Without a Title

My observation on the Face of Gambia Event.

It was  a somewhat boring Friday night, One of those nights that you would use any opportunity to leave your man-cave. My then distraction forced me out to this 'Face of Gambia' event.

I've been to the one that took place in 2008 (to Support a Family member) and it turned out good so my expectations were high. without wasting much time I change into some descent and was ready for the party.

I had high level expectations hoping that I was coming to see another amazing 'Miss Gambia' with beautiful ladies all up in the place, well; this time it was the opposite, the place looked so different from the last one. The setup reminds me of that of a FURAL.

I remember back in 'my days' when every guy wanted to attend the Miss Gambia because that’s where you will find the most beautiful ladies and all, but this time around the dress codes of some of the contestants I spotted there took me back to the early nineties. (The Jumbah Out, Soul 2 Soul, Tiger Skin, velvet ...etc).

Some of the Contestants were OK though, but to be honest it takes so much to make a Miss Gambia.

As the rounds goes, Came the last round, during this round every contestant have to do their katt walk while Singateh performs his live it up track, for about 10 contestants, ( you can imagine the pain of listening to the same song for 10 times, talk less of this was Singateh, the worst artist at the time). 

Singateh (his swagger,  can he be k'naan?,  the dress code,  the dark shades and the 1 fan dancing to all his songs). Joint performance with the Nigerian artist to their song 'Gambian Ladies' wasn't too bad as the crowd moved a bit while Singateh was jumping like a clown and doing his 'harlem shake dance moves. 9 would be cool if this was in the late nineties.

Here comes the DJ - this dude really do need a hook up, The only track he played through all the rounds and breaks was Michael Jackson ROCK MY WORLD.

To sum it up!

The Good

The presentation was awesome, it couldn't get better than that because you can tell if this was an inexperienced presenter the audience would walk out the door as the round goes.

The Stand-up Comedy by Modou Musa was dope too, this should be done more often.

The UGLY

One of the questions the judges asked I found so dumb.
Which two countries bordered The Gambia? (I've looked for answers everywhere but evcryone else seem  to think, there's only one. I refuse to believe you all. The Judges knew what they were talking about. )

In the end the results where to everyone's disappointment. I think this issue of the Miss Gambia / Face of Gambia should be looked into and taken more seriously because this is a National event and not just a one promoter thing. If a face of Gambia is chosen this is the person that will represent Gambia and us Gambians in other nations, these contestants should be experienced, responsible, somewhat educated and not just anyone that can make it through "auditions".

 In the end it comes back to all of us as one nation, so let’s join hands and make a better Gambia, this review you just read is my personal opinion, and believe I am qualified as an attendee to form one. 

I personally rate this event / 1.5 out of 10.

Merci for reading, and do post your comments.

Working with .htaccess files

I encountered some problems sometime ago on how to Change my Joomla URLS from Dynamic Content Management Systems to more readable URL’s then I spend a night up trying to figure out how to , tried different things and I end up with a solution, thought I do share it.

Information on .htaccess and Joomla.

What is it, what does it do and why should you bother?

What is it?

The htaccess.txt file is part of the Joomla core download.
You should find it in the root of your Joomla installation.
Once uploaded and renamed to .htaccess it is a special Apache file

What does it do?

The basic purpose of the .htaccess file here is to rewrite the cryptic URL’s from a dynamic content management system to more readable URL’s

For Apache to be able to do that, it needs to know some things about the URL Joomla produces and how they should be handled

This information is stored in the .htaccess file.

Why you should use it

If you want your Joomla website to have clean and friendly URL's, then you got to know the .htacces file.

This means that your URLs are reading like normal pages that contain your keywords.

This will give them a better Search Engine index as well as easier for you visitors to remember.

So a Link like:  http://mywebsite.com/index.php?option=com_profile&view=profile&Itemid=76

Will not do as well as:  http://mywebsite.com/profile

Basic Technical Needs

Joomla Basic SEO on Apache and .htaccess
To be able to work with this it requires you to have a hosting platform based on Apache and with the MOD_Rewrite for Apache turned on.

You can check this in Joomla itself from the administrator backend.

Or ask you Hosting Provider Support team, they can turn it on for Your hosting account as well.

Is Apache ready?
Now lets us look at the htacces.txt file.
If you installed Joomla in a Subdirectory, you need to change one line

BaseRewrite

That has to reflect the real path to Joomla.
For example BaseRewrite/~user/htdocs/Joomla. Otherwise leave it the same

Then rename the file htaccess.txt to .htaccess via your FTP Program.

What happened? It disappeared from your screen!
That is because this file is very special to Unix, it is a hidden file and if you want to see it again, you have to change your view to show you the hidden files.
Filezilla FTP has this as an option.

Now you can turn on the SEO function of Joomla in the Global Configuration

Or go to your Configuration.php file found in your site root directory and change these settings;

$sef = '1';

$sef_rewrite = '1';

$sef_suffix = '0';

Note that: 0=off and 1=on