To do this in Joomla has been a little bit of a hassel, especially if you are not a webdesigner.

Today, Peter van Westen (Twitter: NoNumber_nl) has made this incredibly much easier. One of his Joomla extensions, Articles Anywhere got a few more settings that basically allows you to put a div around the inserted article and set the size and placement.

To make it look really good, it still requires that someone add a few lines of code of css to the template, but it is enough to do this once – all the journalist will have to do is add the name of the css class when he inserts the sidebar.

The first step is to install Articles Anywhere – either through the normal Joomla installation, or by using Peter’s excellent NoNumber! Extension Manager. I would recommend this for all installations – chances are that you will need at least one or two of his extensions anyway.

What Articles Anywhere does is insert one article inside another, so we need to have an article to insert. I have made one here called Facts that contain the following:

FACTS

Model: XYZ
Price: 1020

Special features: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec mauris non nunc euismod condimentum at in eros.

Phone: 555-123456
Website: www.yoursite.com
E-mail: info@yoursite.com

Then I open the article where I want this to appear as a sidebar, place the cursor where I want it and click on the “Insert Article” button at the bottom of the editor. The process is a bit like inserting a picture. You get a box popping up that looks like this – I have adjusted the settings to what I need:

The new is the settings box to the right. Check that you want to “Embed in a div”, set the size and either left or right align it. I have also removed all but the “All text” setting in the left configuration box. When the configuration is done, find the article that you want to insert and click on it. It is a good idea to click on the ID of the article just in case you decide to change the title of the article later.

There is even a way to make these settings stick: Go to Extenions>Plugin Manager and find the plugin that is called “Editor Button – Articles Anywhere” and click on it. you will then get the configurations that allow you to set the defaults for the Artcles Anywhere extension. So now, most of your settings will be done and you can make a sidebar in just a few seconds! Really nice!

I have made these settings default:

• Use K2 instead of Joomla content type
• Not use the title tag
• Not use the Readmore tag
• Turn on using a div
• Set a size for the div
• Right align it
• Add a div classname

The only thing I wold need to change now might be the size of the div depending on how how much I needed to add in it.

After going through the steps above, you will have a code inserted in your article that looks something like this:

{article k2:24}{div width:200|height:320|float:right|class:sidebars}{text}{/div}{/article}

Save the article, and take a look at what you have:

I want to make the sidebar stand out a little better and add a little air around the text. So I added this section at the end of the css file for the template:

div.sidebars {background:#b6d0d6;margin:10px;padding:5px;}

And suddenly I have a sidebar that stands out and help my readers get a quick overview of the facts!

This is just a very basic use of the sidebar, I am sure you can come up with much better styling and use for it. Want to show how you use it? Leave a comment!

-Svein

So what do I do when I really have to use the commandline? Write a blog post about it, of course!

This time I needed to capture some footage from my DV camera. I tried three different video editing packages, and only one of them had an interface for capturing from DV – Kdenlive. But it did not recognize the source, so no capturing possible. A little searching and I found a post about some problems with firewire in Ubuntu 10.04. The solution is simple enough. Open a terminal window and type this

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf

The file will look like this:

# Select the legacy firewire stack over the new CONFIG_FIREWIRE one.
#blacklist ohci1394
#blacklist sbp2
#blacklist dv1394
#blacklist raw1394
#blacklist video1394

blacklist firewire-ohci
blacklist firewire-sbp2

The hash marks need to be switched around so it will look like this:

# Select the legacy firewire stack over the new CONFIG_FIREWIRE one.
blacklist ohci1394
blacklist sbp2
blacklist dv1394
blacklist raw1394
blacklist video1394

#blacklist firewire-ohci
#blacklist firewire-sbp2

After this has been done you need to run the following command and then re-boot your computer:

sudo update-initramfs -k all -u

When this is done, you should install a package called dvgrab. This one makes it possible to capture DV quite reliably and easy from the commandline via USB and FireWire/IEEE1394 interfaces. Install it with this command:

sudo apt-get install dvgrab

To capture video, attach your DV player or camcorder to your PC with a FireWire or USB cable, then go to the folder where you want to store the video and issue this command:

dvgrab --format raw --noavc capture

This will start dvgrab and it will wait for incoming DV and start capturing as soon as it senses the incoming video. You have to control this with the play and shuttle buttons on the player device. This is what it looks like while it is running:

svein@Laptop:/home/Video$ dvgrab --format raw --noavc capture
Found AV/C device with GUID 0x080046010400715d
Waiting for DV...
Capture Started
"capture001.dv":   999.89 MiB  7281 frames timecode 00:04:51.07 date 2010.08.16 21:23:05
"capture002.dv":   753.25 MiB 5485 frames timecode 00:00:00.00 date 2010.08.19 16:52:01
Capture Stopped

After I reached the end of the footage, I simply pressed CTRL-C to stop capturing. I could then import the material in Kdenlive for editing.

