How can I make a webpage open only during certain hours of the day in a given timezone? I'm using Wix, as I am not smart enough to learn any kind of legitimate programming.
I wouldn't think that's possible with something like Wix since they usually have set-in-stone templates. Most website creation sites I know don't allow you to add custom code, and as a matter of fact it might be taken literally as part of their motto:
"Easy to customize. No coding."
Also, just to clarify I signed up for Wix and checked it out...
In short, I don't think that's possible. You'd need something like Javascript/PHP to accomplish that. You wouldn't be able to use HTML blocks or a Flash file (.swf) and those are the closest kinds of customizations (drag and drop blocks) they offer for your site that would get you there.
I would look into hiring someone to design it or buying a program like Rapidweaver (which is what I use) to create a website on a domain you already own.
Related
Please Bear with me as I know It needs research from my side but still want to ask as It would make things a lot easier for me.
Here is what I want to implement.
An online shop where I would configure admin areas for different store owners (vendors). The store owner can belong to same area or different areas. Using the admin area, each store owner can select from pre-configured list of products and define prices for the products in different locations where they have a physical store. The end user can browse the products listing based on his location (area). If multiple vendors belong to same area as customer, the customer will see the product with multiple prices from different vendors. If none of the vendor configured the product of that area, customer will not see the product.
Now the question is, what would be the appropriate option for the above requirements.
Magento, Opencart, nopcommerce or something else?
This is based on my experience. My advice, if you want sth that goes beyond minor tweaks and a couple of new features, stay away from opencart for the time being.
First of all, you will have to pay (not little...) for extensions and mods of often low quality and crappy support. You should also feel lucky to find one that will cover all the features you want and interoperability between extensions is just non-existent. And if you ask for more features chances are you will have to pay again. There are some free extensions but most are a joke. Like, put a link in your footer or disable sth.
So your next option is coding. Opencart is easy to learn if you know basic php and you can start writing code fast. But.. Opencart lacks a solid mechanism for extending it (until v2.0 at least) and after a while it gets both chaotic and frustrating. Also, you will often need to implement stuff that needs some basic backend functionality from opencart but which is either offered in a way that is useless to you or with basic needed features absent. As a result you will find yourself creating your own "library" of functions that will allow you later to focus on your extension. Moreover there is actually no framework on which you can rely. Sure there are some functions and some methods that you can use, but that's it.
Another thing. The opencart community is not one of the easiest to go along with. I don't mean they are bad or that they will bite you, but people there try to make money and do not find it easy to share things with you, be it advice or code. Also, they are competitive. And they do not accept criticism, even suggestions, gladly. And there is a scent of eliticism in some threads that can upset your stomach.
This is how I have experienced opencart. I have to admit that I like opencart itself and I find pleasure in coding for it and even now I am debugging some new extension of mine. But often it reminds me that there is so much lacking and I often spend so much time doing trivial stuff that it makes me wonder if it is worth it.
I do not know about magento. It feels similar to opencart to me.
I would suggest drupal to anyone wanting to implement something custom. There is all a framework and powerful free as in speech extensions and a great truly foss community. There are a couple options there for building an eshop but I would go with the commerce module. It takes a while to get used to all the concepts but you can achieve what you want with just mere clicks. You won't even have to write code if you don't want to.
Again I repeat, avoid opencart if you need sth too custom (as you do). If not, opencart is one of the fastest to deploy.
Sometimes I get into a situation when I need to deliver a website in a very short period of time and in that case I use to download joomla templates from the internet, modify it as per my requirement and then deliver it.
Now my question is since I am downloading the template free from the internet I assume I don't have the right to write "Developed by My Name/Company Name" in the footer of the website and if my assumption is correct , then what would be appropriate to write in the footer if I also want others to know that I also have some contribution to make the website live.?
Thanks in Advance :)
It depends on the license that the template you use is being distributed under. They are all different and some would allow you to do basically anything you want, like GPL is pretty flexible. While other licenses don't allow any modification to the code, others don't allow any distribution without consent, all kinds of stuff.
