Miscellania

News, announcements, and stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.

TechWriter.Ninja Being Relaunched

by Todd Phillips, published 7 November 2014

The website is being relaunched. I have had some frustrations with Joomla lately, and also wanted to get back into some custome HTML/JQuery coding to build a portfolio piece. The end result is this new look & feel. The goals of the site are:

• Share insights on technical writing
• Review technical writing tools and share tips for using them
• Release my snarky humor upon an unsuspecting world
• Learn more about coding and build an example of my progress

Joomla Frustrations

by Todd Phillips, published 6 November 2014

A couple years ago I made the shift away from WordPress to using Joomla. I liked the integrated security most of all. I had built some WordPress sites with forum and calendar addons that required their own separate logins. What a pain that was for the users. Joomla, with its centralized security, seemed like a real blessing. But it wasn't long before I was missing the ability to remotely author blog entries and to display them as a true blog in the Joomla site. That's when I found EasyBlog.

EasyBlog is an addon for Joomla that manages your blog entries really well. It lets you replicate a lot of the functionality of a WordPress blog. It looks good. But it maintains it's own list of users and permissions. Sure, you still logon once in Joomla and then have access through an EasyBlog user that is tied to a Joomla user. I think this is where my problems started. It seems there are a few people out there in the interwebs that know how to login directly through a page buried in the EasyBlog addon and create a new account. EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE DENIED THEM THE PERMISSION TO DO SO. I have had this one guy (same user name and email, same IP address) use this method on several different sites. Once he is in, he begins posting bogus blog entries full of affiliate links and (probably) malware.

I don't think that this is the fault of Joomla, but I am very suspicious of the EasyBlog addon, because it is always the point of entry for these people. So on the sites that I will maintain on Joomla, I will no longer be purchasing extra addons to handle the blogging. Did I mention that this addon cost me real money to purchase a couple of times? I will be using the built-in functions of Joomla, and in some cases going back to WordPress or hand-coding the sites like I am doing here.