Steve’s Blog

February 2, 2009
12 Comments

Review of Jomsocial

This is a sponsored review of the Jomsocial extension. For details of having your extension reviewed, please contact us. Note that a sponsored review doesn’t mean I’ll like the product, just that I’ll take the time to review it thoroughly.

For several years there has really one been one social networking option for Joomla … Community Builder. Some people love it, others hate it, but it was impossible to ignore. We use it here on alledia.com because three years ago it was really the only option for expanded user profiles and networking.

Two months ago Azrul, the developer of Jomcomment and MyBlog, released an alternative social networking solution called Jomsocial. Is it any good?

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January 27, 2009

6 Months Free Support for Joomla Training Students

joomla training

We delighted to offer a new bonus for all students at JoomlaTraining.com classes:

6 months free support after each class

You’ll have all the resources and teaching materials from the class plus access to our experts for another 6 months.

After a full-day of Joomla training, you can now take home another half-year of help. We think its a great deal. If you agree, we hope to see you at a class soon.

If you’d like to know more please feel free to contact us.

Also don’t forget about the other bonuses that all attendees receive:

A flash drive full of tutorials and best-of-breed Joomla components.
Free membership to the Alledia.com SEO Club. ($99 value)
Free copy of the Alledia.com Bolt Template. ($60 value)

January 23, 2009

iJoomla Use Bolt for New Website

iJoomla.com have just relaunched the website in Joomla 1.5. They’re now using Bolt (aka. the world’s fastest Joomla template).

Big news on the Alledia front: we’re getting ready to launch the .com version of Georgia’s biggest tourist attraction … using Joomla and Bolt … eating our own dog food … getting very nervous.

Any guesses as to what the site is? The answer will be revealed in a full blog post about that launch in the first week of February. Its being moved from a static HTML site so the SEO and technical challenges will both be interesting.

You can see an updated list of live sites using Bolt here.

January 19, 2009
11 Comments

When to Use a SEF Component

This post is intended to answer the question, “Can I avoid using an SEF URL component such as sh404SEF or SEF Advance? Joomla 1.5 default SEF URLs should be enough, right?

Simply – yes. There are many sites and circumstances where Joomla 1.5 default SEF URLs are enough. They are great for most people – certainly are a big leap forward over 1.0. Adding an SEF URL component may simply be adding an extra, unneccessary layer of complexity.

However, for some sites and circumstances, an SEF URL component is a must. Here is a rundown of the ones I’ve encountered most often:

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January 15, 2009
9 Comments

Quote: Advertisers are Becoming the Media

"Advertisers are finding it cheaper to become the media rather than advertise on it and support its bloat"

SEOBook with hat tip to NY Times

This is my quote of 2008. I’ve thought about it more than any other because it sums up so many things from viral marketing to the decline of newspapers. The internet is brutal on middlemen and advertising is richest most prominent middleman around. Its an expensive extra layer between buyer and seller.

I left college less than ten years agos wanting to be a journalist. Its almost impossible to imagine someone having that dream nowadays. Newspapers rely largely on advertising for revenue and their business models just don’t work anymore.

The SEOBook quote has led me to try and apply the same understanding to our businesses. Where are we acting as middlemen? Where are we failing to sell anything tangible? Where are we relying on advertising too much?

If you sell ads … the first step is to radically cut costs. Long-term the only solution is to be astronomically better than advertisers at creating and promoting content. I see only three ways to do that:

Own the #1 ranking on Google for one or more very high-value keywords
Use an absolutely category-definining .com domain name
Be far and away the leading opinion-maker in your market

If you sell products … add great content, not just great products.

January 12, 2009

16 Joomla Training Classes in 11 Weeks

We ran a series of successful Joomla training classes last year in Atlanta, Tampa, New York, Washington and Chicago. This time we’re taking things up a notch and and running 16 classes in 15 cities.

Even to me this seems like a big challenge, but we’ve done our research and are confident there’s enough Joomla interest in these 15 cities. Some of the classes, for example New York and the first Atlanta class, are already half sold-out.

The structure is almost the same as last year, except that we’ve added in an e-commerce session to the afternoon and we’ll be unveiling a bunch of wonderful, new free resources for the students.

