BNR Branding Solutions

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 taken over a year (where have we heard that before??) but slowly but surely the Charlotte Joomla Users Group is starting to taken on a life of it's own. No doubt due to the tireless efforts of Jon Neubauer who has really gone above and beyond to get this group rolling. The next meeting will be June 9 at Hickory Tavern off exit 18 near North Lake Mall. The main topic of discussion will be Joomla 1.6 features as well as Joomla's plan for 1.7 and beyond. Jon has a lot of good information to share so be sure to make it for this meeting.

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.

Smartphones and tablets are the fastest growing segment of internet capable devices. This introduces an interesting problem to most sites that have drop down menus. Just how do you mouse over on a touch screen??

The answer is really a lot easier than you might think, and most menu systems support it. Since there is no such thing as a mouse over on a touch screen, you have to give the users the ability to "click" on the parent menu item in order to activate the drop down. Since most sites link the parent menu to content, the user is never able to view the sub-menus.

After what seems like forever - we did our 1.6 Alpha first look back in January 2009 - The official Joomla! 1.6 stable release is available for public download! The feature set has basically remained the same since the first look, but now everything works. Now this doesn't mean it's time to download and upgrade right now, quite the contrary. So let's talk about upgrading and when to do it.

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+.

Back in November 2009 I wrote about hackers and the importance of having updated software. I had quoted a blogger that had taken the time to track down the guy that hacked his website to interview him. Apparently my wife did not read that post. She doesn’t have a website to protect but she could have learned the lesson that hackers do not attack individuals, they attack systems and vulnerabilities. Guess which one she fell victim to? Interestingly enough, she was the 4th person on my contact list to lose control of an email account in the last month.

Like many millions of internet users, my wife uses a cloud based email service, in her case she uses Gmail. A few weeks ago she called me in a panic because her “phone was blowing up with emails!” She went on to tell me that she was getting dozens of email bounces as well as a bunch of replies from people on her contact list asking her why she was sending out a spam link. Of course she wasn’t sending spam, but her account was. This wasn’t a typical email spoof, it was actually her account sending the email!

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