Things have been quite busy here this week, which is why I have not gotten around to publishing a lot. Also, I’ve been working on my portfolio and am happy with the progress I’ve made on it. More should be up by the end of the weekend. Also, more posts should be coming up, too. Stay tuned for more updates, my friends!
Virtuemart is the leading and most robust e-commerce system for Joomla, much less the most feature rich I’ve seen for a CMS. One day, I was approached by one of my clients who was wondering if their site was able to generate discount coupons for the shopping cart on their site, and if so, set one up that takes 15% off the total purchase before taxes. Not being a Virtuemart expert myself, I did some investigating on the site’s backend.
The first thing I did was log into the site’s backend and went to the Virtuemart component.
Virtuemart is a Joomla Component.
Infographics have really made quite the comeback recently, and those who do it right, reap the benefit of not only creating something visually appealing, but also informative and memorable. Below are 10 infographics I’ve found that demonstrate the power of social media not only in numbers, but with compelling visuals.
Twitter has become a marketing powerhouse for many avenues of business, commerce, and branding. Twitter has made it easier for people to become closer to brands they’re loyal to, celebrities, and has created a more interactive form of dialogue across the internet where content can easily be distributed. I’ve put together a collection of SlideShare presentations focused on Twitter. Topics range from Twitter, building a better brand, and etiquette.
Presentation by David Griner.
This presentation is a great start for the Twitter novice. The presentation includes a brief history of Twitter, online branding basics, how to find people on Twitter, simple etiquette, and terminology. One concept I slightly disagree with is how to select a handle/username. While many people attempting to build a brand keep their usernames professional, I rock the casual username goatboy91587. I do this because this is typically the username I choose for nearly every network I join, or website I subscribe to, which in turn is sort of a branding tactic in itself. The decision is yours. How do you want to be identified?
Presentation by Andy Beal.
A very basic presentation on Twitter fundamentals that is enriching for businesses and common users alike. This presentation is less formal than the first one, but the informality makes the content more presentable and easier to grasp.
When creating Adobe AIR applications, one of the more important (and easily overlooked) things that people like is System Tray Icons (Windows) or Dock Icons (Mac) for simple user commands such as changing preferences in the application or exiting entirely.
One of the many advantages of using Adobe AIR is the cross platform support, but how does an application know if it’s running on a Windows or Mac platform in order to accommodate a System Tray or Dock icon for each respective environment? The development team behind Adobe AIR have conquered this problem for developers. Within the NativeApplication Class there’s two boolean properties to resolve this problem. The boolean property supportsDockIcon is used to detect whether or not the native operating system supports Dock Icons (Mac) while the other, supportsSystemTrayIcon, is used for Windows based systems.
What can be done, is that an if-else if statement can be written to compensate for both environments. In most cases, you’d want the logic in both parts of the statement to be similar, with the exception of the size of the icon. This way, continuity and consistency is maintained between both platforms.
As you can see, the idea is pretty simple. If the boolean returns true, then the respective statement will execute. If you would like this code expanded on, please let me know. I’d be more than happy to either update the post or write a follow up post on this topic.
Happy coding! 
