I was just raving about some very cool javascript gallery effects yesterday… and was about to work on a Joomla component to showcase such things… when I realized that it was already done.  The company was JoomlaWorks and wanted to charge 12 Euros for their Simple Image Gallery which was an amalgamation of 5 Litebox like effects.  Hehe… it was only then that I realised that LiteBox had 5 clones:

• Slimbox
• ThickBox
• LyteBox
• GreyBox

Anyway, if you are interested in finding out how they compare to Litebox, read on….

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If you have read my previous article on video streaming, you will have noted that most of the popular video broadcasting sites broadcast in Flash flv format.  Of course, there are some freeware on the net which allows you to convert different video formats to flv… but nothing beats server side conversion to SWF format….

I mean.. just take a peek at you tube.  Surely, you dun see them asking you to convert your video to FLV format before uploading to their side?

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Have you ever wondered how SPAM filters work?  Well, to start off, let me explain that there are 2 type of SPAM filters.  One type of SPAM filter resides on the client, while the second type resides on the server.  Most hosting packages (including ours) provides you with a server based SPAM detection tool.  The defacto tool provided on most servers is:

Yes.. you guess it… SpamAssassin. 

So how does this SpamAssassin actually work?

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Recently, we have been receiving requests on the removal of email spam. Generally there are 2 ways to remove email spams. One is a client side solution, while the other is a server side solution. The client side solution refers to the purchase of a Windows based applications which can scan through all your incoming mails. A quick google showed that Spam Bully might be useful.

The other solution is a server side solution. As part of your hosting package, we provide a server-based spam filtering software known as Spam Assassin. This article will show you how to configure your server to set up the Spam Assassin,

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I was reading about Sun Tze Art of War and learn about the importance of military intelligence in the traditional battlefield. In today’s competitive business landscape, market intelligence is indispensable. We need to develop a keen understanding of our customers taste and preferences to develop products more suited for the market.

In the virtual world, market intelligence is measured through web statistics tracking & analysis.

199Web provides integration to a comprehensive tracking and analysis tool which will provide you with the necessary market intelligence to drive your business to the next level.
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A content management system (CMS) gives users the flexibility of changing the content of the website themselves. However, lay man with no experience in image processing will generally face some difficulties in the picture updates. This is because, like it or not, the CMS administrator has to possess some simple image editing skills for a CMS to be useful.

Based on feedback from many of our CMS users, the most common graphic editing functions needed are:

• Resizing & Cropping an image to an exact size (i.e. 80 by 80 pixel)
• Stripping a picture of its background

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Recently, I’ve been getting requests on how to analyse the statistics of our websites. That is a great sign as it shows that our clients are not just putting up a website for show, but studying it intently to see how its effectiveness can be fine-tuned.

Fortunately for our customers, our system has a web statistics component. It is an open-source web statistics tracking product, called Webalizer.
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As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Many a times, during the mockup phase, our clients will like to tell us to do certain changes to the design. However, we often phase a limitation on what can be expressed on words…

In such instances, I will recommend our clients to download the software, Snag It, and use it to illustrate the necessary changes. Click here to download Snag It!

Snag It basically allows you to make comments and annotations on the design effortlessly. It saves you a lot of time in expressing your preferences to us. Commenting on our design using Snag It will take less than 5 minutes.. but it is definitely worth more than a thousand words to our designers….

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After the completion of their Content Management System, clients will then be struck with a big problem - cropping and resizing of the images until they are of the right size for the CMS. For the picture to look good on the web, it has to be cropped and resized to the correct dimensions.

Generally, for the systems developed by us, we will provide the appropriate image dimensions. If your pictures do not fit those dimensions, you will need to resize and crop it till it fits. This article will explain:

• resizing of pictures
• cropping of pictures

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This article is long overdue…. my clients have been asking me about how they could do simple updating of their website. Due to our hectic schedule, such requests, unfortunately fell on deaf ears.

Finally, enough is enough. Decided to write up something simple (in the wee hours of the night) and hopefully, this will give our customers the necessary information to perform simple updating of their website.

A word of caution! This is for simple textual updates….. If you need to do something complicated, it is definitely better to just use our design services….. no point tearing your hair out for something that you do only once or twice in your life.

Anyway, here it goes:

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