You need to look at the license before you do anything, that will spell out what you can and can't do.
Write whatever is appropriate.
If you developed it and tweaked the template considerably - put your info there (if the client is okay with that). Publicity is always good.
The free templates are often part of the GPL so you can do with them as you please. Although you have to be careful because some of those 'free' templates end up loading additional things which quietly publicize their own business. Read through THIS THREAD to get an idea of what I'm talking about and which template sites do that.
I'm working on a travel site and am interested in adding some functionality so that visitors can easily click on a travel destination and add it in a "bag", pretty much like a shopping cart on traditional e-commerce websites. When a few destinations are added the customer should be able to type their own text along with the picked destinations and then send an offer by clicking a button.
A travel guide will then receive the form data to customize a trip for the potential customer.
Every destination in Joomla has its own article and therefore need some sort of button that the user can click to add trip to the "bag". If this functionality is inserted in the article by some piece of code or if it's a module in the sidebar doesn't really matter.
I have tried using "SimpleCaddy" for Joomla. I have modified it but I find it really hard to turn it into something useful.
I would like to know how to best proceed? Are there perhaps any extensions, (commercial or non-commercial doesn't matter), that can get the job done?
Most definitley there are. You tagged you're using joomla 1.5, Virtuemart is a great e-commerce solution for that version. Hugely popular, well supported, large community extremely customizable... the downside is that it can be very complex if you're not sure what's going on. Simple Caddy is a great one for something really lightweight and easy to get up and running quickly - but it lacks any sort of advanced features.
Unfortunately in my experience finding one that blends between 'lightweight and easy', and 'full featured and complex' is very difficult. you may also want to try JoomShopping however - I've recently installed it on a site and had great success with it. It was really straight forward, setup was not too bad and getting it configured just took a bit of trial and error (unfortunately there are no real good tool-tips or anything to help you figure out exactly what does what on the back-end).
Those are my two recommendations; Virtuemart or Joomshopping. They both have shoppingcart features which I'm sure you could easily modify to be the users 'bag'. Both seem to have a pretty good/proven track record and a well rounded community. I think either way you'll be satisfied, but it does sound like SimpleCaddy may come up 'just short' of what you're needing.
At my institution, we have a small library with 150 books and 50
users. We would like to use a simple online management system that
displays the books, lets users search and enter when they get and
return a book. (There is no librarian, the books are just in an
otherwise empty room.)
I'm not familiar with modern web content management systems. In the
old days, I would have just implemented a quick Perl/CGI script, but I
think there are better options nowadays?
What would be the simplest way to get/implement such a system? Django?
Ruby on Rails? Ideally, I'd like to just run it in my user account
without having to install database support etc.
Is it possible to do everything on one dynamic HTML page? What role
does AJAX play in such a system?
I suggest take a look at the available open source tools for libraries before deciding to build one from scratch:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Open_Source_Software#Great_Free.2FOpen_Source_Tools_for_Libraries
Another good resource in your research: http://www.oss4lib.org/
If you find an existing tool that fits the bill (or enough to make it worth extending), that will be important in guiding what platform/language/framework and techniques will be best to use.
If you want a quick and easy solution, you might want to consider using SQLite as the database backend, since it does not require any configuration or setup (except for the tables, of course).
If you have a machine standing around there, you could take a look at Qt/C++ or PyQt to create a simple user interface.
Pylons (there are lots of alternatives!) or any other web framework might do the job as well, but I guess it would be more work to create a web application than a quick and simple desktop application for this job.
This is quite a complicated question doesn't have a simple answer. The best I can do is point you in the direction of some resources to get you started:
Framework/CMS
Unfortunately, most frameworks require at least some minimal kind of db interaction. While this is not true for all, it would probably be easiest to steer clear of a framework, you probably don't need that much overhead anyway.
