Sometimes I wonder how non technical people manage to function in their daily life.

I am not talking matrimonial problems or existential crisis, I am referring to trying to take advantage of the wonderful tools we enjoy nowadays without going ballistinc and contemplate either suicide or monastic life.

Take my latest adventures with Vista:

Vista Crazy Display

The other day I managed to get sucked into a a transoceanic brawl with an Australian fellow. The reason for this long distance bar fight was that I am listed as the webmaster of record in one of my client's sites.

I received an email asking me to remove a link from this website. At first I answered politely that I had forwarded the message to the site owner and I trusted he was going to decide one way or another whether to remove the link.

webmasters content

One of the tricks to make your finished site as professional as it can be is to eliminate the various references Joomla makes to itself throughout the site.

If your site is at risk of being hacked, the following tricks will help "mask" your site from the various script kiddies and any ill intentioned hacker. Warning: you are not actually locking down your site or make it hack proof completely. The intention here is simply to make it so that at first glance it will be hard to recognize your site as being built using Joomla.

unjoomla your Joomla!

In Joomla the "Home" page is not just a regular page. In fact, the "Frontpage", as it is called, is nothing more than a Joomla component in its own right.

In a regular Joomla site the "Frontpage" allows the user to publish selected articles in a "blog" or "portal" style. While this is a nice feature and one of the things that make Joomla so powerful, many websites need a Home page with a fixed article to greet and guide visitors or illustrate the  site purpose. While this is actually easy to achieve, it is not immediately evident. I will assume you know your way around Joomla! by now, but even if you don't these techniques should be fairly easy to follow.

static Joomla! home page

Don’t let the headline fool you. This is no historical reference diatribe. This is just my humble observations and predictions of the general design trends for 2007. Less to try and nail down specific trends, but more to open a dialog between artists and those who might be interested in the global state of design for 2007.

2007 Design trends

A common complaint of the Joomla! Blog section is that it seems to have a life of its own. Joomla! is based on the concept of "Sections" and "Categories", where a Section is composed of one or more categories and each category is composed of the actual content. This is a source of some confusion and a lot of frustration on the part of users and I will try to explain how the Joomla! system works and how to set up a working personal bog in Joomla!

Joomla blog