It’s written by Jamie Wright, who lives, works and raises a family in Costa Rica along with her husband Steve. Unlike the badly written, sugar coated pap of your average missionary website, her blog is funny, real, self depreciating, and sometimes even a little crass.

Read it here

Here are 6 of the reasons I prefer blogs to other, briefer forms of online idea sharing:

1. Longhand:  If Twitter is the SMS of the internet, Blog posts are the phone calls (yes, I know about Skype, but please humour me).  It might be nice to receive an SMS now and again, but it can’t compare to a phone call and the connection that can be made through it.
2. Connection: I like that the comments in a blog appear immediately after the post to which they pertain.  You don’t have to run a search to track down all the disparate parts of a discussion.
3. Posterity: Everything on the web is temporal, but blog posts have greater longevity than microblog posts.  Some of my best, or most unique, posts have drawn visitors long after they were written, thanks to the power of Google.  I also use blogging software that has backup and archiving built into it.
4. Charting growth: Thanks to the archiving feature mentioned above, it’s easy for me to hark back to what I was thinking about or reading at any point during the life of this blog, which I started in February 2003.
5. Flexibility: If I want to write a 5,000 word essay, I can do that in a blog.  Likewise, if I want to publish a photograph with a two word explanation.  I’m not confined to 140 characters.
6. Eloquence:I’m a sucker for well written articles and stories.  My appetite for them isn’t satisfied by Twitter, although I often become aware of them there.  Blogs allow words the space to breathe.

I pledge to blog more during 2011 than I did in 2010.

Make Things Fair

For a while I’ve dreamed of setting up a site that will act as a source for information on Human Trafficking and Fair Trade, telling stories as well as offering ways to take action. A few months ago, after a little brainstorming with some friends (thanks Mark), I purchased the makethingsfair.com domain name. I hope that it will become a valuable resource and a place for sharing ideas and activities.

If you care about these issues, please show your support by:

1. Subscribing to receive email updates (click here)
2. Following @makethingsfair on Twitter
3. Contributing stories by email (stories [at] makethingsfair [dot] com)

Click here to visit Make Things Fair

Looks Can Kill

The website of my web design and development company, Looks Can Kill, hasn’t changed much since I first started the company back in 2005. I wanted to freshen it up, and to integrate it with WordPress, in the hope of expanding my portfolio offering, and having a place to file web related blog posts.

Click here to visit Looks Can Kill

This post continues from yesterday, since I ran into problems trying to implement the easy file upload in the SAEF (Stand Alone Entry Form).  After much searching in the forums, and Google, I discovered how I could get this running smoothly.  The following assumes that you have already installed Mark Huot’s File Upload Extension and have it up and running through your control panel.

1. Modify your mod.weblog_standalone.php (found at /system/modules/weblog/mod.weblog_standalone.php) so that instead of reading:
   $data = array(
'hidden_fields' => $hidden_fields,
'action' => $RET,
'id' => 'entryform'
);

   It reads:
   $data = array(
'hidden_fields' => $hidden_fields,
'action' => $RET,
'id' => 'entryform',
'enctype' => 'multipart/form-data'
);

   For more information read this article by Chad Crowell.

2. Find out the Field_ID, for the custom field that you are wanting to add to, in the Control Panel by going to Admin > Utilities > SQL Manager > Manage Database Tables and browsing the exp_weblog_fields table
3. Add the following code to your SAEF (below the {/custom_fields} tag), exchanging 9 for your unique Field_ID

<label for="content">File Upload:</label>
<input class="required" id="file_content" title="Please upload a file. This field is required." name="field_id_9_img[]" type="file" class='file' />
<input type="hidden" value="" class="file" name="field_id_9"/>
<input type="hidden" value="file" class="file" name="field_ft_9"/>
4. And, finally, test to see if it works properly before going live with a client’s site.

For more on this, please take a look at the following links from the EE forum:

• How to get Mark Huot’s File Extension to work with SAEF/Stand Alone Entry Form
• An extension that can be used instead of hacking the mod.weblog_standalone.php
file.
• Mark Huot’s actual Extension

However yesterday I discovered Mark Huot’s File Upload Extension. The extension makes managing files much easier, giving users a simple ‘browse’ button for searching their hard drive, and even manages resizing and cropping site wide (without users ever having to face questions like “would you like to resize your image,” or “would you like to delete the original?”

I did, however, have to customize the extension slightly due to the fact that images with a .jpg file extension were pixelating. After a quick search of the forums I discovered that if I replaced the following code (in the extension file, under the heading ‘Write File’):

if(@imagegif($dst_img, $dst) !== false) {}
else if(@imagejpeg($dst_img, $dst) !== false) {}
else if(@imagepng($dst_img, $dst) !== false) {}

With:
if(@imagejpeg($dst_img, $dst, 90) !== false) {}
else if(@imagegif($dst_img, $dst) !== false) {}
else if(@imagepng($dst_img, $dst) !== false) {}

I could avoid this pixelation and display better quality images.

Update:
I’ve been using this extension on a Windows 2003 server and had some difficulties with the extension accepting the server paths. This post helped me resolve the issue.

A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.

And the illustrations and variation in page layout inspiring:
But sadly it seems to have fallen by the wayside.

The most tricky part of this process is that Paypal do not allow funds to be withdrawn into a South African bank account.  There are so many wonderful, simple, ecommerce solutions that make use of Paypal, and as a result save the merchant a lot of money.

So what are the alternatives?

Right now I’m looking at the following options:

• Use Shopify and find a payment processor which works well (and is low in cost) in South Africa.
• Use Magento and their VCS payment module.

Please do let me know if you have any ideas!