything but MPlayer to play the file. No good.

But there's a ton of settings and options to fiddlle with (the UI is a little klunky for presenting all the options), so hopefully I'll be able to figure it out soon, or find another app that can do it. Multimedia conversion isn't exactly at the top of my list of favorite things to do on a Sunday afternoon.

New Blogger: I'm disappointed

Don't get me wrong-- the system itself is awesome. It's everything I expected it to be (especially since I already test-drove it last week). I love the new Ajax template editor, and the labeling feature is definitely useful.

But what gets me is the fact that I didn't really have to wait this long to switch to the beta. I could've switched over long ago. I was waiting patiently for no good reason.

I thought they were systematically converting all accounts, and it was just a matter of time before they got to mine. But as it turns out, not all accounts are created equal. It turns out that accounts with certain features enabled would not be switching over (until later).

In my case, I had some defunct blogs set to FTP-publish mode, and apparently that feature isn't available in beta-Blogger yet. So as soon as I changed the publish mode back to Blogspot-publish, the magical blue beta upgrade box appeared on my Dashboard, and here I am!

I wish they had made that information more accessible... I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't been poking around the Blogger site regularly to try to find out everything I could about the new version.

I'm disappointed because Google is usually so good with providing users with what they need, whether it's useful information or a clean interface to work with. Unless it was a deliberate omission by Google, to prevent having too many beta signups before they were ready to handle the load. But that would be considered evil, wouldn't it? :P

Well, maybe it's not that bad. It's just that having to wait for something sucks. Especially when you know that others are already enjoying said item and their wait is over. Especially when you find out afterwards that you didn't need to wait after all.

Old but still relevant

I found this link over three years ago, but re-finding it today, I see that pretty much everything written there is still relevant:

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

A lot of it seems like common sense to me, but after helping with tech support in public forums for a few years, I wonder if it is. Or maybe common sense isn't the word... more like courtesy and non-laziness. In any case, asking questions the right way is a big help in getting concise answers most efficiently, and not annoying fellow community members or embarrassing oneself.

Waiting patiently for the new Blogger beta

I still remember back when I first heard that Google was buying Pyra/Blogger. Seems like ages ago. It's about time we saw more integration between Blogger and Google's other products, both in terms of merging the user accounts and in terms of look-and-feel.

I must confess, I cheated by peeking at the beta already, by creating a new beta blog under my gmail account. (Well, the beta announcement even said it was okay, for those who couldn't wait. ;P )

It looks much more polished and convenient to use (gotta love those Ajax menus), so I can't wait til my current blog can be merged over. The new tags and security options are a couple of the other much-needed features that I've been drooling over. But mainly, it's about the new UI/workflow.

It's not that I have a hard time with the current interface. I'm perfectly comfortable coding up entire sites using just vi or notepad. But a nice WYSIWYG interface can save a lot of time and hassle, especially if they give easy access to the underlying code alongside the visual interface.

Call it convenience, call it laziness, call it whatever you want. Years ago, there was a time when I might've been offended or embarrassed to be caught using such visual tools, but since then I've come to see them for exactly what they are: tools. After years of working in web/graphic design/development (and related areas), what I've come to understand is that it's really not about the tools, it's all about the person wielding them.

It seems that every fledgling programmer goes through this phase of "tools snobbery" when they reach a certain advanced beginner level. They become all proud of themselves for being able to do things completely from scratch, and look down on anyone who uses WSYIWYG editors, programming libraries, or any other third-party apps designed to make one's work life easier.

And in some ways I think it's actually good to go through that phase, because there's definitely merit in learning how things work underneath, before touching any tools to do the same work for you. Otherwise, the tools become a crutch, and the tool user is in trouble if/when the tools ever break (so to speak).

But once you've learned something to the point where you can do it in your sleep, I don't see anything wrong with turning it over to a "tool" so that you can spend more time on other, more challenging tasks.

