Steve’s Blog

GroupJive Springs Back to Life

Sad but true. When our clients ask for social networking we almost always them advise them to use Drupal. Its user profile system is comparable to Joomla’s Community Builder, but Drupal is a better choice because of its immensely powerful groups system. Using Organic Groups, Drupal users can create and manage their own groups, adding on dozens of other features from forums and blogs to photo galleries and even registrations. If Joomla is going to compete for social networking sites, it needs groups. It needs Group Jive, the one extension attempting to meet that need. Unfortunately, things haven’t looked good…

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Review of Heavenly Titles Module

One of Joomla’s inbuilt SEO flaws is how it handles page titles. The titles of your Joomla page probably look like this: <td class="contentheading" width="100%">My Page Title</td> That makes about as much sense as wrapping up the paragraphs on your page with code like this: <td class="paragraph" width="100%">This is my paragraph and it rambles on and on….</td>. Whats wrong with <p> and </p>? Fortunately Joomla does use <p> and </p> but it doesn’t utilise <h1> and </h1>. Fortunately, there’s a new module that offers a potential solution….

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New Joomla SEO Forum

As promised – we have a major bonus available today for Joomla SEO eBook Subscribers. We’ve opened a new Joomla SEO Forum. Over the next few months, we’ll build the forum into the most comprehensive Joomla ranking resource on the web. What does this mean for you? Existing SEO eBook Subscribers You receive free lifetime membership to all areas of the forum. You can download the SEO eBook whenever you want from the forum. Future SEO eBook Subscribers You can join the forum and subscribe to have access to the SEO eBook. The price of the book is not changing…

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SEF URL Updates

Some quick updates from the world of Search Engine Friendly URL extensions for Joomla: Emir has added automapping to SEF Advance which is a great and much-needed extra feature. Plus, he now as an sef_ext.php file for Fireboard ready. Open SEF has closed at J-Prosolution.com and has been reposted on Joomla.org as NuSEF. Artio.cz have upgraded JoomSEF to version 1.5.1 and are starting to provide control over metadata and page titles. Finally, we’re continuing to test sh404SEF on live sites and are finding it to be a great, stable SEF extension. Highly recommended.

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Some Thoughts on GPL Business Models

A warning in advance – today’s blog post is a little disconnected. It is really a collection of thoughts I’ve had as people struggle through the question of “How 3rd party developers make money in the GPL’ed Joomla world?” Size matters. Successful GPL models will probably need to be based on large and very important applications. I can imagine that Community Builder, Virtuemart and Fireboard would be the extensions that are in the best position to move towards a subscription model. However, all of those are currently GPL so I’m left struggling to find examples of non-GPL extensions that are…

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Special Countdown and a Rereleased Module

Next Monday at midday U.S. Eastern Time we’re going to unveil new and exciting changes to the Joomla SEO eBook.  Also, because of the new updates, we’re moving to a subscription model. If you buy the SEO eBook before midday on Monday, you’ll have free lifetime access. Wait until after that time, and you’ll need a subscription. Current subscribers to the book already know what it is. If you picked up the book, well …. you’ll have to wait to find out. {mosloadposition countdown} Countdown Module Finally, did you notice the module we’re using to show the countdown? It’s an…

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Is it OK to Put Adsense Under Menus?

I was going back over some of my older sites earlier this week, most of which I hadn’t tweaked quite as often as I should. I noticed that some of them had Adsense underneath dropdown menus. This placement used to be quite profitable but Google’s algorithms have become more effective at detecting such placements and they’ve since been classified as wrong because they have such a high chance of accidental clicks. Voila! Simply by moving Adsense to the side of the site and away from the menu, over the last few days earnings on those old sites has jumped over…

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Local Domain Forums Grow Rapidly

As domains become mainstream worldwide, its been interesting to see how popular the extensions have become for each country. In most places .com is actually less popular than the local alternative. One result of that is that domain forums have sprung up, specialising in names from all sorts of countries. Here’s a smattering of some of the best. If we’ve missed any, drop a line in the comments and we’ll add them to the list: AcornDomains.co.uk   (U.K.) CanadianDots.ca   (Canada) INForum.in   (India) Forumdominios.com  (Spanish names) USForum.us   (U.S.A.)

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