Kdenlive has a lot of really good features, but has an unfortunately clumsy way of doing some things and some non-standard ways of laying things out in the UI. It could easily become a great tool for video editing, even for professional news production and a lot of internet TV and broadcasters in developing countries and new democrasies would benefit from it! I will get back with another post with a review of Kdenlive.

-Svein

The CMS that I am using for the website is Joomla, and i am using the K2 extension. With K2 comes a module called K2 Tools (mod_k2_tools) and you can use it to make a list of categories or a drop-down menu for choosing the category among other things.

The category listing has a setting in the control panel to decide how to sort it. But if you choose category drop-down, you do not get any options for sorting at all.

After searching a lot, it appears that nobody knows how to do this, but at least I got a suggestion from Simon aka. k2joom to see if it would be possible to use the code from the listing option.

As I am not a programmer, this would not be an easy thing to do, but I started to look at the code. In mod_k2_tools.php there was nothing that looked like sorting, but it called another file, helper.php, so I opened this one and found this piece of code in a section that looked like it could belong to the category listing:

switch ($params->get('categoriesListOrdering')) {

case 'alpha':
$orderby = 'name';
break;

case 'ralpha':
$orderby = 'name DESC';
break;

case 'order':
$orderby = 'ordering';
break;

case 'reversedefault':
$orderby = 'id DESC';
break;

default:
$orderby = 'id ASC';
break;
}

As the category drop-down menu is the next in the settings I looked a bit further and found this code:

function treeselectbox(&$params, $id = 0, $level = 0) {

$root_id = (int) $params->get('root_id2');
$option = JRequest::getCmd('option');
$view = JRequest::getCmd('view');
$category = JRequest::getInt('id');
$id = (int) $id;
$user = &JFactory::getUser();
$aid = (int) $user->get('aid');
$db = &JFactory::getDBO();
if (($root_id != 0) && ($level == 0)) {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$root_id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access< ={$aid} ORDER BY ordering ";
} else {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access<={$aid} ORDER BY ordering ";
}

Comparing the last couple of lines to the first block seemed to indicate that there indeed was some ordering going on in there. So I tried changing the order in the categories, and the drop-down menu immediately reflected the change!

As I needed reverse sort by ID, I would rather not sit and redo the order by hand every time something got added. So I looked at the first block of code and decided to try to replace “ordering” with “id DESC” in the last couple of lines. They would then look like this:

if (($root_id != 0) && ($level == 0)) {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$root_id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access< ={$aid} ORDER BY id DESC ";
} else {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access<={$aid} ORDER BY id DESC ";
}

And the miracle happened! The drop-down menu is now prefectly sorted by ID in descending order!

Of course, this change will be overwritten in the next upgrade, which is part of the reason why I document it here. But I also hope that someone that knows a little bit about programming could add sort order as a setting in this module. It would certainly be welcome by me!

Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/
K2: http://getk2.org/

-Svein

After a bit of research, I found a post about this that helped me get things right on the first try. Here is what I did:

First I needed to install the DHCP package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dhcp3-server

After that is well and done, I needed to edit the configuration for it:

sudo nano /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf

Here is what my dhcp.conf file look like now:

# DHCP configuration file for Argoz
#
# Attention: If /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf exists, that will be used as
# configuration file instead of this file.
#
# $Id: dhcpd.conf,v 1.1.1.1 2002/05/21 00:07:44 peloy Exp $
#

# The ddns-updates-style parameter controls whether or not the server will
# attempt to do a DNS update when a lease is confirmed. We default to the
# behavior of the version 2 packages ('none', since DHCP v2 didn't
# have support for DDNS.)
ddns-update-style none;

# option definitions common to all supported networks...
option domain-name "lan1.domainname.com";
option domain-name-servers 10.11.12.100, 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

# If this DHCP server is the official DHCP server for the local
# network, the authoritative directive should be uncommented.
authoritative;

# Use this to send dhcp log messages to a different log file (you also
# have to hack syslog.conf to complete the redirection).
# log-facility local7;

# The rest of the network info

option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option broadcast-address 10.11.12.255;
option routers 10.11.12.1;

# The subnet

subnet 10.11.12.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 10.11.12.150 10.11.12.170;
}

I chose to keep the comments in there as I am not working with these things on a daily basis and thought it might be a good thing to have some reminders if I needed to edit it again.

Notice that all lines starting with # is just a comment and will not influence the DHCP server. This is a pretty common way of doing things in Ubuntu.

I chose to set the range for IP addresses from 10.11.12.150 to 10.11.12.170 as this should give me more than enough addresses for the little use I have. Your need might vary here.

After saving the configuration, the only thing left to do is starting the DHCP server:

sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server start

You should now have a reliable DHCP service on your network and if you had one running in a wireless router or ADSL router, you can log on there and turn it off. Have you considered setting up your own server yet?

The photograph of the computer classrom is by Extra Ketchup and has a Creative Commons license.

-Svein