Brian Teeman

You may have been lucky enough to have seen this presentation live in The Netherlands or Germany or even listened to it at slideshare but now you can watch the presentation in all it's glory.

Thanks to my cameraman Fotis Evangelou the entire presentation is now here for you to enjoy.

It's 31 minutes of pure entertainment - I hope you enjoy it as much as those who saw it live.

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.

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.

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.

As we all know twitter has been up and down more times than a strippers panties in the last 24 hours, so what should you be doing instead.

When I was younger, a long long time ago, the BBC would always show a children's television programme in the school holidays called "Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?" and it got me thinking of things I could be doing instead of waiting for tweets to arrive.

(I'm suprised to find out that the show ran for 42 series between 20 August 1973 and 21 April 1995 and that Russel T Davies of Doctor Who fame was a one time producer/director)

I spend a lot of my time training people new to joomla so I think, and hope, that I have a pretty good idea of the trials and tribulations that they face.

Looking at joomla for the first time can be, for some, a daunting prospect. With so many options and so much power and flexibility it is easy to be overwhelmed and quickly drop joomla in the trash.

Fear not, joomla help is easy to find.

Every day I try to learn something new and today is no different.

Hopefully you are aware of the robots.txt file that comes with your joomla web site install and you might even have customised it to add more power and control.

The robots.txt file acts as a signpost to google and other search engine robots, telling which parts of your web site to index and which to ignore.

In advanced usage it can be used to serve slightly different content to the search engines, prevent images from being included in the google image index or even tell google the pages of your site to include in its mobile index.

But have you checked it is actually working?

Back in November I published a blog post "Where is the search?" in which I stated that the search button should be at the top right hand corner of your web site because "everyone else puts it there so that's where your user expects to look."

According to a recent survey of the Top 100 blogs at Technorati by Smashing Magazine 62% of sites have the search box in the top right corner of the site, just like here, with the majority of the rest placing it at the top of the right hand sidebar.

Today I found another reason.

Is your admin interface in joomla secure?

Could you make it more secure?

Could Joomla itself force some extra security?

I've never used the Joomla "polls" component before so I was suprised today to realise that there is no option to disable the "results" button.

However you use a voting system it's results are always dependant on the number of participants in the vote. Or perhaps I should more accurately say in politic-speak the election turnout.