Forum switch?

Lately I've been looking into merging my existing phpBB forum with my Joomla site. Ideally, what I want is to be able to just embed the forums into my site (visually) without merging their userbases. All the "bridge" extensions I found on the Joomla extensions site seem to involve merging the db's though. I'm not sure I'm ready to take that step yet.

I'm also considering switching over to an SMF (bridged?) forum-- that's what the official Joomla forums is running, so it must be good, right? ;) But I've never used SMF before, so it's a little scary. (Well, not really, but I don't know if it's worth spending the time to try it.)

A third option is installing a Joomlaboard extension. It seems to be the cleanest solution, since it's apparently a native-to-Joomla component, not a bridge. However, I haven't investigated it enough to know whether it's as full-featured and relatively bug-free as the other options, which (I believe) have been around considerably longer.

Since I'm fairly particular about how my forum software works, and what features it has to have, I'll spend more time considering all the options before making a decision.

Helping users get help

Today I posted a suggestion thread on the jReviews board about making the help content more prominently displayed. I do think it looks really nice now, how it unhides itself when you click it.

But it's just a text link and icon near the top of the page, and to be honest I didn't see it for the longest time...

...then again, even if I had seen it, would I have clicked it?

I probably would have, eventually, when I got desperate (or bored) enough. Until that point, I probably would have assumed that it would be pretty useless except to absolute beginners, and ignored it. But some of the comments were actually pretty good to know, and would've saved me some time if I had seen them earlier.

I wonder how many others would do (or have done) the same?

One way to get around that is to have all help texts shown by default when the component is first installed. Then, once the user has read everything and is tired of seeing it, have the option to make it hidden-by-default to save on screen real estate.

Having done forum support for an MMO for nearly 2 years, I know firsthand how frustrating it can be when users never seem to read stuff that's already been posted, whether it's in-game documentation or stickies on the forum. It's kind of sad (having also written most of the game documentation myself), but I'm always pleasantly surprised when someone refers to something I'd written.

So I'm all for making documentation as easily accessible as possible, so that people don't have the excuse of "I didn't see it." ;)

p.s. Is it hypocritical of me, then, to avoid reading others' documentation? I'd say no, because I do consult the documentation/forum archives when I get stuck, or ready to learn more advanced features, before I start posting newb questions for others to answer.

User permissions... denied

Today I've run into what I consider the first real deficiency in basic Joomla 1.0-- the seriously weak user management system. I wasn't planning to open up access to anyone else until the basic foundations of my site were in place, so this is the first time I've actually looked at the user system.

Well, from what I understand, this will be remedied in the next/upcoming major version of Joomla (1.5), but that doesn't help me right now. Those who know me can attest to the fact that I rarely complain about things, but I really need this feature! ;P

This helpful post in the FAQ section of the Joomla forum describes exactly what the different categories of users currently do.

Reading that, I was pretty surprised (and disappointed) that the current system doesn't allow you to limit someone's access to a certain area of the site. That to me seems to be a pretty basic requirement for a full-fledged CMS, since a common use for a CMS is to allow many users (with varying degrees of trustworthiness or technical skill) to help maintain a site, and it's good practice to give users the minimal permissions they need to get their job done.

I don't know how the user system in 1.5 is going to work, but I hope it'll allow the site administrator to define custom groups with their own permissions. At the very least, everyone should be able to access/edit their own posts at any time, whereas the basic front-end "Author" group (in 1.0.x) has some limitations placed on it.

Poking around the forums and extensions site a bit, I learned that there are a couple add-ons offered that improve upon the user system, but I'm reluctant to use them, in case they become incompatible with later versions of Joomla.

Sidestepping the issue

A few forum and email exchanges later, including some suggestions of things to verify or try, we still couldn't get to the bottom of the script error. For what he could tell, things looked fine on the backend; the menus just weren't working properly on the frontend. Too strange.

