Joomulus 2 – Now Handles Greek Characters – Other Languages Coming Soon

Hello All,

Joomulus has been updated to include the Greek character set.

It took some thinking to solve the multilingual option but now that we have worked this out we can provide additional languages/character sets as required (and time permits).

If you have a specific language or character set you want included in Joomulus then leave a comment below. We’ll consider a comment a vote and we’ll start updating the language character sets for the most popular requests first.

Download Joomulus free from our downloads area (must be registered).

July 1, 2009 at 3:23 pm | Joomla Development, Joomulus | 9 comments

SEO Benefits And Cost Savings Of Registering Your Domain For Multiple Years

Just a quick post on something I discovered today while renewing our domain name at Godaddy.com, This could save you a few $$$ and improve your rankings.

I wanted to renew joomlabear.com for multiple years, and for a number of reasons.

Firstly because we don’t have any intention of stopping our joomla templating work, and there is no way we will let our website address lapse.

But the second reason, and of greater importance, is the potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefit to having your domain name registered for multiple years.

The theory goes that Google looks at how long a domain name has been registered for and gives you a small bonus in ranking if you have invested in a period longer than one year. It makes sense really as this helps to sort the wheat from the chaff, the people who are serious about making a long term commitment to their websites from the many fly-by-nighters and spammers.

Google does not disclose the inner workings of their search engine, Meaning this theory, like most aspects of SEO, is based on the experiences and intuition of processional Search Engine Optimizers.

Google has disclosed little morsels of information over the years, Don’t quote me on this but I believe they have stated recently that there are well over 100 factors they take into consideration when ranking a web page.

Keeping this in mind I doubt the length of registration has a major weighting, and many other SEO factors, such as content relevancy and backlinks, are far more powerful factors in the equation.

I don’t think registering your domain for multiple years will push you straight to the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), however I believe it does have a small effect, and every little bit counts, so if you can afford to register your domain for more than one year definitely do so.

If you register your domains at godaddy.com like I do then here’s a little trick that might save you a few dollars – the first one is their slightly cheeky system of giving a different discount if you choose multiple year registration immediately, from the slightly better discount if you select the 3 year option at the end of the checkout process.

Here is the price to renew a domain at Godaddy for 3 years if you select the 3 year option right at the beginning of the checkout process:

Here is the price if you initially choose one year registration, but then upgrade to 3 years on the last page of the checkout process when Godaddy is offering an 8% discount (at the time of writing):

And lastly – and by far the best option – here is the price when using one of our Godaddy Promo Codes – in this instance I’ve plugged “slam30″ into the discount code field in the Godaddy shopping cart and look at the discount on a 3 year registration – 30% off:

Visit Godaddy here and use this coupon code.

Hope this info may help a few of you – as always I’m interested in other peoples thoughts on th SEO benefits of multi-year doman registration, and always keen to hear about other Godaddy Promo Codes – Many of the coupons listed at the link above were submitted by our readers. Thanks everyone.

Cheers

Big Bear

June 26, 2009 at 3:54 am | Domain Names | No comment

Examples Of Adsense Font Size – Small, Medium & Large

Google has just added a new feature to Adsense – publishers may now choose the size of the font they wish to display.

This change will be welcomed by Adsense publishers small and large, near and far.

The crux of this change is that it allows publishers to create more unique looking ad units than have previously been available – while also attracting more attention to ads simply by making the text bigger.

To the right I have examples of the new Adsense font size configurations:

What I have noticed with my limited testing is that different ad blocks seem to be affected in different ways by the font size settings.

468×60 adsense blocks appeared not to be affected at all…
I found the 728×90 to be quite effective and am running a test on our Forum – have a look here.
The 728 leaderborad seems to work well with the new large font setting because it now always shows 3 large ads side by side. Previously you would get 3 or 4 ads, but most often 4.

I have also tested a 338×280 block set to large on leftover ham recipes. I don’t feel this really works as the ad prior to this fitted perfectly – now it looks cluttered. I will run this for a few days and see what click through rate it delivers.

I think this new feature from Google will definitely allow publishers to optimize ad placements and generate more adsense revenue, however my testing so far indicates that some testing and tweaking of ad formats is needed as the new options provide very different looking ads that may no longer work with your site aesthetics.

I’m keen to test out more ad blocks/sizes with different adsense font size settings and will report back on my findings.

Let me know in the comments if you have found an ad size/font size that works well for you. Leave a link to your site too!

June 18, 2009 at 2:50 pm | adsense | 2 comments

Joomulus 2.0 – More Simple Yet More Powerful

After many many months and little time we’ve finally refined and simplified the Joomulus flash tag cloud. The latest version of wp cumulus for Joomla is available now.

I’d like to introduce Joomulus 2.0!

Now there are still improvements we are planning, but this version works on all joomla 1.5 variations, and from the testing we’ve done it works on all major browsers as well.

Thanks to all the users who contributed to Joomulus (Flom I know you did a lot of work). In this new version we’ve done away with a lot of the parameters from the earlier versions; No more tags generated from content for one.

The main reason for this was to stop a major bug with PHP expending bytes allocated, which would stop the whole page from loading and leaving the viewer with a lovely PHP error.

The second reason to remove them, and people may not be aware of this, is the search link that all of the generated tags were associated with. This not only brings up usability issues with the user clicking on a tag then being confronted with a list of all content search results with that tag word in it (which is quite annoying). But it also brings up 404 errors, if you’re a user of Google’s webmaster tools you’ll see a lot of unreachable urls along the lines of:

index.php?option=com_search&searchword=joomlabear&searchphrase=exact&ordering=newest

Lastly, you didn’t  have full control over what tags were generated.

