June « 2010 « brandondawson.org

25Jun/100

Pretty much matches my experience

Interesting little graph of the marketing capabilities of major social media sites here.

Filed under: Internet, Marketing No Comments

23Jun/100

“Invalid Key” error for jos_session, jos_components, and jos_core_acl_aco tables in Joomla database

I ran into this one this evening, and at its root, it comes down to some changes made between MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.

Problem is, fixing the issues created by these changes seems to be more involved than the documentation implies. Suggested fixes such as commenting out the skip-bdb option in my.cnf did not work in this case.

After spending hours perusing support sites, and banging my head repeatedly against these tables that were being reported as "corrupt" and unrepairable, I finally hit upon a low-tech solution.

I downloaded the actual database files from /var/lib/mysql, tucked it into the /var/lib/mysql directory of a MySQL 5.0 install, exported the SQL queries and re-imported them into my 5.1 install.

This solution isn't for everyone, of course, because it requires access to a 5.0 install, but it worked for me.

Tagged as: corrupted database, invalid key, Joomla, jos_components, jos_core_acl_aco, jos_session, mySQL No Comments

17Jun/103

A Brief History of whitehouse.gov redesigns

During a brief foray into Wikipedia today, I found myself deposited on a site operated by the National Archives, that preserved the whitehouse.gov website as it existed during the transfer of power between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

It got me to thinking: viewing the evolving capabilities, style conventions, and sensibilities of the website of this most visible of American institutions might provide insights for communicators of any stripe, whether they be marketers, writers, or political operators/organizations such as the White House is.

Failing that, it's still an interesting walk through 256-color gifs, table layouts, the dawn of Javascript, and the birth of powerful content management systems.

Since the Clinton-era website was not preserved by the National Archives, I had to turn to Archive.org, "The Internet Wayback Machine", in order to see the real evolution, as well as the evolving internet face of the subsequent Bush Administration.

Here are some screenshots documenting that evolution. You can click on the screenshots to pull up an embiggened slideshow view.

Tagged as: retrospective, Web Design, whitehouse.gov Continue reading

15Jun/100

Sending a message?

The 62-foot statue of Jesus built by a megachurch just off I-75 near Cincinnati, known locally as "Touchdown Jesus", was destroyed last night by lightning.