Steve’s Blog

July 29, 2008

Joomla Training Discounts in Atlanta and New England

Are you looking to learn Joomla 1.5? There are Joomla training sessions coming up in Atlanta, Boston (MT), Manchester (NH), Hartford (CT) and Albany (NY). We have a special offer for Alledia blog readers today … $50 discounts for all of those Joomla training sessions: $50 Atlanta Discounts: Use the coupon "allediablog" for a $50 discount on August and October training sessions. $50 New England Discounts: Register in the next two weeks and get a $50 discount. To find out more about the Atlanta training, please click here. To find out more about New England, keep reading:

July 28, 2008

Joomla Challenge for Google Knols

Google launched their Knol site last week. Despite the slightly silly name and Google’s failure to get Knol.com from a Joomla site, I though it would worthwhile to take some time and write a couple: Joomla – a general introduction to Joomla Joomla SEO – a rewrite of my general guide to Joomla SEO

July 25, 2008

Open Questions: Gifts from Customers?

Back at JoomlaExpo in Chicago, one guy stood up during Barrie North’s presentation and very happily announced he’d found Barrie’s tutorials so useful that he’d sent him a box of juicy steaks. I didn’t get any food this week, but did get a big box of T-shirts courtesy of CustomLogoUSA.com who have been SEO Club members for several months. They’re a very friendly company from Syracuse, New York who allow you to put your logo on all sorts of items. So this week’s open question is …

July 23, 2008

Full Site RSS Feeds on Joomla 1.5

No doubt about it, RSS feeds on 1.5 are better than they were on 1.0. Not perfect, but certainly better. Instead of a single feed, the 1.5 RSS feed that appears in the browser bar is always changing because it shows only the articles on that page. You can see a good example at This did lead to one problem I found the other day … its sometimes difficult to produce a full RSS feed for all the articles on your site.

July 17, 2008

Hosting

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July 17, 2008

Surveys Build Mailing Lists

If you’re serious about getting repeat visitors and building your brand, sending out newsletters is a vital tactic. Sometimes its hard to get started with a subscriber base, but there are tactics that work well – surveys are my favorite. Prospect Magazine carred out a survey to rate the "world’s top 100 public intellectuals". A pretty boring subject, but it caught on with newspapers running campaigns to vote for local heroes in Indonesia, Canada, India, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey. This story about the results on NPR really got my attention with a quote at the end: Interviewer: "Do you have…

July 15, 2008

Google Website Optimizer and Joomla 1.5

Some very good news from the Joomla 1.5 world today … Google Website Optimizer now works with Joomla 1.5. If you haven’t tried it yet, Website Optimizer is a tool for testing different versions of your site to see which one produces a higher conversion rate. Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Performance and Barrie from Compass Designs for their work on this. Original forum post Bug tracker item Download the patch

July 14, 2008

Newsletter Thanks

Thanks For Signing Up! Many thanks for signing up to the Alledia newsletter. We’ll email you just one per month with useful Joomla SEO tips and advice.

July 14, 2008

New sh404SEF Documentation and a Free Trial

I’m delighted to say we’ve released a new section to the SEO Club today … Extension Guides. What you’ll find there are easy-to-understand explanations of how to use the most popular Joomla SEO extensions. We’ve started with 12 detailed articles on how to use sh404SEF and guides to Artio SEF, SEF Advance, the SEF Patch and others will follow shortly. Oh, and did I mention that during the next 5 days you can get a free 2 week trial to the SEO Club? Simply click here to?register and then choose your subscription.

July 10, 2008

Make All Your External Links Open in New Windows

Mike at Simbunch.com has created a very useful little mambot that forces all external links to open in a new window. (free registration required) What Does It Do? The mambot can add these tags to all external links: target=”_blank” (open the link in a new window) rel=”nofollow” (telling search engines to ignore the link) both Personally I don’t agree with people who want to add nofollow to all their external links. It seems overly paranoid and contrary to how the web works. However, opening other sites in a new window is increasingly a good idea.