News and Thoughts

If you have friends or associates that still don't get why they need a website, refer them to this video we did under our WebsiteOwnersGuidebook.com banner.

And yes, if you'd like a similar video for your website, we can do that as well.

Backups, like spare tires, are something you hope you never have to use. But when time comes that you need them, they'd better work. The thing about backing up any site run by today's modern CMS systems is that you have to be sure to back up the files (programs, photographs, documents) at the same time you back up the database (users, content, categories) to make sure one doesn't reference something the other doesn't have. We back up all our client sites on our server nightly to a machine that's sitting under my desk. Yes, I'm old-fashioned in that I don't trust a backup I can't physically touch. We keep the past five nights' worth of backup as well. So if something goes awry it should surely manifest itself within five days and we can recover from it. The other thing about backups is that once in a while you have to actually run the fire-drill and make sure the backups can be restored. I did that this morning with the openfacesystems.com site itself. Yes, it worked just fine. Breathe easy.

joomla logo blackOf course, after Joomla 3.5.0 shipped, a bugfix was released. This was for minor annonyances, such as if you were logged into the administrator side of the site and you got logged off due to being idle too long, you had to log in twice to get back in. This sort of thing. We've updated all our client sites as of April 7th.

The Joomla! project has released Joomla 3.5.0. Over the past several days we've updated all our sites. The updates all went smoothly. There isn't too much new from the user's point of view. It will be sending anonymous user data back to the Joomla project so they can better understand how users interact with the software in order to make future usability improvements. It will also notify the site administrator by mail when security updates are available. This isnt' a big deal for our clients as we automatically update new software anyway.

As most of you know, I teach several classes at Emory Continuing Education. In one of my classes the assignment I made was to do a YouTube video about your choice of topic. I decided to do an example video for the class to see. One Saturday when my wife, Marla, and I were walking at a local park I carried my cell phone and shot some video and stills. I then uploaded them to YouTube and used their online video editor to put together a video. Youtube's online video editor has its quirks and it's not nearly as powerful or easy to use as desktop applications, but it's free. If we can help you put together a video for your website, let us know. If you need video fancier than a smartphone and Youtube, don't worry, we have you covered there as well.

On the evening of March 2nd, we upgraded our main server that hosts most of our internal and client websites. We rent server space from the world's largest provider of cloud computing resources: Amazon Web Services. We upgraded our server to double the amount of processor power and added a bit more disk space. We can tell the difference already. Hopefully you'll be pleased as well. The upgrade went very smoothly and all the websites and backups are doing well.

Welcome to our latest client, Star Light Farm. They take care of horses. And thanks to Lucy at Ashland Farm for the referral.

We get a lot of questions about how websites should work with mobile devices. To answer these questions, we've written a nice PDF article about all things mobile. To get it, fill out this form to subscribe to our once-a-month email list and start learning.

OpenFace Systems and some of our clients are businesses that sell to businesses, commonly called B2B. To help such organizations find new clients, we've launched FreshBusinesses.info, a website that gathers new members from almost 2,000 Chambers of Commerce across the US and makes these names available for purchase. There are other such sites out there, but what makes FreshBusinesses different is a simple, no-hassle purchase process. The customer knows the costs up front, doesn't have to commit to a long-term relationship, or even create an account on the site. It's a simple, clean, buy-what-you-need, painless process.

We get asked a lot of questions about web design, social media, marketing, you name it. To try to aswer these questions for our clients and anyone else on the Internet, we've collected our thoughts on all things Website and launched a new informational site, WebsiteOwnersGuidebook.com. We hope you'll take a look around and tell us what you think. If there's something you'd like to learn about, just contact us and let us know.

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