Steve’s Blog

February 4, 2009

Second Atlanta Joomla Group Opens

Joomla Atlanta Just a quick post to let you know that the Atlanta Joomla group is expanding. There’ll now be a second meeting each month:

Downtown Atlanta: First week of every month at Manuel’s Tavern.
Alpharetta (northern suburbs): Third week of every month at 5 Seasons Brewing.

Thanks to Nick for help with getting this new meeting started and thanks also to Steven and Brent for their help in Alpharetta.

If you’re in Atlanta or North Georgia, feel free to sign up for the group via http://www.meetup.com/atlantajoomla/ and we’ll see you at one of the upcoming meetings!

Not in Atlanta?

Aussies: The Joomla Day in Melbourne is only a couple of days away now
Pommies: Joomla Day UK is in 5 weeks
Gamblers: Joomla Day Las Vegas is in April
Crooked Politicians: CMS Expo is back in Chicago at the end of April
Yankees: Joomla Day New England is coming in May
Milwaukee: Can’t think of any digs at Milwaukee … can barely even spell it. Anyway, the user group there just held their first meeting very successfully with over 35 people

If I’ve missed an event, drop it in the comments …

February 3, 2009

LakeLanier.com Relaunches With Joomla

This is probably the most satisfying post I’ve written in the three years of this blog … this weekend we relaunched LakeLanier.com using Joomla.

About LakeLanier.com

The site has been a labor of love. We live on the lake and I can see the water out the window while typing this post.

The launch also marks the end of a long process. The site had only one previous owner and he’d run it for around 15 years, having registered the name back in the mid-1990s. It took around 18 months to go through the sale process and then another several months to build out the site on evenings and weekends.

About Lake Lanier

The lake is an hour north of Atlanta and its really a beautiful part of North Georgia if you ever get the chance to visit. The Olympic rowing events were held in here in 1996 and the Superbowl of fishing, the Forrest Wood Cup, will be here next year.

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February 2, 2009

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

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

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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