Welcome to Alledia - the Joomla SEO Experts

Hitting the wall:

"In endurance sports, particularly cycling and running, hitting the wall describes the condition when an athlete suddenly loses energy". (via Wikipedia)

 Hitting the open source wall:

"In building a project, particularly when giving it away free, hitting the wall describes the condition when an project suddenly loses energy". (via me)

I hope this will be the first of a series of open discussions focusing on popular Joomla extensions.

A very smart SEO Club member helped me brainstorm a list of things to be aware of when optimizing a site with Fireboard. I'm going to give those here and then turn if over to you guys for any other tips, tricks or problems that you have.

1) Using 'RE:' for All Replies

This is an example of one page with two URLs, a clear duplicate content problem:

• forums/general/form-search-not-working
• forums/general/re-form-search-not-working

If you read the Alledia blog regularly you know we're doing training for Joomla beginners across the eastern, southern and mid-USA. You can find a full list of classes on JoomlaTraining.com.

Each week, with about 2 months before the class, we're giving a rundown of the training in each city. We've covered the November 7th class in Washington D.C. and the class a week later in New York City. The third and final one I'll cover is a session in Tampa on Saturday November 22nd.

A quick note: we took a shot at teaching in 5 cities. Washington, New York, Tampa and Atlanta all have enough students signed up for us to hold the classes (even several weeks out) but St. Louis is the odd one out. Not a squeek out of the people in the Mid-West. So if you'd like training in that region, try the CMS Expo in Denver in December. I'll be there too!

For about a week this month there were problems with the cache component we use here on Alledia.com. I turned it off while we tried to bugshoot the issue.

We also use Pingdom.com to track whether our sites are offline and also how fast they're responding. When I logged in today, I found a stellar argument for why caching your Joomla site is so important:

Alledia.com loads twice as quickly with the cache turned on.

Last week, I discussed Acquia which provides managed commercial grade support for Drupal sites. This week, I'm going to talk about some companies that don't quite have $7 million in their back pocket, but are creating new support and hosting products for Joomla.

I'm always fascinated by new business models in the Joomla world, so I'll let the leaders of these two projects explain what they're up to:

If you read the Alledia blog regularly you know we're doing training for Joomla beginners across the eastern, southern and mid-USA. You can find a full list of classes on JoomlaTraining.com.

Each week, with about 2 months before the class, we're giving a rundown of the training in each city. 

Last week we covered the November 7th class in Washington D.C.. The second class is a week later in New York City - downtown Manhattan to be precise. 

Back at the beginning of 2007 I wrote about why I'd love Joomla developers to stop encoding components and gave a rundown of why encoding bugs me.

However, sometimes the only solution, short of writing your own, is to use an encoded extension. We've faced that problem this week, moving a large and popular site to Joomla. To evaluate whether or not to use encoded work, we came up with a list of criteria that might be useful to some of you:

Can I pat myself on the back? 18 months ago, I asked if Drupal or Joomla could produce a company like Red Hat.

It turns out that Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert wants to do just that. At the beginning of this year, his company Acquia received $7 million in venture capital funding.

Where has that money gone? Over at Information Week, Acquia marketing VP explains: 

A couple of weeks back, I announced that we'd be doing Joomla training classes across the United States from Tampa in the south, New York up north and St. Louis and Denver in the midwest. You can find the full list on our Joomla Training website, including Barrie North's training class which is this Friday in Boston.

Each week until the classes I'm going to give you a brief introduction to each class, including the who, what, where, when and answers to other important questions.

Our first class, 7 weeks away now, is in the nation's capital. Here's what you need to know about the Joomla training class in Washington D.C.:

In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Brian Teeman who follows on from Kyle Ledbetter of Joomlapraise.com who asked whether Joomla admin templates are worth the effort.

Joomla is great and does everything I want (well it doesn't make my coffee but we can't have everything). But there are times when I just tear my hair out at the poor usability of the backend.

I try to avoid quoting other people's opinions and articles on this blog, but over the weekend I found a newspaper article about the interaction of search engines and the stock market that was absolutely fascinating. It also seems like an appropriate topic with this week's events on Wall Street.

Quite a few people have been asking lately about the benefits of using Google SiteSearch.

In theory, it's great idea because people can use Google's own search engine to search your site without leaving it. There's even a slick module that allows you do this easily on Joomla 1.5. This should produce more accurate results, right?

Wrong. Here's six reasons why you're better off using your own site search rather than relying on Google: