Have you ever had the situation where you wanted to delete a file or an entire directory structure from your host server and no matter what you tried it just wouldn’t go the way of the Dodo? I’ve had this problem more often than I think is fair, and I have just discovered a method which is far easier than the method I have been using in the past to get rid of them.

The problem tends to happen when files and directories are created by a script on your host server, rather than being uploaded. Some, not all, scripts create files and directories that actually own the files, therefore you don’t, and it can be a bit of a mission to convince the files that you are allowed to change their permissions so you can delete them.

I generally use a tool called Bharat's Cleanup Script which was written to enable a webmaster to change the permissions of files and directories.

From the site…….. any files it creates are owned by the webserver process. If you want to modify those files yourself, you need to get the webserver to change the permissions on them so that you have access. That's what this script is for.Download this file, unzip it and put it on your webserver as cleanup.php

Open it in your browser, and enter the path to your albums directory and this script will make every file in that path (that it can access) writable by everybody.

After that, you should be able to delete the files manually via your FTP client or via the shell.

This technique has served me well in the past but today I found that the Legacy File Manager within my hosts cPanel deleted an entire directory structure that was suffering from these ownership issues. As easy as 123! I selected the directory, deleted it and emptied the trash. No problem at all. Though using the cPanels File Manager or FTP software wouldn’t even think about deleting the offending files. Hopefully it wasn’t just a fluke and the next time I have the file permissions problem I’ll be able to use this fast and easy technique effectively.

As a Freelancer I have been using Joomla! since not long after it was first released. I adore it, it does everything I could possibly want of a CMS. Any of you who haven’t yet heard of this wonderful bit of software and who are thinking of either publishing or upgrading a pre-existing website should seriously take a look and put some research into it. Go to Joomla!.org to find further information.

A Joomla! administrator has the ability to be able to add extra bits and bobs into the system, either in the form of Components, Plugin’s or Modules. I’ll cover the differences between these in another article. The point is you can add cool stuff to both the frontend, the actual pages that people see when they browse through your site, and the backend, the administration end of your website that the general public don’t see. Up until today I have always installed and used one or two WYSIWYG editors into the system, making Joomla! a more pleasant place altogether to write articles.

But today I have discovered and started using MovableType XML-RPC Plugin from Joomler!.net. What an awesome plugin! I can now create content without opening the backend of my site at all. I know this doesn’t seem like a major issue, and to tell you the truth it really isn’t. But I have never felt totally at home using the backend editors in Joomla! it all just seemed a little bit sluggish. Yes, that sounds like a lame excuse, but really I don’t need to have an excuse. The fact is it’s cool to be able to write content offline and then have it uploaded to the site with just a push of a button.

Today I've been playing around trying to get an animated favourite icon to show up in my browser address bar. I'm currently running Joomla! 1.5. I battled a little as the method has changed since the Joomla 1.0 releases. Nevertheless it's done now and it's quite a simple process to achieve.

To complete this project you are going to need:

• 1 x 32x32 pixel static icon file and 1 x 16x16 pixel animated gif. I'll give you a link where you can automatically create these if you don't want to make them yourself.

• Access to your current templates “index.php” file, so you can edit a couple of lines of code. I used FTP for this but you can use whatever method you're most comfortable with.

• The ability to upload the icons to your host server.

Firstly if you haven't already done so, create your site icons. A cool site to do this automatically is http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

Want to display your own logo on the browser address bar and browser tabs? Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size / resolution) for the "Image to Use" and click "Generate FavIcon.ico" – From the Site.

That about says it all, once you have created the icons download, unzip and upload them to your sites /images directory.

Next on our list is to edit the index.php found inside the directory of the current default site template that you are using. You can check this by entering the backend of the site as an admin, clicking on Extensions and then Template Manager and making note of the template that has the star next to it which is your sites default. It's always good practice to make a backup of this file before editing it. Open the index.php file, make sure there is no other reference to “favicon.ico” in the code, if you find a reference to it then comment the line out or delete it. Now add the following lines of code just before the </head>

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<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico">
<link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="/images/animated_favicon1.gif">

Save your file, upload/overwrite the existing index.php back into your template folder.

There it is, you should now have an animated favourite icon in your browser.

I've been with my host since Noah first looked up and thought it looked like rain. It's fair to say that I'm more than happy with them. The service rarely has any downtime and the support is excellent. But... due to no fault of my host, I have been battling like mad to get sections of this website working as it should. It worked like a charm on my localhost, did everything I wanted it to. Then I uploaded it to my hosting service and all the wheels fell off.

I now know it should have been obvious what the problem was, but at the time I battered the keyboard and screamed at the monitor and spent most of the day in the place between self loathing, as I obviously missed something in the code and technophobia, as we all know technology really should have stopped moving forward once we arrived at the digital watch and pocket calculator era.

Strangely, sometimes the most obvious and direct trouble shooting route is not the route we take. Glaringly obvious as it seems now, three major bits of the site now weren't working and I just couldn't get my head around it.

• In the portfolio section when there is a single image and not a gallery, the thumbnail would not expand when clicked. Though the articles with the gallery images were working fine. (A seriously good clue)

• The Forums were no longer working. (Not surprising as I also had this linked into the sites ACL's.)

• I am currently running an ACL (Access Control Level) component to restrict certain areas, articles and forums of the site to clients. This had also gone haywire. (Not as good a clue as above as ACL's in Joomla! Can be a headache, I can't wait till Joomla! 1.6 gets released with inbuilt ACL's)

I thought it must have been something to do with an incorrectly entered path, or perhaps it was a SEF component that had gone bad. Nope... none of those, it was that I was being hosted on a server that was running PHP4.4.4 and the items that dropped out needed at least release 5. Maan! Was I hopping mad, mainly at myself for being such a time waster. Anyway to cut the rest of the story short my hosting service has moved me to an updated server running the software I require and the DNS's have just clicked into place, so I'm a happy chappie.