Castner IT is the single-person consulting business of Dr Grant Castner. I offer customised consulting and development services tailored to the requirements of your business. I specialise in web site design, search engine optimisation, web analytics, cloud computing, Microsoft Office development, elearning and IT business analysis.
Joomla 2.5 is set to be released on 24 January. One of the new features is Joomla now supports the Microsoft SQL database in addition to mySQL (and others) as its content database. This new feature provides great opportunities for tighter integration of your public web site with your back-end systems running MS SQL. For [...]
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Tags: Joomla, Microsoft SQL Server
on August 30th, 2011 by Grant Castner
Most of my work involves developing intranet applications for training companies. My latest project is to develop tablet apps as part of an mlearning strategy. The majority of my work is in ASP.NET and C# so I have started working with monodroid to develop an app for Android. One of the first tasks was to [...]
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Virtuemart is a popular shopping cart component for Joomla. Here is a quick rundown of the files you may want to edit when configuring the look-and-feel of the shopping cart, in addition to the settings available from the Virtuemart admin page in Joomla. If you use a different theme, substitute default with your theme name. [...]
Tags: Joomla, Virtuemart
After successful maps for the federal and Victorian elections, I am again running the sausage sizzle and cake stall map for the 2011 NSW election. It is a great way to demonstrate a range of online topics for small business including: Search Engine Optimisation Google Analytics Social Media Integration Google Maps Integration ASP.NET SQL Server [...]
Tags: NSW election, Sausage Sizzle Map
Each day this week there will be a helpful and easy-to-use tip on improving your web site’s search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO techniques aim at improving your web site’s search results on search engines such as Google and Bing. The helpful tips and techniques will be available each day from the E-Nable elearning homepage once [...]
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on November 1st, 2010 by Grant Castner
A client recently asked for an ASP.NET page that would provide flexible and ad-hoc reporting functionality. Specifically, the client wanted to be able to: Choose from over 20 data columns to show/hide in a gridview Filter data by date ranges Search over multiple columns Total amount columns based on the search and filter criteria Show/Hide [...]
Continue reading about Show/Hide and Search Columns in GridView with CheckBoxList and QueryExtender »
Tags: CheckBoxList, GridView, QueryExtender
Windows Phone 7 launched today and I can’t wait to get one. Telstra and Vodafone will carry phones running Windows Phone 7. They will be available October 21. Here are some highlights of Windows Phone 7 that I really like: Ability to take photos in seconds even when the phone is originally off Office 2010 [...]
Cloud computing has a number of features that differentiate it from traditional services: Services are sold on demand, typically by time (e.g. $10 per user per month) Services are elastic and scalable – a user or small business can access as little or as much as they want at any given time. Services are fully [...]
Tags: Google Apps
Probably the hardest part of using social media such as Facebook and Twitter for small business is getting started. Many small business owners and managers are often reluctant to use these tools often because the perception is that they add little or no business value. A common reason for not using twitter is that knowing [...]
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A key component of search engine optimisation is generating links to your web site from popular sites such as news web sites. Press releases are one method of generating these links. A free press release service that you can use is: http://www.prlog.org/ From the prlog web site: Press Release Distribution Distribution to Google News. Distribution to [...]