Travel without ever leaving your seat

design trends

Have you ever wanted to take a trip to a faraway landmark, maybe the Eiffel Tower in France or the Court of Great Harmony in the Forbidden City in China, but weren’t sure you could swing it? Well now you can visit locations throughout the world and not actually leave your seat. These are panophotographies – immersive and interactive panoramic images. Choose your destination, then click your mouse and move it around in 360°+ to make it seem like you are standing in that actual location. Look up, look down and spin all around. Amazing...

Crayon Art

design history

Ever wonder what to do with those old crayons that your kids have abandoned in your basement? Start a new hobby of carving them. Create anything from pink elephants to red roosters.

These amazing sculptures, comprised of 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac, were carved from crayons by Vietnamese artist Diem Chau. Chau can create anything from animals to humans. Have one custom-made for your recent graduate... what a great gift!

Joomla Updates

interactive news

In the last month, Joomla issued two security updates to the core software. Joomla describes the priority of the fixes as moderate, but recommends that all sites upgrade. We can help you do this. It’s a quick process, but we recommend backing up both your files and your database.

We should let you know that we currently have Lazybackup installed in the Art270 site, and so far it has done an excellent job of sending a backup of the database to a designated email address. It’s worked well for us, but one of our clients installed it on their site as well, and recently needed to restore a previous database backup only to find it corrupted. Since Joomla has removed this extension from their directory, we take this as a vote of no-confidence and cannot recommend it. If you have it installed, see the note below about Akeeba Backup.

Joomla extensions we like

JoomlaWatch installs a realtime traffic monitoring component in the administrative back end that allows you to immediately see the amount and source of your web traffic. Recommended for every deployment. Free.

AG Google Analytics displays your Google traffic stats in your administrative area. The charts and graphics aren’t as polished as Google’s, but you get the information without having to leave your site. Recommended for any site with an Analytics site. Free.

Akeeba Backup makes a complete backup of all your site files and your database and saves it to your web server in a location you set. This component is the successor to JoomlaPack. Unfortunately, it does require you to manually initiate the process and does not send the backups to you via email. Also, if your server is close to capacity, this could push you over. Recommended for every deployment. Free.

Find all these extensions and more in the Joomla Extensions Directory.