Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Documentation Formats and Joomla

Historically we used to create our documentation using ‘Word Perfect’ but changed to using Microsoft Word, soon after Adobe ‘took over’ Word Perfect.  This has served us well for many years, but unfortunately Word has not kept up with the changes in the Web and the need for short pages of documentation easily accessible by users.  Yes, Word can generate HTML documents but anyone who has every looked at the created output will be struck by the obvious bloated code and its use of strangely named variables making it almost unreadable in its raw form.  This necessitates a cleanup operation on the code before it can really be used.

So the search was on to see it there is anything ‘better’ out there.

The obvious candidate was something known as DocBook which is written in XML, which means that it can be created and edited by virtually any editor upon any platform.  However to ensure good structure that meets the requirements of the DTD, something more robust is required.  It also raises the question of how one retains the investment in existing documents and how one can convert them to the ‘new’ format.  One advantage of the XML format is that it is reasonably easy to use XSL transforms to convert it to PDF, HTML  or indeed many other formats.

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Website Anti-Spam


A recent comment requested some additional anti-spam option in our Issue Tracker component. That triggered much though on a topic that obviously impact all website and their components, be it blogs, commenting systems etc.

There are a number of different parts to preventing spam on a website and this is to expand upon our own particular take on the subject.

Spam is one of the many problem that face web sites today. It is basically the proverbial ‘pain in the neck’ and if not handled correctly can be very time consuming. How often have you viewed web sites where there are totally unrelated comments /registrations/ forums posts which has to make one think about the site’s reputation and credibility.

Our site is not immune to this problem and the source is not restricted to any specific country although there does seem to be a preponderance from locations such as Turkey, China, Russian Federation and more recently Ukraine and Brazil.

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The Tor Project

Mentioned the Tor Project in a recent post so decided to expand a little upon the topic. 

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

It is a browser that exists on your machine, but is not installed as such, so can be placed on a USB key and used as a remote app.  Its’ purpose is to anonymise your web communications by bouncing then around a distributed network of relays all around the world:  it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Useful for accessing sites that may be blocked by you ISP for what ever reason.

HTTPS Everywhere a browser add-in



Came across this some time ago but now seems an appropriate time to mention it, especially with the on-going ‘mania’ with web security.

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox and Chrome extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.  It is with a one-click installation,which can  seriously increase your security on over 1,400 web sites by encrypting your connection.

Many sites, like Gmail (and Facebook, with caveats) have options that let you browse with HTTPS always turned on, but the HTTPS Everywhere extension makes this simpler.  Instead of turning it on for individual sites, HTTPS Everywhere will automatically routes all your data through a secure connection on any of its 1,400 supported web sites, keeping your information safe and away from prying eyes—in short, it's an extension everyone should have installed.

Essentially a win win situation.  Unfortunately not available for IE, Safari and other browsers except Firefox and Chrome.   

Site Spam Protection

We have noticed for some time a steady stream of Spam Comments added to our Blog entries and articles.  We know that we are not alone in this and that it seems to be a ‘fact of life’ that certain individuals wish to waste their time in creating such trivia. 

To minimise the disruption and annoyance these cause, these have been kept under control using a variety of methods and we recently changed our Blogging tool as a step to minimising this problem.

However one thing we did notice was that there were still Spam comments being entered even for content items that were no longer visible on the site.

We are sure that the majority of our visitors are not that interested in goods that these Spam entries advertise so have decided to take another step to trap more of these entries and introduce a further step in our line of defences.

Akeeba Admin Tools Pro has a very useful tool in the ‘Web Access Filter’ that can be used to assist in this task.  [We are users of this product and recommend it to our users, as satisfied customers and for the excellent support provided.]

We hope that this will not create any problems to our visitors and will continue to monitor the situation as time goes by. 

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5 More Free Tools For Windows 7 You Have To Try

Peter Bruzzese said in his blog: "Every couple of months, it's both entertaining and useful to revisit the tools and toys available to make our desktop experience smoother, more flexible, and, yes, more fun. A while back, I identified eight free Windows 7 tools you have to try and later revealed some truly awesome tools for Windows 7 power users. I have five more "gotta try" Windows tools for you to consider." Check them out here:
More Free Tools

Mailinator

One things that annoys me is these websites where you see an interesting articles that offers a free download of the article and then wants you to sign up and provide an email address so they may proceed to send you many emails that you do not really want to get.

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