I recently launched my new site at www.ChandeshParekh.com - I felt the need to step away from the Cynergise name as I focussed primarily on Internet marketing on this site, however I wanted to be able to write about a lot of other topics. This doesn’t mean cynergise.com will die a slow, lonely death however; I’ll probably still update with relevant content though if you really want to keep up with me come along to www.ChandeshParekh.com. Share This Read Full Story

Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten increasingly busy (hence the lull in articles on this site) in customising certain Joomla components at work. One component I came across just last week is RokDownloads. This is a file-download management component for Joomla 1.5 and as the name suggests it rocks! Developed by the same team that create the brilliant templates for Joomla, RocketWerx (RocketTheme) I guess it’s not that much of a surprise what a quality component this is. I was usi... Read Full Story

There is a great need for a reliable, easy-to-configure and easy-to-use on-line payment system for small traders and Amazon has stepped into this arena with it’s own on-line payment system called Checkout by Amazon. Read more about it at C-Net… Share This Read Full Story

Whenever I’m building or designing a web site/web app, the most time-consuming part of the project will be the creation of graphical elements like buttons etc. Well now I won’t be spending as much time doing that since I discovered iconzworld, a free icon resource web site. They put up new icon sets every couple of days and the quality is amazing. Go to iconworld now to see the great range of free icons sets… Share This Read Full Story

Although Joomla is a very popular open source application for building content-rich web sites, the available documentation for version 1.0x leaves a lot to be desired. Currently working on a pretty big, and complicated, project involving multiple Joomla sites, I went off in search of relevant material that would help me design and build custom components and modules for version 1.015. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any single document that provided me with the information I needed, that... Read Full Story

Email marketing, although a proven and required part of a marketing strategy, can be costly with most online suppliers charging a hefty monthly sum to use their systems. Those that operate for free have limitations, usually something like ‘100 recipients only’ which is ok for low level activity but unsuitable for a growing business. Setting up your own system e.g. using something like PHPList is often tedious and  takes some technical knowledge to set up properly and working just ... Read Full Story

I often write about or quote 37 Signals here, largely due to the respect I have for them as designers/developers and for the way they manage their business. This week Matt Linderman has written the article “Advice for entrepreneurs: Throw out that five-year plan, build something now, and don’t take any money” where he’s brought together thoughts from 2 articles, in this month’s Best Life magazine, by Greg Gianforte and Mark Cuban respectively: Gianforte descr... Read Full Story

I went on a bit of a Cheat Sheet binge this month. Working on a couple of projects using various technologies means I keep bouncing around looking for stuff so I thought I’d better get some cheat sheets up on my wall to save me time. Most of these are from one site, the brilliantly named “ILoveJackDaniels” by UK web developer Dave Child: Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet PHP Cheat Sheet MySQL Cheat Sheet CSS Cheat Sheet and more from the same site… The Web Developers SEO Chea... Read Full Story

Last month’s Inc. magazine featured clothing company Threadless on the front cover, a company founded by 2 college drop-outs (an interesting trend in itself - so many successful start-ups have college drop-outs at the helm) Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff. Founded in 2000, Threadless is set to hit $5million is sales this year selling, wait for it, t-shirts! Yep, and they’ve never had a single design that hasn’t  sold out! So how has Threadless managed to sell out every de... Read Full Story

Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, said in April’s Ruby Conference that Ruby and PHP are the languages of choice for new web applications. Both Ruby and PHP are open source and therefore it comes as no surprise that both these languages are being taken up far more quickly than established languages like Java. There are other factors too; One of the main ones is that many new web applications need to reach their market as quickly as possible. Applications develop... Read Full Story