Unfortunately, I was unable to resolve the issues with using OpenX for my banner management at this time.  My page load times had spiraled up to 22 seconds or better, with a Cache system, on 6mbps connection.  Not good.

BannersManager is the most robust banner management system for Joomla that I have found yet.  The big drawback is the lack of reporting, but I don’t guess you can fault them in that they’re doing this inside someone else’s system as opposed to OpenX which is an independent system.

With BannersManager I was able to get my average cached page load time down to just over 1 second.  Un-cached times are averaging just under 4 seconds.  If you’re a purist, you want the whole page to load in under 2 seconds on a dial-up connection, but with the massive amount of information we have displayed I don’t think that’s going to be feasible.

So, in summation:

Pros

• has seperate clients, ad positions, and banners for maximum flexibility
• loads quickly

Cons

• doesn’t send out reports to clients.  Bummer.

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So, recently I have been working the final bugs out of MyLoganCounty.com and spreading the word around town to get business owners to start taking advantage.

During this process I’ve had to call on friends all over the place to Beta test for me so I knew where the bugs were.  Nobody can find the flaws faster than someone with fresh eyes.

My good buddy Bofe commented on my just-barely-better-than-craptastic load time on the site, so I’ve been engaged with speeding up my sites.  I find that my experiences with Joomla center around mastering one aspect at a time, so this time it’s optimization to reduce load time.

Right now, I’m using the 23-odd domains that I have to experiment with different caching techniques in Joomla so that I have a good basis of comparison.  The Extensions section on Joomla.org led me to a tool called PageCache 2.0.10 from JoomlaPerformance.com and the immediate results were good.  I saw, according to their measurements, auxillary page load times decrease to almost 1/5 what they were.

The problem was the index pages.  On one domain, RDL-USA.com, I saw page load time soar from 9 seconds uncached (high) to 17-19 seconds cached (outrageous).  Still haven’t figured this out yet.

So, after reading the usual “I know more than you ever will” banter on the Joomla forums, I found that I might have another issue: just watching the page load I saw that ads.mylogancounty.com stayed in the status bar in the bottom left of Firefox for quite a while.  When I unpublished the modules containing those calls to OpenX, the page load time dropped DRAMATICALLY.

So, if you’re out there, please- I’d love to hear about your experiences with managing a Joomla site with Cache enabled and banner management.  Thanks!

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Recently I determined it was really freaking annoying to have to type in my document size every time I wanted to do a web banner in Photoshop.

All my Google searches for how to edit the default list yielded nadda for Windows, so I did it myself.

1. Make sure PS is closed.
2. Navigate to Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CSx/Required
3. Make a duplicate of “Default New Doc Sizes.txt” so it says “Copy of Default New Doc Sizes.txt” - Safety step so you don’t foul up.
4. Open the file “Default New Doc Sizes.txt” in your best text editor, preferably something like Notepad++.  Windows Notepad will screw it up.
5. In my case, I copied from line 33-38 and pasted a copy of this on line 40, changing “Default screen sizes” to “banners” and changing the sizes accordingly.
6. Save, close, and then restart Photoshop! See your new sizes listed!

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Life is good.

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Come and check out Russellville Dental Lab’s new design at

www.RDL-USA.com

RDL is a premiere supplier of high-end implant restorations, especially full arch implant supported cases with immediate loading.

We’re still adding content as we go.  Be sure and check out the new “How-To” section see the videos we added.

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