Lightquick Web Design - High Quality, Low Cost

Apologies if the site has been slow, I have been tinkering. I have been building two mambots, one for adding facebook iframe/xfbml like this links to all pages and another to embed the Facebook JSDK code on all pages. These have required some changes to various tools and settings that comprise/control the site. Firstly the configuration of Artio JoomSEF to prevent creation of duplicate SEF URLs with extra -2, -3 at the end. The new Facebook API must have tags automatically defined per page and one of these is the og: url tag. All the site's similarly-associated SEF URLs needed to resolve to the same place if the Facebook Open Graph URL tag is to work properly without reporting an error.

Removal of the unique URLs means that the itemid tag on the URL is now hidden and as a result certain components and functions don't work and they needed rejigging to exclude them from being processed by Artio JoomSEF, one of the affected components being facileforms. The other issue is that templates for different pages no longer work without the itemid being available to identify which page so the link on the front page to the sample shop has had to go. That is no big deal as the sample shop needs a rejig in any case as does the Frontpage. I could have told Artio to re-add the itemids but that would have meant that every URL in the site would now be fundamentally different and no existing external link to an internal resource would ever work again. Not good for SEO. That means no itemids so only one template per site and the loss of one facileform SEF URL, that is not so bad.

The reconfiguration of Artio JoomSEF links has caused another problem, namely that when you make a change to the configuration, Artio JoomSEf asks you, "do you want to clear the cache?" That sounds innocuous enough but when you do say 'yes' you will find that all the links in the SEF table have disappeared, so when someone clicks on a Google link to the site it will generate a 404 error. That is very bad for SEO.

However that is no real long term problem as all I have to do is click on every article in the site and Artio JoomSEF will re-generate the SEF link, trouble is that I have a hundred or more articles on the site and clicking each will take forever and in the process I am bound to forget some. So, to the rescue is Linky. Linky is a Firefox add-on that will open every link on your page. Once initiated Linky loads all the pages more or less simultaneously so be aware that the load on the site while it achieves this is quite great, hence the slowdown. Be warned, opening a hundred tabs in FF is also quite a memory drain on your PC so make sure you have no other apps running on your PC and plenty of memory to spare or swapping will occur. Once Linky has visited every article linked to on the site all the SEF URLs in the Artio JoomSEF table will be recreated. It helps to have a module on the page like "latest news module" showing all articles from the site. Linky will find each and every one and open it. The end result will be that your SEF table will be repopulated with all your links. Linky can be found here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linky/

This tinkering has also discovered a problem with the default Joomla 1.0 cacheing in that the com_frontpage component is incorrectly handled. When the cached version of the page is shown it fails to call the $mainframe functions in /includes/joomla.php meaning that none of the meta tags or meta properties are created even though a cached version of that page should have these by definition. The cache does not seem to be working at all for com_frontpage, just screwing it up. This was discovered when a "view source" showed no meta tags on the FP from time to time, none from my mambot and none from any other extension.

Therefore, an installation of JRE cache, an alternative to the Joomla 1.0 cacheing mechanism was called for. When done the site runs considerably faster than before, even with my new mambots running. I am always amazed at how fast a Joomla 1.0 site can run in comparison to a J1.5 site. The front end and the back end are always so much faster. I have always struggeled with bloatware and directly because Joomla 1.5 - 1.7 can do so much more they have a lot more code to execute, Joomla 1.0.15 still does almost all that I need and fast too, that is why I am still using it here. Joomla 1.5 is great software but it isn't as quick. I run J1.0 sites and J1.5 sites on the same servers and the 1.0 sites are fast when compared.

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