Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Problem accessing some sites and HTTPS Everywhere.


We have noticed a small problem recently when trying to access a specific site ‘www.joomla.org’.  Not a particularly unusual place to access given some of our work. What was confusing was that other sites in the same domain were all accessible.

After much head scratching and trial and error, clearing cache’s and disabling cookies etc.  we eventually discovered the cause.

We use an extension names HTTPS Everywhere in our Chrome and Firefox browsers and it was this that was forcing the use of the HTTPS protocol on the site.  The result was that the site was always timing out.  Once identified the resolution was (as usual) simple, and involved disabling the use of HTTPS for that specific address.  Once this was done the problem was solved.

This type of problem may of course impact other web addresses, but after six months of use we must admit it is the only site that has every given us any problem. One for others to note in case they have the same type of problem.

SPAM and IP blocking

spamSince we started mapping IP addresses of persistent attempts to submit SPAM on our live site, it is obvious that Miami in the US is one of the most persistemt source. Already even though it is only the fourth day of the month we can see 128 attempts to submit SPAM messages.

This is annoying since it just increases the size of the server logs that are inspected for system problems and adds a lot of background noise.

I have decided therefore to start blocking the persistent IP addresses being used. The effect is virtually immediate with the incidences which were occuring very 5 minutes or so having ceased. It is a pity that some individuals feel the need to insert advertisements for 'personal' products on sites where they are totally inappropriate.

We therefore apologise to anyone inadvertantly who may be refused site access because they are given an IP address in our blocked range.  If you are caught then please contact support who will investigate and if necessary 'unblock' the IP address.

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Farewell to Microsoft Messenger

With the imminent demise of Microsoft Messenger (25th March 2013), which we have used for a number of years without any problems, we have made the upgrade to using Microsoft Skype.  This being the product that Microsoft brought in and has decided to replace the ‘old’ Messenger service.

The upgrade went clean enough and the ‘old’ Messenger software was successfully uninstalled.. Now to see how it measures up.

Noticed the upgrade tried to ‘push’ the use of Bing, and MSN as a homepage in the browser, which can be easily overlooked, but somehow one expects that!

Now to see how it works in practise.

Addresses etc. remain unchanged, so current contacts should all continue to work.

Experiences using DocBook XML

This summaries a few of the lessons learned using DocBook XML for documentation.

Upcast: The conversion from Microsoft Word to DocBook XML introduced a few opportunities for changes:

1. Media objects (figures) are all converted to ‘inlinemediaobject’, and even when the image is on its own it always is surrounded by ‘para’ and results up positioned on the left hand side of the page. The best approach we found was to convert them to simple ‘mediaobject’ and change then to become ‘figures’ and in this way also enable the creation of a ‘List of Figures’. We also tended to change the specified exact image size to use scaling so that the width of 14cm was most appropriate. [This did impact the fact that all html screen images come out at a standard width.]

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DocBook XML to PDF

The Apache FOP ProjectThe next stage in our documentation changes was the creation of PDF documents from the DocBook XML formats.  [See previous posts for other blogs on our documentation changes.]

There is a need to use a XSLT transform to convert the XML document to a FO (formatted object) which can then be processed to create the PDF output.

The DocBook distribution have available a set of XSL transforms for converting the XML files into a variety of different formats, so the first step was to download these. This is not strictly necessary since it is possible to access the XSL transforms over the web, but having a local copy speeds up the transformation process.

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Custom CSS and DocBook XML documents

docimport-48We have previously mentioned using XML documents in DocBook format. We now turn our attention to the question of the format of the tables. A previous blog on DocBook table format mentioned the two types of  tables supported by DocBook, but not every document table necessarily has to be in the same format. We have an ‘in-house’ style used for some time and the desire was to retain a similar format with our web pages.

We are using a Joomla component named DocImport written by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos and are very pleased with its behaviour even though it is still in an ‘alpha’ release form. A credit to the authors abilities. The component presents each web page with headers and footers which are using a ‘table style’ which does not display column separators. This is understandable since the standard format for tables is basic to put it bluntly. 

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Animated Gifs in banners stopped working

lg-1and1
Noticed a little while ago that the banner we use for our affiliate link to 1&1 Internet was not being displayed in our page footer.

Further inspection revealed that 1&1 Internet had changed their affiliate specification slightly (not that we were informed but there you are!).  Anyway they now provide animated GIFs to use so replaced our 'old' configuration with the suggested new details.

That was fine apart from the link still refused to display. So we had to investigate further. What didn't help was that we were unsure exactly when the link first exhibited problems, so were unsure whether this was caused by a change of ours, or just by 1&1.

To cut a long story short, we discovered that it was the animated GIFs that were causing the problem, since a static image displays fine. For our purposes a static GIF is fine, and until we have more time to see if the animated GIF problem is more widespread than just banners it will suffice.

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Joomla and JTableNested

joomla
We recently started addressing a small concern that we had with the handling of Projects in our Issue Tracker component.  Not I hasten to add, a bug, but more a lack of functionality that was desired.  The search functionality was a little limited, and we has implemented some code to sort the projects in the desired order.  Whilst it worked it was not what we would describe as ‘pretty’.  We took the bullet and decided to convert the table from a ‘hierarchical’ format to a ‘nested’ format.

The desire was to

  • improve the search facility
  • to clean up the existing code making better use of supplied Joomla functionality
  • to provide an improved sort ability
  • to introduce ACL group control of the projects (we had already implemented ACL controls upon the issues in an earlier release).
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DocBook XML tables


We have been studying  the DocBook DTD and in particular the table specifications.  There are two separate and distinct formats supported, the originals CALS format and the ‘newer’ HTML format since DocBook version 4.3. CALS is an SGML standard developed by the U.S. military, and their set of table tags was one of the first to be developed that included complex features for tables.

Some confusion was encountered since one source claimed that both table formats could not be used in the same document, whilst another source claimed that the two forms cannot be mixed within  the same definition, which makes more sense.

Later, because of widespread familiarity with HTML tables, DocBook added HTML table elements. Now you can use tr and td instead of row and entry in a table.  They cannot be mixed within one table. Also, the content of each table cell has to be valid DocBook, so you cannot usually just cut and paste an HTML table into your DocBook document. But the DTD does permit a document to contain both CALS tables and HTML tables. The tgroup element is the distinguishing characteristic between them. A CALS table requires a tgroup, and an HTML table does not permit one.

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Using XXE as an XML editor

XMLmind logo
We have been using the evaluation edition of XMLMind XML editor commonly known as XXE for a little while and discovered a a document on the web from the O’Reilly stable.

The link is for an older version of the software (Standard Edition 2.10 I think) but in the main it is still applicable with the latest evaluation edition (5.4.1).  The authors hope that it is found useful or as a starting point for your own work.

Note:  Reloading a later evaluation version resets the usage counter back to 30 days.

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