Steve’s Blog

January 11, 2007

Where to Get Free Joomla Templates

Template clubs, template clubs, template clubs. There are literally dozens of template vendors jostling for attention in the crowded Joomla market, trying to compete for your $30 / $50 / $80 per year. While free components are still produced every week, it seems that the free template has gone the way of the dodo (or reduced to an advertising move in order to attract paid memberships). Today, we thought it would be nice to mention those people who still don’t charge for their templates. If we’ve missed anyone, please feel free to email us and we’ll add them…

January 10, 2007

How Do You Back Up Your Sites?

Ever since Google released its Code Search feature which made it next to impossible to safely create and store backups on a webserver, we’ve been struggling with a security question: Backing up MySQL databases every day is easy, but what’s the best way to backup a site’s files? There are tutorials available on how to use a cron job to use get CPanel to backup the files automatically. However, these are not really appropriate for most of our clients who aren’t able or willing to learn how to use and manage cron jobs. Many hosting companies don’t even…

January 9, 2007

Can Joomla or Drupal Produce a RedHat?

People have already proven that big companies can be built using Open Souce software. 15 years ago Linux started as the hobby of a Finnish university student. Companies such as RedHat have built on his developments and created multi-billion dollar companies. RedHat alone has a market cap of 4.25 Billion US$. It took 8 years for Linux to produce a company listed on the Stock Market whereas both Mambo/Joomla and Drupal are nearly 8 years old now. Can Joomla or Drupal produce a RedHat?

January 8, 2007

Interview with Cory Webb of Joomlaform & HowtoJoomla

We’re delighted to announce a new feature here at Alledia. Every Monday for the next few weeks, we’ll be interviewing people closely involved in developing for Joomla First up is Cory Webb, the talented web designer who is involved in running two key Joomla sites: Joomlaform.com. A showcase for the best in Joomla template design. HowtoJoomla.net. A site full with tutorials for Joomla beginners. If that, wasn’t enough, in addition to working with Joomlashack.com, he also has a full-time job. Last week he was kind enough to submit to our questions about himself and about building templates for Joomla.

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.…