If you haven’t been to a class yet, feel free to browse our training site and see testimonials from past students. If you’d like to help promote the classes, we’ve an affiliate program paying out $50 per sale.

Here are the class dates:

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January 11, 2009

SherWeb.com

I was dreading this particular review as so many exchange hosting companies have well-earned poor reputations. Not so with SherWeb:

Quality website – check
Live phone numers – check
An active blog – check

They even have a high percentage of praise on review sites – that’s highly unusual as normally just the angry customers both to post. Essentially they offer sharepoint web hosting from around $10 per month. I’m more of a Basecamp fan but a lot of companies still need a hosted sharepoint solution.

The company doesn’t have a huge online brand or great SEO currently, but the present themselves well, seem to be building a good reputation and I’d give them a whirl if I needed their kind of services.

January 10, 2009

Affiliate Link Cloaking with Joomla

This is a quick how-to requested by two SEO Club members.

The problem? Affiliate links are normally ugly and easy to spot: http://productsite.com/affiliates/affiliatelink?youraffiliatenumber=324. This means that:

Some websurfers are reluctant to click on affiliate links. They may be naturally suspect of someone linking to a product for money or they may just resent generating money for the writer they’re reading.
If the affiliate link is obvious, its easy to hijack. If you remind me they have an affiliate program, I could easily go to productsite.com, sign up as an affiliate and take the commission when I purchase there.
There is actually spyware out there that can automatically hijack links for some of the most popular affiliate programs.

The solution? Disguise affiliate links so that they look much more innocuous. Here are three ways to do that:

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January 9, 2009

Pagination Indignation

OK, indignation might be taking it a little too far, but pagination is annoying.

What’s Wrong With Pagination?

What’s the point? Does anyone say “I really want to go to page 68 of the blog?” No – they use the search.
Weak link text. From an SEO standpoint, does the link text “68” help Google understand what a page is about?
Impossible to optimize. Take page 68 as an example. You can optimize that page, but when you’ve published a few more posts all the content will move to page 69 and your work has been wasted. Most pages like this simply end up with a page title such as “Alledia Blog – Page 68”
Duplicate title tags: Check out this guy who has 1400 pages all with identical metadata, simply because of pagination.

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January 5, 2009

We Sponsor a New Version of Ninjamonials

We’ve just sponsored Daniel and his team at Ninja Forge to create a new version of their Ninjamonials component for Joomla 1.5. Ninjamonials allows you to easily add customer testimonials to your Joomla site. Ryan over at JCE sponsored the other part of the conversion. You can see a live demo at JoomlaTraining.com.

Why a sponsorship? There’s been a double-whammy for Joomla developers recently with the recession and the need to move to a GPL license. Now is definitely a time to be trying new business models and looking for extra sources of income, so we were very happy to help test Daniel’s idea.

If I know one thing at the beginning of 2009, it’s that Joomla developers with only one source of revenue are in an even vulnerable position than normal. More thinking like Daniel’s is needed. My advice is to diversify, diversify, diversify:

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December 30, 2008

Joomla! Day Las Vegas in April

Last spring the North American Joomla Day was in Vancouver. This time its down in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Joomla! Day Las Vegas is going to be an one-day conference of Joomla! experts
presenting on Joomla! basics,
design, development and advanced topics.

Presenters will include almost the entire Joomla core team including Andrew Eddie, Anthony Ferrara, Louis Landry and Rob Schley. Registration costs $45 and includes a personalized Joomla! Day Las Vegas t-shirt.

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December 28, 2008

A Proposal to Move Joomla Forward

This is a post that’s been lying around in various forms as a draft for over a year. I’ve dusted it off and decided to publish after the series of announcements made by the Joomla team over Christmas.

The announcements were about decisions concerning the Joomla Extensions Directory where I’m an editor. The decisions were to remove extensions that were for Joomla 1.0 only, weren’t licensed under the GPL or violated Joomla’s trademark.

Over the holidays, I’ve been talking closely with people who agree with the decisions and those who don’t. There are a good number of people on both sides. After listening carefully, I’d like to make several proposals in order to help us move forward effectively.

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