A set of extensions to bring blogging power to Joomla! CMS.

My friend, designer Arno Zijlstra , just pinged me regarding a new Joomla! project that promises to bring "blogging power to individuals and communities" on the Joomla! Content Management System. The project is called Tamka (Speak Up!)

As a long-time Blogger (this blog is Blogger-powered) and WordPress user, it's good to see Joomla! getting some attention in the blog tool department but what exactly we'll be getting we don't know yet.

I've never seriously used Joomla! as a pure blogging tool and, quite frankly, it's not supposed to be. Not only is there a ton of core code but Joomla! is a far more powerful fully-featured CMS and a blog should be considered as one channel of your web offering.

is4profit.com, the SME resource website, is a Joomla! powered portal for small business information & advice and apart from the many sections within their site they would benefit from a business blog, so let's see if the new Tamka.org can pique their interest when it's released.

We'll keep you posted or you can follow Tamkaorg on twitter.

UPDATE: Tamka is live and looking good. Congrats to the team and here's looking forward to testing :)

Labels: blogging, CMS, joomla

As I designer I'm all for changing websites; maybe the design got a bit stuffy, maybe there's a new layout you'd like to try, maybe you've got a better idea than before, or even your focus has changed.

Change is good. But yesterday I noticed some websites that once had very important links to my clients' websites had changed. The layout changed and so had the content. The links were missing.

I wish changes to old websites would include keeping the old content. Whilst there may be more work to do in the short-term there's ultimately less playing of "catchup" and you've already got a raft of content that may be indexed in the SERPs, even ranking quite well and picking up some traffic.

Please people, think about a site upate as a full, holistic upgrade including keeping your old content.

Labels: design, development, search, seo

After installing an app last weekend I've had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn't tell Crawler.com to do that so I'm pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.

The hijack doesn't appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn't the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.

So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?

Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:

In the address bar enter about:config

Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:

browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1

My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk

Bugger! That didn't work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:

keyword.URL

THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.

That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.

Labels: browsers, firefox, search, tips

That new search engine, cuil, you know the reputed Google killer? It sucks.

From England I typed in "Small business news" and got served a dish of useless American websites - useless to me anyway. Why do I sit in an office in (Old) Hampshire and wish to see small business news from Cleveland, New Jersey, Michigan and Alabama? For the $33 million of venture capital that was reportedly spent on floating this search engine, I expect better.

Cuil is as daft as its name is - which is also French for arse is it not?

Cuil is dead, long live Google.

Labels: rant, search

Rumour has it that Google's new open source browser, Chrome, is out today. Infact it's not just speculation, Google made an official announcement on their blog.

Google's Chrome browser is accompanied by a 32-page Scott McCloud comic book detailing Google's thoughts behind the release of the new browser which lands in a market dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and constantly chased but never equalled (in terms of market share anyway) by Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock and others.

The Google Chrome book is a neat & friendly way to introduce punters to the new browser, making a nice change from the usual stuffy instructions you might expect.

So let's see what happens later today when the Google Chrome beta is released...

Labels: browsers, google, open source

A List Apart are running their 2008 survey for people who make websites. I took it and so should you :)

The results of last year's survey (1.7Mb PDF) makes good reading. From my own perspective it's interesting to see that the majority of the 2007 survey's respondents were:

• mainly developers (I class myself as a web designer)
• younger than me
  
• educated to a higher degree
• working for MUCH bigger companies
• only recently into blogging
• mostly getting excited by the web design field
• working less hours
• fairly "green" in the web industry
• not having as much holiday
• earning less but getting pay rises

Labels: survey

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is out and, although it's a nice bit of kit, I only really wanted to post about it because of the awesome piece of design on the FF3b5 welcome page.

The gorgeous picture accompanying the FF3b5 homepage is of a giant retro robot being built in a utopian setting - very much Sky Captain style but with more colour ;)

Labels: browsers, firefox