Steve’s Blog

January 1, 2007

Joomla Extension of the Month – February 07

A few weeks back we asked the question, "How do you backup your sites?"

Copying the database is easy, with the help of the Jombackup Daily MySQL Backup Bot but safely backing up and restoring the files has always been much more difficult.

We’ve tried every component available without finding one that works satisfactorily – until now. Joomla! Pack is a simple upload-and-click component from Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos. What we particularly like about it is that it comes with an installer which makes moving or reinstalling sites from backup very easy indeed.

A very worthy Extension of the Month!

January 1, 2007

The Alledia Blog Goes Daily

Its January 1st, 2007 and we wish all our readers a great New Year. We also have some big news…

We’re delighted to announce that the Alledia Blog is going to updated daily, starting today!

That said, what changes will you see on the site?

Monday to Friday, 52 weeks a year, you’ll find posts about Joomla, Drupal, SEO, CMS systems, Domain Names and more.
You can register with this site, add a profile, link to your own website and have your logo or photo beside any comments you post. We’re even kind enough not add "no-follow" to the links, so registering will give you a little SEO boost.
We’ll be having a series of guest bloggers during the year. Stay tuned for more details.
There’s now a live RSS feed on the right hand menu and in the browser bar to make subscribing as easy as possible.

Welcome, and we look forward to seeing more of you all in the weeks to come!

December 29, 2006

Church Forgets to Renew Domain Name and Gets Nasty Surprise

There was bad news for one New England Church this week as they learned they’d forgotten to renew their domain name. To make things worse, the name was purchased by people with something very different than Bibles on their mind.

Although the article tries hard not to mention it, the old website address seem to have been found by the readers at Digg. For obvious reasons I won’t post it here.

So what can you use to make sure you keep track of your domains? I’m sure many of you have domains spread across multiple registrars after seeing a special offers here and there. Its not unusual for people to call us up and admit that they’ve forgotten WHERE they registered their domain, let alone when it expires. We used to do the same thing ourselves.

How do we keep track of our domain names now?

Continue reading “Church Forgets to Renew Domain Name and Gets Nasty Surprise”

December 28, 2006

Making MosTree More Search-Engine Friendly

Apart from Alledia.com, the most popular site we run is JoomlaYellowPages.com, based on the excellent MosTree directory component from Mosets.com.

The site has only been up and running for 4 months, but it has already got some good search engine rankings, positioned as #8 in Google for "Joomla Developers" and #7 in Google for "Joomla Development".

We started to kick around some ideas to make the site more search engine friendly and decided to apply some simple changes to MosTree.

Continue reading “Making MosTree More Search-Engine Friendly”

December 27, 2006

Happy Holidays and a Great 2007 to All!

A very happy holiday season to all of you.

We’re hard at work adding new features to Alledia.com and you can already start to see some appearing in the right-hand menu. Sharp-eyed readers will see some improvements appearing in the right hand column already. We’ll have the complete lowdown on January 1st.

We aim to make 2007 an interesting year on the Alledia blog and we hope it will be great for all you readers too.

December 19, 2006

Alledia Portfolio Now Online

Ever get stuck in that situation when you’re too busy on other people’s sites to concentrate on your own?

We did. Its been too long, but we’ve finally got a decent portfolio online. It doesn’t contain everything we’ve done but hopefully it will give you a good idea of what we’ve been up to and what we’re capable of. We used NeoReferences, the great new component from NeoJoomla.com to get up and running.

Click here to visit the Alledia Portfolio.

December 19, 2006

Can Good Hosting Help Your Search Engine Ranking?

A great blog post over at ModernLifeisRubbish.co.uk yesterday about how good hosting can really help your Search Engine rankings and about how bad hosting and site optimization can cause you a lot of trouble.

Stuart Brown got onto this issue after discovering a little noticed set of statistics in Google’s Webmaster toolbox. Basically, Google is keeping track of how fast your pages load.

Heres how to find those stats:

Continue reading “Can Good Hosting Help Your Search Engine Ranking?”

December 16, 2006

Adding RSS Feeds to your Browser Bar with Joomla

A quick little tutorial to show how to add a little RSS button to the browser bar when people visit your site.

Go to Run-Digital.com to get their RSS Feed Manager for Joomla! (Click here to get it). Install it as a component.
Take the url of your RSS feed from the component and go to FeedBurner.com. Sign up and register your feed. They should give you an easy to remember and customize URL. Ours is simply: http://feeds.feedburner.com/alledia
Add the following code to the head of your template:

If you want different RSS Feeds available on each page you will need to copy your template and assign the copies to the right pages unless someone can come up with a clever work-around….

Thanks to Sam over at SiteCoffee.com for tips with this.

On 1.5, you’ll need to turn off the default RSS feeds by going to Menus >> Main Menu >> Parameters (Advanced) >> Show a Feed Link >> No

December 15, 2006

Cleaning Dirty Search Engine Footprints

I was online looking for a printer the other today and took to browsing through Hewlett Packard’s search results. After flicking through for a while, something started to feel odd? Wasn’t there a big scandal in the news about HP recently? Where was it? Everything seemed rosy in the Search Engine results.

If you search for "Hewlett Packard" you need to go to page 6 on Google to find even the first mention of the corporate spying scandal that hit the company in 2006. Yahoo is even kinder. You need to go to result #264 before you find the faintest hint of scandal.

Continue reading “Cleaning Dirty Search Engine Footprints”

December 14, 2006

Joomla v. WordPress v. Drupal

Today we're building up to a little Search Engine Optimization competition we're going to be running over the next year.

We're curious to see how WordPress, Joomla and Drupal stack up against each other in a fair SEO fight.

The Study:

Launch 3 sites: Amritsar.net.in (Drupal), Jabalpur.net.in (WordPress) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla!)
Make them as similar as possible. Each site has 8 articles of 500 words. Each site has had some keyword and title optimization. Each city is of a similar size and has comparable Overture results.
Choose a relatively uncompetitive field (Indian cities) so that each domain has the potential for a big move in the search engine rankings.
Watch them carefully using Google Analytics and WebCEO, to track how well each one performs for its keywords.
After a year, see which solution has the best built-in SEO.

Continue reading “Joomla v. WordPress v. Drupal”