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Using Joomla! for a Personal WWW Site The Site: www.helmers.com List of Links: Background Getting the Word Out Setting The Record Straight Self Publishing New Writings Promoting Joomla Active Browser Reading 2009 Hardware 2009 Software ←●→ Background: Carl Helmers is a co-founder, was a minority co-owner and the first editor of BYTE magazine 1975 through 1980. As a personal computing pioneer and writer, Carl needs a site on which to place his articles – about his current projects and activities, historical archive pieces about his BYTE years and about developments since his BYTE Magazine helped revolutionize the computer field. After leaving BYTE, Carl became very busy through the 1980's and 1990's founding then publishing three successful advertising supported controlled circulation high tech print magazines through his Helmers Publishing, Incorporated After the end of Helmers Publishing Incorporated in March, 2006 Carl retained ownership of the WWW.helmers.com internet domain in order to keep his long used eponymous carl@helmers.com e-mail address ad infinitum. Going along with his e-mail anchor, Carl's first laboriously and painfully created personal WWW.helmers.com site version was on line in 2006/2007. In 2008 Carl faced a March 2009 deadline to convert that MS FrontPage-2003 site design to some other easier to use system by the time his first ISP's prepaid contract expired at the end of March 2009. He started looking around for a modern open source CMS – where most of his time would be spent creating content rather than coping with software. His mid-2008 choice was to use Joomla! for the new site design, on servers of Information Analytics, Inc. ←●→ ● Getting the Word Out... Carl Helmers is alive and well and still active living in Western New York near Rochester. His current writings posted on www.helmers.com attest to this. Visitors to his site will find writings about Carl's workshop projects, about Carl's occasional experiments with Linux distributions on his computers, and about domestic/international travels to scientific meetings with his research scientist wife Jean Bidlack. ←●→ ● Setting The Record Straight... Carl Helmers and his www.helmers.com is the only place on the WWW to find true information about Carl and his role in the 1975-1980 years of pre-IBM PC, pre-WWW personal computing. Visitors will already find some memoirs of Carl's BYTE magazine written in the form of introductions to Carl's OCR captured on line posting of some favorite 1975 to 1980 BYTE editorials. ←●→ ● Self Publishing New Writings... As a thinker and writer, Carl uses his www.helmers.com to self-publish new writings about various subjects. Many are travelogues about the trips that he an his wife Jean Bidlack have taken together. Jean is Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology and a research scientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center. While hardly a scientist by profession, Carl often accompanies Jean to and audits sessions of scientific meetings that Jean attends around the US and abroad. Similarly, Jean accompanies Carl to and participates with him in the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. Then there are Carl's occasional fun western New York country living stories to post about happenings like a neighbor felling pine trees and disrupting both power mains and internet service: http://www.helmers.com/images/stories/31_Current_Memes/OIvMPT/Our_Internet_vs_Murphy's_Pine_Tree.html . Carl's current activities frequently start with an idea, then a CAD design, then building useful projects in his workshop. He uses the WWW site to self-publish plan articles with project images and .jpg scans of his CAD printouts. ←●→ Promoting Joomla! ● Ease of Maintenance: Carl Helmers wants a Content Management System (CMS) which provides him with a way to generate article files in directories offline that can be quickly uploaded and integrated into to his site. It will always take hours, days or weeks of offline thinking and editing to write and slickly format an article on any subject. With Carl' method of using Joomla! he can upload and integrate a new article into his Joomla! site in at most a few tens of minutes. After first posting an article, Carl can post an updated version in only a few minutes once the new version is ready to post. With Joomla! the cost in time of fixing spelling/grammar or even more serious errors is mostly reduced to the offline change and editing time. ● Ease of Use By Visitors: Carl Helmers has definite opinions on the best way to write an article for interactive reading and communication of ideas to the WWW reader of his thoughts. With the invention of the key WWW software