In today’s fast paced life, it is more important than ever to keep tabs on whats going. My church have recently undergone a refurb project and as a result has lots of activities taking place in different rooms throughout the building. Suddenly the paper diary that is keep by someones telephone was no longer an adequate system for us to use.
I looked for various solutions to this problem before settling on MRBS from sourceforge.net. The features that made this so attractive were:
- The code is free!
- It would run on our existing website, (although a MySQL database and PHP is required)
- The layout is customisable
- I will grow with our needs
- Accessible by many people via the Internet.
I cannot express what a great sucess this has been for us so if you are needing to implement a similar system, I personally think MRBS is well worth a look.
For years, web developers have been creating the necessary html files on their local computers and once design and content have been finalised, uploading to their website. This is an efficient way of working but is not possible with php based sites such as WordPress or MRBS that reply on a database that creates the html files, ‘on the fly’.
One little program I have found indispensable is Xampp. This sets up a web-server with php and MySQL facilities on your local machine allowing development and fine tuning of your website without the hassle of constantly uploading files via FTP. Once the site is ready with a little tweak and an upload, you can make it live with an upload.
I’m currently running this from a USB stick which means I can use this from any computer, take it into meetings and have access to my latest developments even when no Internet connection is available.
The developers of Xampp openly admit there are security issues if you try and use this to make your site publicly available but it not intended for that. They have kindly made versions available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris operating systems. The only little problem I have found with this is when also having skype installed, there is a conflict but a work around can be found here.
The number of times my machine hangs because I’ve either got too many tabs open in Firefox or too many programs open in Windows or a mixture of both is quite regular. My solution was too open up Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and End the process there but for some reason it always used to take a little longer than expect. Then a few weeks ago I discovered “SuperF4” and it works like a treat.
What SuperF4 basically does, is kill the process of the foreground window when you press Ctrl+Alt+F4. You can also kill a process by pressing Win+F4 and then clicking the window with your mouse. You can press escape or the right mouse button to exit this mode without killing a program. SuperF4 should be able to kill all kinds of processes, whether they are hung or not. Beware though, SuperF4 effectively kills the program and doesn’t give it a chance to save unsaved work etc…
Download it here