I received a review copy of Joomla! 1.5 Multimediafrom Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already know about Images and the image manager in Joomla!.

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimisation efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.



I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do... what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

• Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.


• Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to setup podcasts and the handling of mp3s which is very good in combination with normal blogging.


• Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!


• Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don't need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don't take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

I just finished my book on Joomla 1.5 SEO.

Here is the editors review from Amazon:

This is a practical, hands-on book that will lead you through the process of search engine optimization of your Joomla!-based web site.
It provides clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step in the SEO process. Once you have finished reading the book and gone through the detailed plans from each chapter, you will have the knowledge to improve the rankings and visitor numbers of almost any Joomla!-based web site.

This book is written for anyone using Joomla! ranging from owners of business sites to web site developers and personal web site owners. Any Joomla! web site owner who wants to sell products or services, or send out a message to the world will find that getting better rankings in the search engines will help them reach their goal.

Some prior knowledge of Joomla! is expected but no prior knowledge of search engine optimization is needed for this book. The reader will get a deeper level of knowledge on how to make their web site rank better and attract more visitors to their site.

I could not have written this description any better than they did.

But what's in it for you?

Here are some pointers:

What you will learn from this book

• Set up your SEO and Keyword strategy
• Develop and implement a plan to improve the ranking of your web site
• Organize your content in a search engine-friendly and user-friendly way
• Get more SEO improvement possibilities with an SEF patch
• Impress the search engines and your visitors by writing titles and articles
• Set up a Joomla! blog and run its RSS feed using Google's FeedBurner service
• Install and use sh404SEF, an SEF component to improve your URLs
• Pick a good SEO template for speed and SEO techniques
• Speed up your site with better images and cache settings
• Monitor visitors and keep a track of the visits to your site using Statcounter stats and Google Analytics

Still not convinced, read a sample chapter here:
Joomla Blogging and RSS Feeds

Want more? well... You can buy it from Packt publishing or via Amazon.com Joomla! 1.5 SEO

I recently switched over to a new Hosting Company after having some issues with an upgrade the old provider did on their platform. Along with this switch I want to do some testing to see how certain changes will work out.

Changing Hosting Company

One of the changes is the change of hosting company, going from a Dutch based server to a USA based server.
It should provide some more traffic from the US if the geotargetting function of Google and Yahoo / Bing takes the IP address of the server into account.
The new platform is also faster then the old provider was...

Changing URLs / Domain

The second change was a change in domain name. I went from wordpress-cms-hummerbie.com to http://wpsitebuilding.com where the old url has a 301 redirect (permantly moved) to the new domain.

Changing WordPress Theme

The third change is the change of the WordPress Theme to the Excutive Blog Theme by StudioPress which is a new theme that has also by search engine optimized by Joost de Valk from www.yoast.com.

In the screenschot below you can see how this theme works out on my new site.

I will post here in a few weeks to tell you if the expected results are indeed working for Building a Website with WordPress. In the mean time go check out the site!

I just setup a website with the AutoCashSystem to see if this is really functioning the way it is promoted.

I must admit the the way you set-up a website with this product is really very easy.
Within minutes I create a website about How to Make Money with Photograpy and I just had to fill in some contact details and I just chanced the Default Title of the site to something more suitable... wicht some help ove another program I use.

Here is the system promotion, just click it to read and listen to the salespage and learn from it!



In the next weeks I will get more email and will try to follow up to see if the program lives up to its promise. Stay Tuned.