Norwegian Site Using BlackBear – Showcasing Donkeys & Horses
I have just received an email from a friend who has put together a stunning website for his sister using the BlackBear template.
The site focuses on her work with horses donkeys, and can be viewed here:
Beautiful photography and great execution. I love the Ken Burns effect on the slideshow.
It’s always great hear from anyone who has built a site with one of our Joomla Templates so do email me if you’ve made something you are proud of.
2009, Year Of The JoomlaBear
A few quick updates.
I’ve dropped the adsense from the blog feed – It was pretty annoying and I wondered why people would subscribe and then leave again within a few days – I subscribed to my own feed a few days ago and noticed how the format appears to be just a few lines of text and then an annoying ad… I actually had forgotten I’d activated ads for the feed… It sort of just happened while I was playing around with my adsense account before Xmas.
You only get a partial feed at present but I know I can give you guys the full post in your feed reader. If this would this be preferable then leave me a comment saying so.
When I set up this blog initially I raced through the options without thinking to much – but have since found that I absolutely love blogging, and an audience seems to be developing with traffic increasing by the day. So I’m keen now to tailor the site as much as possible to you, my readers.
I’ll also be removing the rest of the adsense from this blog – It just bugs me, and you are all way to clued up to click ads. I’ll be replacing this with a showcase of some of my best template work and upcoming Joomla Templates.
It’s been particularly hectic the past few weeks – My business partner, and much beloved younger brother, has been away. It’s amazing how much work there is to do when there is only one person to do the work of two.
The past couple of weeks I’ve mainly been finishing some enhancements to www.ninjakiwi.com, which was one of my biggest projects last year. NinjaKiwi receives over 100,000 visitors per day, is designed by yours truly, and is proudly running Joomla!
And this brings me to an interesting announcement – JoomlaBear is winding up client work and preparing to focus solely on Joomla Template production. 2009 will see more templates from Big Bear than you can shake a hosting account at.
On our test server a new JoomlaBear is being born that includes a phpBB powered forum, linked to the powerful Joomla user registration process via a wonderful Joomla plugin called JFusion. This allows users to register once on either the phpBB forum, or Joomla’s front end, and the same user account then works for both applications.
And of course I’m using Wordpress here for the blog. So it looks like 2009 will also be the year that JoomlaBear tries to keep his fingers in all the best open source CMS projects 
And I will certainly be writing more on the Joomla vs. Wordpress debate which I find increasingly interesting, and difficult to answer! As both systems have some obvious strengths, and weaknesses.
If you have thoughts, or requests for topics you would like me to write about, then by all means leave me a comment. My primary skills include 12 years of web development and design with PHP, Flash, HTML and CSS. Joomla, Wordpress, Photoshop & Fireworks are some of my best buddies – we hang out all the time. I have focused a lot of energy on Internet Marketing in recent years and have plenty of SEO stories to tell.
Wishing you all well and look forward to hearing from you.
Big Bear
Bikini Pictures – A Joomla Template For The ‘Hot or Not’ Component
Hi folks, This is a little template I put together towards the end of last year that is a little bit experimental – I was interested in the Joomla Hot or Not Component (only available for Joomla 1.0) and wanted to see what could be done with it. excuse the topic of the site but I really couldn’t help myself – so without ado I present to you… Bikini Pictures…
<cough> well that’s what a hot or not component is for right? </cough>
Anyway, I’m really just interested in what you think of the design and whether you think the floating cloud modules work, and ultimately if anyone would be interested in having this available for download? (I’d have to work it up a bit before it would be usable).
I don’t think it’s worth pursueing the hot or not component as it no longer appears to be in development (let me know if this changes). So I would be developing this to handle normal Joomla content and not hot or not pics and rating system, etc
What do you think?
Merry Christmas – Looking Forward To Glazing The Ham
I realize this has nothng to do with Joomla, Wordpress, SEO or making your website profitable, but I want to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and thank you for following this blog and being part of the growing Joomlabear community.
There has been blood, sweat and tears getting to where we are now and we are still a fare way off making ends meet from our JoomlaBear template work. We have come a long way though and we thank you all for your support, especially those who have contributed in the forums and supported our work on Joomla templates. We couldn’t have done it without you.
I wish you all well and hope that like me you will be getting ready to cook the ham and celebrate with family and friends.
Good will, and much ham, to you all.
Computer Tips To Speed Up Your PC
If you’re a computer nerd like me you run a lot of applications at once; Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver to name a few! Sometimes I need my beloved free open source open office as well when I’m putting together a spreadsheet or client proposal. Nothing beats free software, and Open office is a great one that everyone should have. Why pay microsoft hundreds of dollars when there is an alternative that is just as good and costs you nothing? Heck I even spent a small fortune on Excel Training back in the day.
However all these applications can really slow down your computer and then you start to feel like you need every ounce of juice your machine has to offer to keep going. So in an effort to speed up my computer which has been slowing me down I went in search of some Computer Tips to help mefix computer errors.
We’ll I’ve been through this process before but It was good to find a refresher course – Sometimes you need to kill those nasty additional processes running in the background of your PC to really optimize your computer.
That did it – my PC is running smoothely again.
