ESU Ventures Website

This is the first job I completed while working with ennovateNIGERIA and I must say that I learnt quit a lot working on this simple site. One saying comes to mind. "Why re-invent the wheel". I learnt how to use tools that would assist me in building powerful websites in a short time
Visit the website at http://esuventuresoilandgas.com to have a peek.

Virtual Hosts on a Local Wamp Server

Well I was having a peculiar problem recently while working on a project. I wanted to use relative links (e.g.Home and it seemed that this was my only solution to a peculiar problem. However, as some of you may have realized when using relative links, the page is redirected to "localhost/index.php" instead of "localhost/mySite/index.php". Well I tried so many solutions, but I really wanted relative linking to work because it seems to be the best solution. Well the solution I discovered is Virtual Hosting.

As the name implies, virtual hosting means you can virtually host different sites. Instead of you being stuck with localhost preceding every site, you can easily work with a virtual host such as mySite.local/. Cool right? So how exactly can this be done? This solution allows you to host multiple virtual hosts on your wamp server.

After installing Wamp Server on your computer system, you can place all your sites in the www folder and preview them on a web page using localhost/mySite. But if you would like to have a local URL of your own, follow the following steps

Step 1: Edit the Windows hosts file (directory is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts using your favorite text editor (I used Notepad). If you are using Windows Vista or 7, ensure that you open Notepad with administrator privilages, else you would not be able to save changes. To open with administrator privileges, search for your text editor (in this case notepad) from your start menu. Right click it and select Run as administrator. Add a line 127.0.0.1 your-local-domain. You can out any name in place of your-local-domain. Your file should look like this. Save and continue to step 2.

Work Continues on Atticus

I've been pretty busy on atticus on other projects. One of the major improvements to the homepage of atticus is the inclusion of am autosuggest box that lists previous related searches. Any search query is stored in a table on the database. The autosuggests are arranged according to the number of duplicates. This means that the most popular autosuggest comes up first.

The search page now has a popup login form for visitors who would like to view details of search records without logging in. This was ofcos accomplished with the use of the ever powerful JQuery Library. It is actually quite easy (surprisingly).

I have done most of the work so far on the admin backend, where contents and users are managed. The stylish  login form is for admins and super admins only. I have done extensive work on the Content page (you could call it dashboard if you like) where the actually content management for the site is done. I have also setup the Admin page which allows admins to change their passwords and super admins to change details of other admins like name, email, password, privilege (or role), etc.

I am so proud of how much I've done but there is so much left to be done. Special thanks to my "boss", Ope, for all his contributions. I know this project would be great. You can check out the site on http://www.atticus.ennovatedemos.com. This is only a temporary hosting.
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