Brian Teeman

Happy New Year to you all.

Of course I'm not really so sad as to be sat typing this blog post at midnight on New Years Day. It's actualy 15:53 on the 29th and I'm using the "Start Publishing" feature of joomla.

I started this  blog in response to a few of my friends "demanding" I put some of my thoughts and tips & tricks down in writing.

Of course I hopped that other people would stumble upon this blog and find it interesting but I never expected  the readership to grow so large so quickly to an average of 1500 visits every day.

Browsing the web all day some trends really start to stand out. Designers seem to be under the misapprehension that white space is bad and that they need to fill it.

Of course in the Joomla world we have all those wonderfuly useless eye-candy gadgets (oops I meant to say modules) to chose from to fill that white space.

But do they add to the site or does the site become so busy that your visitor misses your important content?

I bet you are amongst the majority of internet users who use one password for everything.

A password is only as strong as the weakest link and if you use the same password on multiple sites it is only as strong as the security on the weakest site.

And if you recently had an account at typo3.org you just found the weakest site as their site was compromised over the weekend.

One of the changes in Joomla 1.5.8 is changes with some of the newsfeeds supplied as sample data which according to this bug report

It appears that all Joomla installations have been providing a loophole for advertising for Linuxcentral.com products in every installation"

This suprised me as very few of the Joomla sites I visit actualy use the newsfeed component to display feeds, so if the component isn't in use on a site how is this happening?

There are many different approaches to keeping your email inbox under control. Personaly I always try to answer emails as they arrive as I fear that if I let them stack up I will never answer them.

Today I was pointed to a slightly different approach, although perhaps recipients of my email replies might feel that I have always used it.

This post is here because in the last 3 weeks I must have googled for the answer about 5 times.

How do you search and replace a word in a database using phpMyAdmin?

This post has been through several revisions whilst I temper my anger!

A common e-mail from myself to some of the people that I have helped build web sites starts something like this....

"Very disappointed!!! I spent ages making your web site accessible to all. I spent ages showing you why it was important to make your web site accessible. I showed you web sites that didn't have any alt tags for images and how unusable that made your site. I showed you how easy it was to at the very minimum give an image an alt tag. And what do you do as soon as my back is turned...."

Obviously on this site it's on the top right corner of the page. But why is it there and can you still search the site if there isn't a search button?