With the rise of twitter we are seeing a rapid increase in the usage of short urls (sURLS).

I use a sURL whenever I tweet a new blog post and also if I need to place a url in a powerpoint presentation.

In theory these are a great method of providing short, quick and permanent links to important content.

Sadly they are also often used to disguise the domain until after you have clicked on it.

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I came across this site last week whilst doing a little bit of holiday planning for my parents.

www.eggedo.co.il is the web site for coach tours of Israel (and beyond) for the Israeli national bus company.

It's very different to the usual type of clean, crisp web site that I admire.

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Every day I read and hear a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEF (Search Engine Friendly) urls.

For me the number one question is "are the urls HEF (Human Ear Friendly)?"

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Of course he does. If he still has time to use the net then it's a fairly safe bet that at some point he will visit a joomla powered web site.

With Joomla being used by the UN, National Governments, leading NPO's and US Senators and Governors he surely must.

But that isn't what this blog post is really all about or why there is a photo of lion accompanying this blog post.

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A few weeks ago I wrote that Joomla and Virtuemart were not the ideal solution for creating an ecommerce website. (Read it here).

Feedback on that was fairly divided and it was suggested that "my" problem was that I didn't really know Virtuemart well enough.

So, never one to turn down the opportunity to learn from the source I decided to go to Virtuemart Day and JoomlaDay in Germany later this month.

Today only the cost of Virtuemart Day is reduced to only €99.

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Wow has it really been four years since Peter Russell and I sat down and wrote the press release that announced the birth of Joomla!.

So much has changed since then and yet so much is still the same.

Happy Birthday and congratulations to everyone who was there on that day, September 1st 2005.

In 2006 Johan and myself celebrated the first bithday with a cake and a candle at the first Joomla!Day in the UK.

Will you be celebrating today or perhaps having a JUG (Joomla User Group) party?

(I really should consign that photo to the trash - it was certainly a bad hair day. )

This holiday weekend I had an enlightening conversation with a large company, that had been a training client of mine.

They got stuck on a little joomla issue with extension XXXX and just couldn't work out the problem or find the solution.

This client is pretty tech savvy and had followed most of the advice I gave in the training class.

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In his now infamous book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S Raymond wrote "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

1. Once you've started scratching does the itch go away?
2. Do you reach a point where the itch has gone but the software is not complete.
3. If you do what happens next?

Writing a new piece of software can be hard work and time consuming. You slave away at it in your spare time for days, weeks, months and even years until it works the way you need it to.

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A few months ago I joined the dark side and bought a Mac because I had an idea to build an iPhone app for one of my largest clients.

I'm not a programmer although I like to think I am quite good at reading code and hacking it, I just don't have the skills to start from scratch.

But my app was fairly basic, really not much more than an on-line book, so how hard could it be? Surely I would be able to re-use some of the skills I have learnt over the years with Joomla.

With my shiny new Mac I downloaded the iPhone SDK, bought a few books, installed the IDE and stared at the blank screen not knowing where to start.

As with so many things in life this looked destined to be one of those ideas that never came to fruition. So I put the iPhone development on the back-burner and moved on to other projects.

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