element, the browser in the early 1990s this idea of creating articles that can be read using browsers locally or ultimately on the WWW provides an exciting new interactive way to present materials for readers. [see http://www.helmers.com/images/stories/31_Current_Memes/HB-WWW/Happy_Birthday_WWW.html .] Carl's central theme is using a modern browser to accomplish true bi-directional hyperlinks to bookmark URLs throughout a WWW writing of what would formerly have been a static printed references to other parts of a document. ● Experimentation: Carl Helmers is an experimenter at heart. Carl's site reflects the latest state of his experiments. As he continues to write new stories for www.helmers.com , he is continually experimenting with concepts and ways of representing his material within the Joomla! framework. Part of Carl's tutorial mission is writing comments about what works and does not work for him in the context of his Joomla! site. ● Tutorial Goal: One of Carl's goals for his Joomla! site is to communicate what he has learned about Joomla! to others. His site provides information on do what he wants to do with Joomla!: using open source tools offline to write then publish his writings on WWW.helmers.com . By describing what he is doing others can learn how to use the same widely available Open Source tools with the Open Source Joomla! CMS to achieve similar results. In the post 2000 era, Carl has been switching to open source applications whenever they mature for reliable regular use. ←●→ Carl's Showcase for Active Browser Reading Carl uses what he calls his Active Browser Readable style for technical and non-technical articles that he posts on his WWW site. Writing in this style, for reading with a browser enables convenient active browser reading of a properly prepared article. When reading such an ABR style article with a browser, instant bi-directional hyperlinks to local document bookmarks may be followed by the reader at will. This replaces hunting for internal reference by flipping manually through pages as would be required to follow the equivalent cross reference in a printed work. Active browser reading is a truly dynamic way of reading a properly prepared ABR style article whether locally or on a WWW site. What in the print era were static references in text to photos, images and figures become instantaneous bi-directional hyperlinks. Bi-directional external hyperlinks to the general WWW occur with speed limited only by the WWW. Static lists of named sections (a Table of Contents,) lists of images and lists of figures become dynamic lists of bi-directional hyperlinks to these items when read with a browser. Importance of Bi-directional Hyperlinks A browser's standard bi-directional hyperlink actions allow the reader – while reading – to briefly follow a hyperlink/bookmark to read or look at the reference, illustration or supporting argument – then instantly return to the original thread and continue reading from the point beyond the link. The hyperlinks can lead in turn to additional hyperlinks, which with a browser are unlimited in number. Like in any WWW browsing activity, the links can be unwound to the original point when there finds no further references or decides not to go any further. This bi-directional hyperlink capability is lacking in the current Adobe Acrobat PDF readers. It is lacking in the user interfaces of every word processor Carl has used. Once a link is taken in such readers, all memory is lost of the original place in the work from which the link was followed. This is the major functional reason why Carl decided not to adopt PDF as his way of representing his thoughts on his WWW site. ←●→ Carl's 2009 Hardware: → HP Pavilion desktop PC: Carl uses his legacy circa 2003 acquired Hewlett Packard Pavilion ____ Windows XP X86 computer (he calls Apollo) to run Open Office applications (OOWriter, OOCalc) and other application software to create his site's content offline. Carl daily runs an incremental backup program to copy files that have changed onto a USB external hard disk drive, making a complete new backup of 10Gb or so of working files every week or two. → Dell Inspiron 600M laptop PC: Carl uses his legacy circa 2003 Dell Inspiron 600M laptop PC with Windows XP X86 on the road to run the same application programs he would normally use at home. He calls this laptop computer Hermes. When otherwise unused at home, Hermes resides next to Carl's circa 2005 acquired Epson 350 Photo Scanner in order to run its control software, and temporarily store scanned files for transfer to Apollo. Carl uses a Logitech Wireless USB mouse at home and on the road with Hermes. → Epson 3590 Photo Scanner: This peripheral is USB connected to Carl's Hermes laptop to creates .jpeg files scanned from various sources: letter size CAD printouts, previously published print articles, photographic prints, other source materials. The ABBYWord OCR program was bundled with the Epson 3590 on a support software CD-ROM → USB Memory Sticks: For transferring between Apollo and Hermes, Carl has found the most time-effective method is to transfer files to 1GB and 8 GB USB memory sticks, then using that old standby, sneaker net (physical transfer of data,) instead of the LinkSys GHz wireless LAN. Just like overnight-shipping a hard disk from city A to city to city B often gives a higher data rate than sending an identical large amount of data over am internet connection as e-mail, walking a memory stick from one computer to another – even allowing for the time penalty of two USB/hard disk file transfer times – subjectively seems to take less time. Another equivalent to a memory stick temporary file is to write DVD media, which leaves a DVD backup copy as an artifact of the transfer. However writing a DVD takes considerably longer than sending the same amount of data to a memory stick – and is often afflicted (in my experience) with media errors that require restarting the same transfer with new blank media. ←●→ Carl's 2009 Software: → Open Office Writer (OOWriter): Carl uses this word processing tool to write then maintain offline Active Browser Readable source files of articles illustrated by .jpg images. For upload to his WWW site Carl uses OOWriter's ability to save as HTML to create collections of an HTML file and supporting files (usually renamed .jpg copies) in separate WWW usable folders to upload to his WWW site with FileZilla. This ultimate output step of OOWriter is like the operation of a compiler program when it translates a source language expression of a program into its executable form. → GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program): Carl use the GIMP tool regularly to prepare images to insert in OOWriter article source files for the WWW, shrinking original image effective sizes so that the typical image in an article is under a few hundred kilobytes in size. Carl also used GIMP to create his www.helmers.com Joomla! site logo image, “Carl Helmers' Open Source Breakthrough” from an image he captured as he started his Joomla! site's design. → ABBYWord: Carl uses ABBYWord to OCR convert .jpg scans of sequential segments of Carl's selected Byte magazine editorials and other previously printed matter to intermediate .rtf ( rich text format ) files that preserve some of the original text file's layout and form. Then he reconstructs the editorial-article as an OOWriter document .odt file (starting with an empty WWW template) by inserting each segment in turn, along with any scanned .jpg files of images and diagrams. Ultimately he saves the reconstructed article from OOWriter as its HTML file and subsidiary renamed .jpg files to a waiting empty directory. To place the article on the site, he will upload this HTML directory to his WWW site. → AutoSketch: Carl uses the AutoSketch proprietary CAD application of AutoDesk Incorporated for drawings of designs. Carl has used this excellent and personally familiar CAD software from its early versions in the 1990s though his present version 9. Since version 9 AutoSketch still makes a mess when attempting to save a drawing as a .jpg image file to insert in a WWW article, Carl presently scans letter size ink jet printouts of drawings to .jpg image files to insert in his project articles. [ The .jpg output problem cited is a potential reason to eventually try the new version 10 AutoSketch (recently released) to see if that output glitch is fixed. ] ←●→ Carl's 2009 Software: → FileZilla FTP program: Carl uses FileZilla to FTP upload offline created/maintained articles to his site. FileZilla can also carry out on-line file manipulations on the site. Mozilla Firefox: Carl currently uses the open source Mozilla Firefox as his personal WWW browser of the internet. He uses Firefox both in Windows XP and Linux operating system environments of various computers. → Joomla!: Information Analytics Incorporated maintains Carl's www.helmers.com site with the latest releases of Joomla!, currently version 1.5.11, running on Linux servers. → Joomla! Admin Menus: Carl uses this central Joomla! paradigm to create and manipulate site menu items of WWW.helmers.com and to connect them to the article .html files in uploaded directories output from OOWriter. → Joomla! Template: Carl presently uses the rhuk_milkyway default Joomla! template for his initial 2009+ version of his WWW.helmers.com WWW site. ←●→ back to → List of Links WWW_CH_Joomla_Site.odt July 18, 2009

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