It's late. It's me. And I'm tired. I have another site that generally serves to host all my off-road racing photos. It used to turn a profit on them and retail e-commerce sales. That is why I was long deserting the idea of hosting a photo gallery here. Why do…

It's been a while since I've been in the swing of things and catching up on a whole lotta races. Don't get me wrong. I love racing. Get me the aroma of race fuel and some sort of camera (preferably a pro still or video camera), and I'm there. We had the opportunity to scout out the layout of the land and develop a strategy we're engaged at this weekend at the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series season opener in Las Vegas. It was a one day deal. We slammed some photos in as well as managed to post some updates upon various social media channels.

It's been quite some time since we've been delivered a status update about Twitter by way of its newsletter. After perusing the latest update just received a few minutes ago from @Biz, it was great to see that there will be a gathering this spring at Chirp, which is its…

It seems the business of marketing, particularly social media marketing, remains on course with a continuum of exponential growth. Bouncing around between a massive list of bookmarks and well categorized RSS feeds within my Mozilla Firefox web browser, even with advanced organizational skills, it is often difficult to keep up…

There are myriad of ways to broadcast or webcast live video or podcasting live audio from your personal computer onto the web. I have performed some testing on a number of these real-time or live streaming platforms and am have several projects we're currently working on that will integrate such…

I grabbed hold of this shot through the lens of one of my favorite Nikon cameras. Navigating to the Southern Nevada Off Road Race Enthusiasts (SNORE) race was an effort to capture some 2010 SNORE Battle At Primm photos. The job is done and will prove to be one of the greatest off-road races of the season.

It was inevitable. I called it out the day I left. I understood full well, as managing editor (or "Managing Partner" =), who was taking reigns and how little they understood the dynamics of the industry and the core lifestyle of its community. It may have taken two years longer…

I rarely donate any time to my personal websites. I am not one who has been too zealous on self promotion. I don't promote many of the projects I have worked on or am actively working on and don't Tweet too many of my own blog posts. I'm trying to…

Do I stream? Do Ustream? Well, if you're considering launching a web cast that seeks to stream a live audio or live video show, then Ustream is an excellent platform to place your web streaming efforts into. I love the social media channel for its compartmentalized embed options, which can…

VerticalScope Inc., owner and operator of the Internet’s largest network of automotive and powersports web sites, today announced that it has acquired Off-Road.com from Advanstar Communications Inc. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. “Off-Road.com is a great fit with our portfolio of premier auto and powersports web sites, which…

Actively managing multiple social media accounts for my own personal business efforts as well as managing multiple social media identities for a handful of clients, the biggest issues that have arisen are not with updating these accounts, as there are an array of desktop software applications such as EchoFon (EchoFon…

It's free. It's clean. It's quick. And while it may be one of the cleanest free Joomla templates I have used in recent years, the intuitive user interface design of the Joomla Praise Joomla AdminPraise Lite Template does take some getting used to, as the key elements of the administrator…

Amid the race photos captured during the 2010 SCORE Laughlin Desert Challenge was this photograph of the McMillin Racing Trophy Truck of Andy McMillin during Sunday's racing. The young McMillin charged through the field to take the top slot for the weekend's racing in his Ford truck that boasted BFGoodrich Tires as well as a Fox Racing Shox and Eibach Springs suspension package. The motorsports photography was captured using a Nikon D2H with my favored 80-200mm F2.8 Nikon lens. The work was performed in conjunction with Trackside Photo, the legends of off-road racing photography.

I have long touted the principle of self-sufficiency and regularly integrate it into my work ethic as well as the work itself. From an editorial standpoint, this translated into articles that identified the lifestyle of self-reliance. This played well, as most of my life after newspapers has existed in the…

Looking to log into one of my personal business YouTube accounts, I was presented with a problem I had yet to fully address. Before I get into the semantics of what transpired to give me such tribulations, I would prefer to get straight to the business of outright warning you.…

Taking a gander at social media and the immediacy of the project at hand, there comes a time when too much is simply too much and not enough is simply not enough. And attempting to explain it to those who may have interest but neither have the time nor multifaceted…

Last week, on the crux of moving forward on several projects and completing critical phases of others I had a hard drive failure. Fortunately, I run my primary machine with multiple hard drives for real-time backup and likewise back them up via remote backup applications such as Carbonite. Now, in…

Today’s navigation throughout the web fringe takes me back to web advertising as well as overall off-road industry marketing. But let's at least stick to the web perspective for the time being. Now, from the publisher’s perspective, I have great disdain for a reliance upon ad networks, especially when it…

I am hereby breaking into the business of making news of someone else's hard work. I toss a quick quip and a sensational array of edgy words. It's artistry and engaging. I don't dictate onto the masses. I embrace them. I call it news aggregation. It's nothing more than a…

This morning began quite early. After an excruciatingly long day with a scant amount of sleep the evening previous, I slipped down down into a deep slumber by the time 2000 hours rolled around. It was a good day's work with formidable advances. I was convinced my body and mind…

Recently the DIRT FORGE Blog performed a migration from a Wordpress blog on a sub-domain to a JoomlaWorks K2 blog wrapped within the Joomla CMS framework installed upon the root domain. While Wordpress remains one of easiest all-around web development platforms, especially for websites that require the capabilities of a…

