Steve’s Blog

January 5, 2007

Signs of Life from the Open Directory?

A while ago we blogged about the slow death being suffered by the Open Directory. On October 20th their servers crashed and since then no-one was able to submit sites and editors could not update categories. Finally, two months later on December 18, the DMOZ staggered back to working order. The questions is, can it recover from those recent terrible months? Perhaps a better question is, can it recover from the recent terrible years? Want to know how irrelevant the Open Directory has become? Check out this list of websites whose homepages are missing from the site: YouTube.com Orkut.com …

January 5, 2007

Duplicate Content in Joomla and Why it Matters

A few weeks ago we mentioned that there was some good news for those people who have duplicate content on their site. A Google staff member mentioned that there was no longer going to be an active penalty for websites that committed this particular mistake. Some people were happy. Some were dubious and belived the penalty still existed. Some simply said, "what the beep is duplicate content and how does it affect my Joomla site"? This post is that for that last group of people. What is duplicate content? When a website has several pages, all with…

January 3, 2007

Using the Alias as the Page Title for Joomla SEO

I had the pleasure of talking to Phil Braddock, a Melbourne based Joomla developer, over the Christmas holidays. He runs Salsa Internet and is someone who comes at Joomla from the perspective of someone focused on trying to improve Joomla’s SEO performance. There seems to be an increasing number of us! As the number of people wanting to use Joomla increases, a lot of people are working out how to improve its less SEO-friendly aspects. One of those is inability to create a unique meta title that might be different from what actually appears on the page. To…

January 3, 2007

A Beginner’s Guide to Domain Hacks

Over the last few years the domain business has profesionalized rapidly with big corporations forming, each controlling thousands of domains. Companies like iREIT and Moniker have led the way using large statistical packages to analyze every feature of a domain and its value. However, there’s one aspect of the domain world where the only limit is your imagination (oh, and your willingness to deal with obscure government organizations in tiny islands and countries). Domain hacks are basically puns. The simplest way to describe them is that they are domain names that actually use the extension as part of…

January 2, 2007

Joomla Extension of the Month – January 07

Our first choice for extension of the month in 2007 is the Run-Digital RSS Feed Manager. We love to pick extensions that are free, user-friendly and that we use ourselves on key sites. The RD RSS Feed Manager fits all those criteria. It is free to download from their site, simple to use and we utilize it to create multiple RSS Feeds on Alledia.com and for important clients. After installation, you need only click "New", choose which areas of your site you wish to include in a particular RSS Feed, and click "Save". You’re done. You’ll have an RSS link…

January 1, 2007

Keeping Track of Your Domain Names

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. The mix-up happened a few weeks ago when the church changed Internet service providers and the church failed to keep track of the domain’s expiry date. The church’s pastor said he believed the church could keep its Web site name but the old service provider put the address up for sale and it was bought by a pornographic Web site.…

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,…

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…

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.