While I was still trying to figure out this problem on my own, I had tried making a new joomla site on a different hosting account that I have, so that I could test more freely. Copied over my Joomla template files, and installed the same components, including jReviews. But to my dismay, the drop-down menus worked fine on this other site.

The two sites happened to be using different web hosting companies, so I wondered if it was some version compatibility issue with some server package. When I suggested this to him, he replied that it might be easier for him to figure it out if I could give him admin access to the site that was having the error, or some test site on the same server.

So I made another demo/test installation*, this time only installing core Joomla followed by the latest version of jReviews (1.1.2). Then I copied over my custom Joomla template and re-created the menu structure from the non-working site. (*Nothing personal, of course... I'm just naturally paranoid and reluctant to give full admin access for a live commercial site to someone I've just exchanged a couple messages with.)

Surprisingly (to me, at least), the drop-downs worked just fine on this new site. So it must've been some conflict with something I installed previously, even though none of the other stuff used Ajax, as far as I know. In any case, now that I have a working installation, I can get back to work on customizing it.

Part of me isn't quite satisfied not knowing what caused the error on the other site, but the rewards of seeing this new site come together far outweigh the minor dissatisfaction. :)

Ratings and reviews

One of the things I'm working on is a review site for a subgenre of video games. After looking around on extensions.joomla.org for a bit, it seemed that the most developed package (at the time) was this free component called xtdratings.

I downloaded it and played with it for a bit, but it was kind of confusing-- you needed to install this other component called FacileForms which it was built on, and there were some version compatibility issues to be aware of. I got it basically working, but hadn't started looking into how to customize it (layoutwise) or how the user system worked. Documentation was really sparse, though to be fair, forum support from the creator was REALLY responsive (thanks!).

Shortly afterwards, the xtdratings creator (Alejandro Schmeichler) released a new review component called jReviews which looked much more polished and well-integrated with core Joomla, and now uses AJAX for a lot of things. Pretty cool. The only catch was now it was no longer free. Well, I played with the demo site for a bit, and decided to just bite the bullet and get it, since it would probably save me a lot of time to set up, and then I could move on to other things.

Installed it without any problems, and it was easier to learn than the old system. But then as I was testing out the various pages, I found that the drop-downs on the "submit new entry" page weren't working for me... but they work just fine on the demo site, as well as on a temp site I made on my other server to test with. I spent several evenings trying to figure out what was causing it, including confirming that it was a problem with the actual implementation (codewise or serverwise) and not something silly like a typo.

Finally I concluded that it wasn't something obvious, and decided to ask for help on the jReviews forums. So that's where I am now-- still trying to figure out why the drop-down menus aren't working for me... but at least I have someone more experienced helping me with this now. And once I learn the system well enough myself, I'll be more than happy to return the favor by helping others who are less experienced than myself. <3

Looking the gift horse in the mouth

Upon closer inspection, I noticed tonight that the content extension I installed (see previous post) doesn't quite have all the functionality of the standard content display. I can get it to show an arbitrary number of items, even from multiple sections/categories, but there doesn't seem to be a way to navigate through the rest of the items beyond what's displayed.

I guess I could work around it for now, by manually adding a link under each section that displays the rest of the entries on a separate page. Not nearly as cool imo, but what can you do...

Customizing content displays in Joomla

It took me a surprisingly long time (and a custom extension) to figure out how to make a custom page in Joomla to display content from two different categories (or sections or whatever) side by side. Argh. (Hint: it involves making custom modules and module positions.)

On the bright side, I have a better understanding of how things are organized in Joomla now, as a result of trying to figure out how to do that.

Another thing I've learned recently, that seems like it should be obvious but really isn't, is where the Frontpage settings can be found -- basically the idea is that the "front page" is simply the link to "home" in your "main menu"... the thing that makes it counterintuitive for me is that it doesn't show up anywhere else as a content page.

My new blog

Customary "Hello World" first post. w00t!