Brian Teeman

It seems that almost everyday there is a new social media opportunity appearing online which is immediately followed by an inevitable land grab phase. But before jumping on the bandwagon of the latest and greatest thing to hit the net take a moment to think.

Are you getting the maximum benefits you could from your current social media streams? Are there some that just didn't work for you? Are you missing opportunities because you just don't get it or did you not put in the time and effort and create a consistent social media presence.

I give a lot of presentations throughout the year and last night I represented Joomla at the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in a panel debate on Open Source knowledge/skills gaps across HM Government.

As many of you know I spend a considerable amount of my time fixing hacked websites and in the last two days there have been two very important postings for anyone who creates or runs a Joomla! web site.

Just as you can not be a little bit pregnant your website can not be a little bit secure or a little bit unsecure. 

There are many extensions available for Joomla that "claim" to secure your site and whilst some of them will indeed block certain types of hacks none of them will make your web site unhackable.

This month a survey by cmscrawler.com of 2,944,914 European web sites has been able to identify the publishing solution used in almost 494,040 of those sites.

Unlike other statistical analysis this was restricted to European TLD (top level domains) and does not limit itself to only testing sites in the top x million based on traffic.

Does that make it more accurate? Probably not but by removing the traffic filter it does allow us to look at the usage of web platforms more generally.

Writing a blog post or any type of documentation on line is a challenge. One of the many things that I try to do is to write in a style that is appropriate for you the reader.

I am aware that for a large percentage of my readers English is not their first language. As a result I try to avoid using complex words, phrases or sentence structures. Of course I often fail but I do try.

Last night I started writing a new blog post and it quickly became apparent to me that it really should be a video.

Not a problem I thought, I know how to produce videos.

Just this morning I was telling some friends how brilliant iMovie is on the Mac for producing videos.

There are certainly benefits to both social networking and networking in person. Is one really better than the other? Well, I guess my answer is that in order to really develop quality relationships, face-to-face is the best way. Is that always possible in today’s technological age of communicating online all over the world? Not always.

Social networking makes it very convenient for the non-socialites to stay cocooned in their own little world. Sure, they talk to people on the phone, over Skype, they Twitter and blog, but I would argue that the bulk of that interaction with the outside world only creates a “surface relationship.” Whereas an interpersonal relationship requires getting to know the other person more deeply.

The other day I was conducting a review of a new web site and came across my favourite usability failure.

Drop Down menus suck!!

Not the whole menu of course just the bad habit of site builders who add functionality to the top level link.

With every web browser on the planet rendering differently it's a constant battle ensuring that your beautifully and painstakingly designed web site looks just as gorgeous on all browsers.

Personally I build a site entirely using Firefox and only at the end of the build process do I look at it in other browsers, curse and swear and then start to fix issues.

But what is the best way to check your site on multiple browsers?