Calgary Joomla Website Design and Hosting

The much anticipated Joomla 1.6 Beta 1 was released this Monday, May 17th, 2010.

I've only just started to play with the new features, so I can't comment in depth just yet.

Upon first glance, however, I can say that J1.6B-1 is, in a word, clean. The admin interface has been stripped down to its essentials and it's apparent that a great deal of thought has gone into the design and layout of features.

The headliners of the new J1.6 show are the improved ACL and unlimited nested categories, but there are more improvements under the hood than just those two. From the announcement on Joomla ...

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

• New Access Control System: Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.
• Unlimited Depth Organizational Model: Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.
• One-Click Extension Updates: Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.
• Semantic XHTML Layouts: Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

I'll test these new features over the coming days and will report my findings :)

Email spam is a scourge upon humanity. Not only does it steal our valuable and limited time away from more important or fun tasks, but it also costs untold billions of dollars in terms of bandwidth, and very often it's downright offensive. A pox on it and they who send it!

I don't claim to be an expert in the area of eliminating email spam, but I have all but eliminated the scourge of spam in my life and I have 8 separate email addresses, all of which are published on the web in various places so they've all been picked up by email spammers.

What follows is a brief history of my attempts to eliminate spam and my eventual solution of choice.

I run several online forums, and one forum is in the health field and it is constantly under assault by people and bots who want to spam it with ads for cheap pills. No amount of CAPTCHA or skill-testing questions can stop these determined individuals, so I've resorted to approving every new registration.

Most registrations from the spammers are easy to spot because they have user names with a number in it. For example, "johnsmith858". Then there are the ones with no imagination whatsoever who use names like "buycheappillsonline". Occasionally, however, I get a registered user name that seems legit, so I have to decide to approve or not approve. What if I approve it and it's a spammer? What if I delete it and it's a real person who wanted to use the board? Rather than rely on my gut (something I used to do) I now use StopForumSpam.com to check whether the person is a spammer or not. So far, it has been 100% on target with all my "is it?" or "isn't it?" registrations.

All you have to do is take either the user name, IP, or email address of the new user registration and plug it into the StopForumSpam.com website and you'll get an answer in a few  milliseconds.

Fantastic utility that takes the guesswork out of new forum registrations. Here's the link again: StopForumSpam.com.

You don't have to be a Fortune 500 company to put out a press release. Even if you are a solopreneur, you can do it. Check out Gail's excellent blog post where she shows you how to integrate today's social media tools into your next (and perhaps first) press release.

Link: Creating Social Media Press Releases

Note: If you would like Gail to work with you on your next press release, or to improve your website's social media presence, or just improve your search engine rankings, give her a call at our main, toll-free A1Media.ca phone number: 1-877-228-0422.

Is the Joomla wrapper feature a good thing? Or, is it just an evil thing used by lazy web developers? If this is a question that keeps you awake at night, pull up a chair and get ready to be dazzled! Okay, maybe dazzled is over-selling it. Get ready to be ... INFORMED! Heh! That's the ticket.

Please Pass the Granulated Permissions

One of the biggest challenges in using Joomla as a business website is the lack of sufficiently granular permissons. Granular permissions? That's geek-speak for the ability to set who can access what on the website.

Tuesday, May 12th, Google announced its new Search Options feature for Google Search. Now, instead having to visually sift through page after page of search results, you can, as the Google execs say, "slice and dice" your results.

Two weeks of twittering and I am already suffering Twitter overload.

Twitter is a very fun application that is easy to get started in and easy to get addicted to. After the encouragement from a friend, and despite my ever-present reluctance to "put my self out there," I signed up for a Twitter account, slapped up my goofy mug, and got twittering.

Have you ever wanted to compare two text documents to see exactly what has changed from one version to the next? I find myself in this situation frequently when I need to compare two versions of code contained in separately dated versions of a PHP or HTML page. To make the comparison between the two text files I use a powerful text-difference analyzer called CSDiff by Component Software. CSDiff is an easy-to-use, powerful, feature-rich application, and best of all, it's free!

• Google Documents: For some reason, people either love Google or hate them with the burning white heat of a million imploding suns. We actually like it. Currently, we are totally in-like with Google Document's templates. Need a personal expense tracking spreadsheet? No problem. Need a mortgage calculator? Got that. Party invitation template? Yup. Business plan, letterhead, resume, invoice? Yep. Yep. and Yep! All you need is a free Google Gmail account and you're off and running.
  Link: Google Docs.

As a follow-up to our 4 Reasons To Keep Your Content Fresh article, here's 6 quick and easy ways to add fresh content to your website.

1. Announce new product and/or service offerings
2. Publish customer testimonials
3. Add YouTube videos
4. Add a Google news feeds
5. Start a corporate blog
6. Publish a newsletter

Why would you want "fresh" content on your website?

1. Fresh Beats Static: Fresh content, that is to say new, timely content, lets casual visitors to your website know that you are an active on-going business. For example, if you had to choose between two vendors, and all you had to base your decision on was the information on their websites, which company would you choose: the company with the static information that could've been written ten years ago? or the company with news and information updates from the last week on their website? Chances are you'll go with the company that has the new info on their website.