These issues combined make for a fairly useless little tool. A: it’s not really usable B: it doesn’t help search engines but rather impairs them. So the tag generation from content has been all together removed (also known as automatic read out).

We’re left now with one option, the user defined tags. This requires a little more work to set up but allows full control over the tag, what it links to, and the size at which it should appear. And because the XML process is pretty much the same, but requires even MORE set up with ftp access, the parameter tag options was the way to  go.

So after creating an efficient, to-the -point module, scrapping unnecessary parameters, we still had the IE issue to go.

And if you weren’t aware of it the IE issue was fairly major. It was worse than the PHP memory issue, the viewer was confronted with a wicked error and the page just wouldn’t load? I had thought the error was some where in the previous 300 lines of code; After refining the module to just under 100 lines of code I was still stumped by the issue.

Going back to basics I went to SWFObject Google group, and the old SWFObject forums….. then the posts went by and I still couldn’t find the issue. My brother had told me about the defer=’defer’ attribute that is now apart of XHTML specifications. This hints to the browser that the javascript doesn’t create content therefore delaying the execution until after the page loads. So I tried it and a burst of excitement/satisfaction arose in me as the page started to load.

But then a new error occurred and the page went blank….. my heart sank, frustration swelled.

But still progress was made. Looking at the page source on IE6 a bazaar line of code was left <script id=__ie_ondomload defer=true src=://><\/script> was all that was in the page. Going back to Google and searching for “__ie_ondomload” brought up some pages I hadn’t viewed before, and sure enough others had experienced this problem.

This was a line of code inserted by SWFObject when detecting the browser and which method of embedding to use. It was a known issue for the developers and they’d recently updated this in SWFObject 2.2.

So I updated Joomulus from 2.1 to 2.2 and again the results were looking good, until crash, burn, IE6 fell on another one of it’s 1001 hurdles, what a surprise.

I was starting to doubt the effectiveness of this method of embedding .swf’s. But everything I’ve read would suggest otherwise, Google is behind it and Adobe. So why me? Why was this such and issue and where was the fix? Was I really that noobish that I couldn’t get the most recommended method of embedding swf’s to work?

So I started from scratch again with a basic HTML page and any old swf file, it worked fine, not an error in/on site. I’d read a few forum posts of people having issues with IE errors, when the problem had been using an absolute path to the .js file. I’d been using the full URL the entire time though, in the basic HTML page and in the Joomla module?

The answer lies in the XHTML compliant <base> tag which Joomla uses. I found when adding a <base> to my basic HTML page errors were flying again in IE6. After reading forum posts on the topic I had a fleeting thought that people would just have to hack into Joomla and remove the base tag…. buts this is not only unintelligent, unpractical, it’s right pain in the arse.

The base tag uses a compliant method of closing which is called a self closing tag <base href=”http://joomlabear.com/” />. The self closing part is the final forward slash the comes before the closing of the opening tag. A better example is a hr <hr /> or a br <br />, if these were normal HTML tags they would look like <hr></hr> or <br></br>. It’s this self closing nature that IE can’t seem to interpret. Not only can it not interpret it but it crashes totally when used with SWFObject.

So after hours of frustration and cursing Mircosoft IE, the solution for all browsers is in IE ‘if statements’ that I’ll have you know were developed to allow alternative solutions for IE known issues. They actually developed IE with the ability to pick on specific HTML comments, that’s saying something. Here it is the solution for Joomulus or any swf being embedded with SWFObject on a page using a <base> tag

<!–[if IE]></base><![endif]–>

Thats it, IE is now satisfied with a old school traditional closing tag element.

Strange how something that simple can cause huge aggravation. And here we have Joomulus 2.0.

I hope anyone out there experiencing similar issues might benefit from this.

May 12, 2009 at 9:19 am | Joomla Development, Joomulus | 11 comments

Managing Spam Comments In Wordpress and Joomla

Some of the sites  mentioned in this post belong to friends of mine who use Wordpress not Joomla – However the same issues apply to those of us who run Joomla sites and choose to use a comments plugin.

My friend RT has written an interesting post on the pros and cons of dofollow versus nofollow.

His post sparked quite a bit of discussion on the issue and many commented on the large amount of spam that ensues when a blog is ‘dofollowed’. Frank Carr also pointed out that when he ran dofollow on his earn online cash blog his site was then picked up and added to various ‘dofollow’ blog list around the interweb – this in turn resulted in poor quality traffic and a deluge of spammers.

So what can you do? Well it seems the tide may be turning against dofollow amongst its stalwart followers, I have been a supporter but sadly reverted to nofollow a few weeks back – the spam was just overwhelming me. When you run dofollow many of the spam posts will be from real people, not bots, and spam filters have a very tricky time picking these up.

Akismet has actually worked quite well for me. I have a blog where I played with feeding RSS feeds into wordpress posts – using the wp-o-matic plugin.

I didn’t really check the comments on the blog for a few months as the project was just an experiment on something very different… But when I did look a couple of months later there were 900+  comments in the queue!

So I installed Akismet, which is a wordpress spam filter that provides a ‘check for spam’ button in the comments window. This scans all your existing, unapproved comments, not just the new ones.

Akismet moved all but 3 of the 900+ comments to the spam folder.

I did a double check by manually looking at 3-4 pages in the spam folder and they were definitely spam. The 3 non-spam comments were valid.

Akismet did a good job in this case.

If you are using Joomla this may end up being a major issue for you as all the comment components are 3rd party, and to my knowledge none have particularly robust spam moderation features.

Do let me know if you are running comments in Joomla and have any interesting methods to combat spam, has anyone looked at implementing Akismet for Joomla?

April 21, 2009 at 8:18 pm | Joomla Development, SEO | 6 comments

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