Since the days of Google's now renamed Froogle product search platform, which is now simply referred to as Google Products, I have made habit of dutifully exporting product data to product search websites through the use of CSV, RSS or through an API. This method of extending the e-commerce shopping cart's…

When it comes to technology and even social media, the Off-Road Industry (OFFROAD NATION) remains in a stooper, in part due to the archaic-minded mavens at the helm and likewise due to the snake oil salesmen who have delivered these the industry a sour taste of used car salesmanship. This remains…

I generated my first Twitter account back in 2007. Shortly thereafter, I performed a few contextual posts to Twitter (Tweets) and audio posts to Utterz (now called Utterli).  This included posts generated from remote location at local races such as Mojave Desert Racing (MDR) and Mojave Offroad Racing Enthusiasts (MORE)…

I received a request from Twitter friend for some Joomla consulting assistance. The project concerns a client who is a school district with an established Joomla content management system. It requires a web system by which teachers, instructors and administrators can easily execute and manage lesson plans, assignments and other education-related requirements common with institutions of higher education, associations, K-12 schools, career colleges, corporations, volunteer organizations and government agencies. I have had some experience in researching this topic for other projects during the Joomla 1.0 era and have maintained a casual eye on the development of such projects, particularly those related to Joomla. My immediate thoughts were to consider an integrated bridged install of the standalone Moodle web software application. Also an immediate consideration was the E-Learning Force Joomla LMS Component, which after looking at the product comparison that includes Blackboard and Moodle versus Joomla LMS appears an impressive option.

I'm reworking a website in need of a few Joomla extensions. So, there I was navigating through the latest Joomla modules and plugins on the Joomla Extensions website, in search of some display modules and plugins. And it just so happens that there are two new extensions worth a look. While I have not tested these extensions and one of the demos is not particularly flashy, they look functional and very useful, having earned formidable interest and ratings from the JED community.

I remember the days. I worked straight HTML. I wrote like a mad man. Lived the ultimate off-road lifestyle and documented the insanity by means of a camera, a keyboard and often times a satellite internet connection. Those were the days of Off-Road.com. There were editorial days that existed long…

I have spent the last 14 hours mulling over an array of performance-enhancing techniques to improve e-commerce sales. And while there are a number of ways to accomplish this, the easiest statement I can make on the subject is to simply add more products, and in this case, I simply need to commandeer a Parts Unlimited and Tucker Rocky catalog and ingeniously merge their product databases into my well-groomed category structure. But that's not necessarily the topic of this post. Based upon a brief glance at some analytics that spanned Woopra as well as Google Analytics, Google Trends and Quantcast, I was inclined to update some business listings. In the midst of this, I had to make a phone call, and since I did not have the business number entered into my cell phone's contact list, I elected to utilize GOOG-411, a free 411 directory listing service. This service can be called upon by any audio phone or even by text message and can relay pertinent contact information that includes map directions and the more standard name, address and phone number. Anyhow, that's the crux of this post. It beats the 50-cent charge Verizon Wireless lays down upon my wireless bill. But the service has yet to mature. Calling the service did not render the requested results, even when requesting the specific business information and also when requesting the listing via the business category method. This was interesting when considering the request was from Google and that the business I was seeking information for topped the Google web search business listings in its industry and its local listings. Anyhow, this all got me to thinking about a few things. Soon, we will see a more complete convergence of such tech capabilities as VoIP services, video chat, product search, 411 audio search and an array of other applications geared toward the e-commerce retailer. It's time to secure your brand on each service and develop it according to market trends and objectives. But the key point here is to secure it.

I am conducting some system maintenance on a rather large e-commerce site that enlists Gallery 2 as its means of attracting targeted search engine optimized traffic to its applicable product database. In performing the maintenance, I am also placing a website administration calendar of various tasks that must be performed, including an eventual upgrade from Gallery 2 to Gallery 3, which aims to be faster and offer an easier to understand code base than the bulky, resource-intensive and ultra-complicated Gallery 2 code base. My immediate reaction to the Gallery 3 installer is that the same graphic designer who designed Gallery 1 graphics back in 1990-something performed the graphic design on Gallery 3. Hopefully, this is not a sign of things to come with the code base.

Perhaps the greatest inhibitor that Joomla has on a writer is its inability to auto-save the content of a blog post. When you consider that as a writer, you want nothing more to do than write, steadfast on avoiding the diversions that inevitably deliver writer's block, Joomla adds a plethora of painstaking tasks that one must perform in order to ensure their words are not lost upon the inadvertent glitches of the World Wide Web. Amid the most damning of the tasks is having to manually save your content article. And to do that, you must first place the article you have yet to write in a predefined category within the highly limited section-category content structure. Then, once you have accomplished this tedious task, which can only get worse when you have forecasted that the content you are about to write will not logically fit within the current section-content structure, you must then brave the constant threat of a database timeout, which will cause the blank page of death to all you have written when you finally click the save button. When you have taken this into consideration, you wonder why Joomla is fervently marketed as content management system. It's not. It's best thought of as a web software framework that happens to have a poorly engineered CMS pre-installed as a core component.