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Moving from Feedburner to Google Feeds and Why?

Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine

If you are running your feeds through Feedburner, you should know that Google bought that service in 2007.
Now they are making the next step, moving the feeds from Feedburner.com to feeds.google.com.

And you have to follow… and you should do it before the end of February 2009.
How? well there is nice instruction written by Michel Martin from Pro Blog Design on How to Move from Feedburner to Google

I just moved my Feeds over to my Google account and it is really easy and you cannot !! go back!

The analytics are nice, although I cannot click on the time line anymore to go to the statistics of my readers, you now have to use a drop-down menu to choose that date.
But you can see the mail addresses of the people who subscribed via the Feedburner email option.

So that  is nice, there are however also a few drawbacks…

Even with the Smart-feed options active, you now just get a limited number of options if you want to subscribe to my feed:

Feedburner to Google losing smartfeed

So it seems Google is now cashing in on the Feedburner service and using it to promote their own services and adverts.

Why the move from Feedburner to Google feeds?

Here are some ideas that are on my mind that might be the reasons for Google to force this move upon us Feedburner users:

  • Getting the feed data into the central Google index would mean easier and faster integration into the search results pages (well that would be nice:-))
  • Monetizing the feeds by adding an easy way to integrate adsense adverts (lets see if that works?)
  • Getting more grip on spammers that use a lot of feeds via Feedburner to spam the search index
  • Promoting their own feed reader instead of giving people the choice of their favorite feed reader service
  • Promoting the use of Google personal page to integrate feeds instead of offering the option to using services like Netvibes
  • Taking away the second email subscription option and instead driving people to wards Google mail.

All these reasons will have a large impact on some of the services and companies that where integrated or build on the Feedburner service…

Can you think of any other evil and non-evil reasons, please post them in the comments.
I would love to read your ideas on the reasons for this move.

Do you know if your site is Down?

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

If you run a site, you will at some point in time encounter a site outage.
That is not only with a Joomla site, it can also happen with WordPress or Drupal or any other Content Management System.

I am now talking about the fact that a complete server is down or that the Internet Connection of you Hosting Provider makes it impossible to reach your website.

No, the error I am talking about is that the connection to your database is lost…

In Joomla there is a special page that is presented to you visitors telling them there is something wrong, asking them to contact the administrator.

Joomla Database Error Page

Now that is nice.. or isn’t it?
…ehhh how do I contact the System Administrator?

Change the Standard

Well in a standard installation you get these lines in your Global Configuration.
And most of use leave it as it is… of you take the site offline for maintenance it works just fine, so why change anything?

The second field in you Global Configuration is where you should make a little change.
Just ad a line with your email code in it like Hummerbie ( at ) Gmail (dot) com

Joomla error page with email contact data

Its even possible to change your entire offline page if you want to, but thats an whole other issue.

For now its really important that you know of your site outage before Google takes you out of the Index… and that can happen withing 48 hours if you have a really busy website.

Besides the contact information that you can easily edit into the Global configuration there is also an external service that can monitor your website for you.

Site24x7 gives you the opportunity to check you site one per hour and in case off a failed check you can get an email,sms or RSS alert.

Its free for up to 2 domains, but the paid service comes at a small price starting from $0,50 USD per month per domain..

Here is my configuration:
Configuration of Domain check

This is a check for the keywords in the error page.

And yes, there are reports with graphics and data to see the response times of the site.
Definitely worth a try , but just one warning… you might find out your have to talk to, or even change your hosting provider if you don’t like what you see… 

Optimize your Joomla website from the Back-end

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

If you want your Joomla website to run as smooth as you can, you have to optimize your MySQL tables at some point.

If you work with your PHP Admin software, you now how time consuming this can be, although you can have some scripts made up to do this maintenance task more easily.
But it would be great if you could do this just from withing your Joomla admin panel, instead of login into you hosting admin panel and then into the PHP Admin?

Well, it’s possible… with the SM2 DB Health Check Component from http://www.sm2joomla.com/.

Joomla! Database Health Check Component 

Its a simple component to install, and for most part you don’t even have to set the configuration  parameters like the Name of the Database Table, User name, server of password.

Please make a back-up of your database before you run this component, although I have had no problems any time I ran the component.
It runs fast, and gives you a nice list of what tables where repaired and which ones where optimized!

Yes, it even optimizes your database tables!
A very nice component, that you should use once a month ar so.

And as a bonus they have another nice Plugin for you to keep you site optimized and running, you can read more about that on my http://seo4joomla.wordpress.com site.