4 weeks of horizontal living

I am back from the land of the incapacitated. Many of you of Junkie users will know me from the support forums. Over the past few weeks I have been totally absent due to a herniated disc that left me unable to walk or do anything more then lay on my back.

I have always been a very active person. Before JoomlaJunkie I held a blue collar type job where I did a lot of lifting, climbing and physical activity on a daily basis. I put my back in a lot of insane situations and always came out rosy. Fast forward a year and I now do a lot of sitting and working at a computer. I have a rather expensive chair and try to take breaks when I can, but straining my back never seemed to be something I should worry about. Then one day I woke up and could only stand up for about 60 seconds before my entire leg was lit up in pain and my only escape was to lay on my back on the floor.

To be honest I always thought people with back pain were being lame or dramatic. Take some Tylenol and suck it up was my opinion. This changed my outlook on peoples back issues, because it was not just my back that hurt, but everything from my waist down to my toes, and it was easily a 8 out of 10 on the pain scale, with 10 being somebody cutting my leg off with a pair of scissors.  I made two trips to the emergency room with very little help form the hospital aside form telling me to “take it easy”. They told me I had a herniated or a ruptured disc.  This meant a piece of my spine was pinching the nerve that controlled my left leg from the lower-back all the way to my toes. There isn’t much that can be done and the accepted way to heal it is to do nothing. I was on Percocets, and they did nothing for my pain. they upped me to Oxycontin and the pain was only lowered by about 10%. I actually got a deep tissue injection of Oxycontin the last hospital visit and I still could barely walk to the car to go home. I was stoned off my gourd, by I still had exquisite pain. The pharmacist that filled my scripts actually was concerned with the high value of meds that I was prescribed. My prescriptions actually raised a flag they were so strong. :) Only after 4 and a half weeks of laying down and taking lots of anti-inflammatory drugs did I finally start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

It is now week 5 or 6 ish of my experience. I can walk, but I hobble. I can sit, but not for long. My muscles in my left leg are weak from non-use and things like putting my pants on is considerably more complicated now. My leg is still a bit tingly and slightly numb. The doctors say this is all normal behavior for somebody with a pinched nerve and nothing to be alarmed over. In time I will become strong again, and will be back to my old self.

The most important thing to take away from this is the fact that I really didn’t do anything wrong. I eat well, try to be careful about my health, and lift with my legs. I didn’t experience any trauma or do anything dumb, I was just living my life and it happened. I suppose it came from sitting at my desk too much. Take my experience and store it. If sitting in your chair makes you sore, get up, and do something. Do not try and push through it. It could very easily turn into something debilitating and change your life short-term. I was lucky to have a a few special people in my life who checked up on me and helped me out. I was lucky to be a part of the JoomlaJunkie team. I was just generally lucky. I don’t wish the experience I had on anybody, and hope this post will remind everybody that we are all human and scary crap can happen to anybody…at anytime…for no reason.

Tags: staff, useful tips

New extension: Slideshow module for Joomla

Good things come to those who wait… The JoomlaJunkie SuperSlider module will be available for free download next week for members of our Joomla! templates club. To get the news about the SuperSlider release first of all – sign up for Joomla!Junkie newsletter.

SuperSlider Joomla extension

We have been hard at work creating a nice little Joomla extension that is sure to brighten up even the most boring website.

This little Joomla 1.5 gem allows you to scroll or slide your images across the screen in a sleek fashion and even comes with three built in styles!

The SuperSlider module, makes use of the nifty jQuery library and jFlow plugins to bring you an image slider that was previously only possible using Flash.

This lightweight module also comes with a host of easy to configure options to allow you to really customize the functionality and behaviour of the slider.

Want to see it in action?

We have set up a slideshow demo for you to check the module out in all its glory, so have a look at the demo website and leave a comment here about your thoughts!

Modules features include: Out of box install 3 Built in css styles to match your template Super Slider Slick Slider News Slider Lots of options to customize the behaviour Add links to your slides Add Titles to each slide Add a caption to each slide Allows for mulitple sliders to be used on the same page Comprehensive documentation Fully compatible with IE7, Safari 2, Firefox 1.5+ (mac +win), Opera

Free download for club members

Good things come to those who wait… The JoomlaJunkie SuperSlider module will be available for free download next week for members of our Joomla! templates club.

Tags: Extensions, Joomla

Treasures of the week

Bookmarking on Delicious, Magnolia, Digg or whatever is one thing. Picking the diamonds out of the heaps of internet treasures you find every week is another thing all together. Below you will find three of the diamonds we found this week.

SOCIAL MENTION

Real-time tracking of what people say about you

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. (more…)

Tags: inspire change, Online Presence, Social Media

Search Engine Optimized Copywriting

Is your cool new JJ website user friendly? There’s more to a successful website than cool JoomlaJunkie templates. They’re an important first step. People judge by first appearances but then they want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

How to hook your customers and then keep them

You need sales oriented SEO copy that engages both your customers and the search engines! And then you need to ensure that your site navigation makes it easy for your customers to find the information and products they’re looking for.

Special offer for JoomlaJunkie template users

To help you get the most from your cool JoomlaJunkie site The Copywriter Online has come up with a great special offer for October.

You can have your homepage professionally written with crisp, sales oriented SEO copy plus a site review (10 pages max) that will tell you what works and what doesn’t for only $250! That’s great value. The average cost for such a service is $520.

Get in quick as this offer is available to first 20 customers only. Visit the contact page and put JJ site offer in the subject field and then The Copywriter online will contact you to discuss details. Simple!

Tags: Copywriting, seo

Joomla plugin available for MailChimp

MailChimp honestly makes our email marketing fun and easy! One of the reasons is that they keep on developing new cool and powerful things around it (their plugin page just keeps growing).

Joomla plugin for Mailchimp

No longer valid – “This extension has been unpublished for the following reason: Security issue(s).” See update further down on this page!
This Joomla! plugin will place a Subscribe box for your users to use. Allowing your users to sign up without refreshing the page with AJAX as well easy management for the site admin. Very simple to use. (thanks to generationsix!).

You don’t have a Mailchimp account yet?

Since we have a Mailchimp account, you can get USD 30 and 3 Inbox Inspector reports if you become a MailChimp customer today. Just sign up for a free trial here (there’s no obligation, no credit card required, and they keep your information private).

UPDATE 2009 June 5

In March Mailchimp blogged about mod_mailchimp2 – a new Mailchimp plugin for Joomla1.5.

“This 1.5 Native module will place a simple Subscribe box on your Joomla site allowing your users to sign up without refreshing the page by using an AJAX call, plus includes easy management for the site admin.”

Visit the plugin/download site.

Tags: eMarketing, Joomla, newsletter, plugins