In an effort to "do no evil" Google announced last month that logged in users would default to using their encrypted search. That's just fancy tech talk for search being done over HTTPS. This is the same technology that protects your private information when you buy stuff online through secure websites. Basically, it jumbles up any information exchanged between a website and your browser so anyone snooping around can't read that information. Sounds like a good idea right? Right?
There has been a lot of talk lately about social networks and how they affect search engine results pages - the unpaid, organic listings that the search engines give you when you search for something. Many of the social media proponents claim that social will impact search while many of the SEO experts claim that no such force exists.
That's right, the release of Joomla 1.7.0 stable is 8 days late! Frankly, I am a little surprised that it actually came out. This is definitely a big moment for the Joomla! project because it validates the 6 month release cycle. The good news is that it was a few ways late due to the dev team making sure that it would be a simple upgrade from 1.6. The bad news is that if you are on a 1.5 site, you will still have to migrate your site and April 2012 is not as far away as it sounds right now.
It's official, Google+ is not in private beta and they are giving out invites to get in. So far the process is very hit or miss as the response seems to be much greater than Google anticipated. Since getting in on an actual invite seems to require being online at the perfect time I figured I'd share my experience so far in getting people in to G+.
If you haven't seen Google's answer the the Facebook like button, you will soon. According to Google, the new "+1" button will soon be integrated across their network of sites. We figured we'd get a jump on the competition and put together a module to display the +1 button on Joomla 1.5 sites.