Javascript/AJAX
If you want things to happen without any seperate pageloads, then sure, you can use some ajax. However, you probably don't need anything this sophisiticated
How I Would Do It
If you really trusted your students enough to be diligent about checking in/out books, I think it would be easiest to just have a form on a webpage somewhere that they could enter the number of the book they are checking in/out. Then store the state of each book in a text file somewhere (you said you didn't want to use any db's), or even look into sqlite.
Again, you probably don't need all the overhead of a full framework/CMS. It would be fairly trivial to, as you said, write a quick script to handle the ISDN, ID, Title, Whatever of the book they are checking in/out.
Also, there are significantly easier languages to write scripts in these days than Perl and CGI. Try PHP, Ruby, or Java
What do the clever programmers here do to keep track of handy programming tricks and useful information they pick up over their many years of experience? Things like useful compiler arguments, IDE short-cuts, clever code snippets, etc.
I sometimes find myself frustrated when looking up something that I used to know a year or two ago. My IE favorites probably represent a good chunk of the Internet in the late 1990s, so clearly that isn't effective (at least for me). Or am I just getting old?
So.. what do you do?
Two Things I do:
I blog about it - this allows me to go back and search my own blog.
We use the code snippet feature in Visual Studio.
Cheers.
I use:
Google Notebook - I take notes for projects, books I'm reading, etc
Delicious + Firefox plug in - Every time I see a good page I mark it.
Windows Journal (in tablet pc) - When I need to draw something and then copy/cut/paste it. I have more distractions here, the web is always very close :)
Small Moleskine paper notebook - Its always with me.
Big paper notebook - When I need more space to write and less distractions.
Obviously these are for all useful information, not just for snippets or tips and tricks.
Why not set up a Wiki?
If you are on windows, i know that ScrewTurn wiki is pretty simple to deploy on a desktop/laptop. No database to fuss around with.
Blog about it.
One of the nice side-effects of blogging is that if you use a sensible categorization or tagging system, it's quite easy to search for stuff within your blog. The fact that you wrote about it also makes it easier to remember problems you have encountered before ("hey, I blogged about that!").
That's a great benefit aside from, of course, being able to share this information publicly so that others might be able to find your solution to a particular problem using Google.
A number of people I know swear by Google Notebook
I send them to my gmail account, that way I have them where ever I go, and they can be put into appropriate folders for later.
I second the blog about it technique...even Jeff said that's a major reason he blogs.
Also, regarding the wiki idea, if you set one up at work, be sure to encourage your coworkers to do the same. When someone finds something of interest they can just write a little "article" explaining what it is and how to do it... that way, not only are your own things easily available and quickly searchable, but you'll often find out things you never knew from other people in your group. That way it benefits everyone not just you.
I agree with emailing, the wiki and the blog. Emailing is the most useful. If you can't use GMail and you're on windows, install a desktop search utility (Windows search, Google Desktop, Copernic, etc)
I also like to jot it into a textfile and save it in my documents folder. Whatever desktop search utility you use will be able to find it easily. e.g.
//print spool stop.notes.txt
If the printer spooler stops, start it again by
- Services > Provision Networks > Restart Service
tags: printer provision no printer spooler cannot print remote desktop
Subscribe in Google Reader and then search later.
At my last place of work they wouldn't let me set up a wiki or anything - so I just made various word documents full of tips and instructions and gave that to my successor when I left.
Now though I'd use a private wiki, or maybe a blog.
For many years I've kept a Word doc named Knowledgebase.doc that contains all my notes with a decent table of contents. I like to keep everything in one searchable doc.
I use a sync tool to make sure the file is copied to all the machines I want it on.
I use TiddlyWiki stored in my DropBox account. Although, recently, Evernote is getting my atention; it has a really useful feature: you send a twitter direct message to evernote user (myen) and it adds a note with your message (a really quick way to add notes or URL's for post-processing). Imagine, you can use a command-line twitter client to create notes! (or any twitter client). I really like this feature.