Over the years, Google has made changes to their search results both to better serve the consumer and to also bring more value to their advertisers. They've done a pretty good job of balancing what the consumer is looking for and what the advertisers are paying for.

One of the common questions we see regularly in various Joomla communities is how to speed up a slow Joomla site. It's a reasonable request on the surface, with Google putting more emphasis on user experience, the speed of your site is more important than ever.

All too often I see business pages on Facebook that still have a really long URLs - that's the web address - that would be impossible to remember, much less tell someone about. In typical Facebook fashion, there is a simple solution to the problem, but it's buried so most users don't even know it's possible to have a shorter page address.

One of the topics that always seems to come up when discussing Joomla is the extensions you can't live without. This list changes as Joomla, extension developers, and the web changes so I figured I'd put down our current list of must haves based on Joomla 2.5. I'll stick to the extensions that we use in every install (or at least nearly every one). Here are the top 6+1 in no particular order.

In a not very shocking blog post, Google announced Search, plus Your World last Tuesday. Unless you've been ignoring anything with an internet connection, you probably already knew that Google has been pushing hard in the social media arena, and this is just the culmination of months of small changes to how Google works.