Long belated update...

It has been a very long time since I posted, but it's time for an update.

We have been very happy with Joomla and the sh404SEF plugin for a long time. Well, a couple of years.

Joomla? Easy choice. Not hard to implement, update and modify to suit your needs. A lot of what most people want is available off the shelf, open source and rather very often - free. A top CMS and great add-ons for no money down. Excellent.

Some fo us who are commercial users have dreams of having a number one rank in Google in all the places we want to be in. It's a dream. We look for solutions to help us enhance our chance to make those dreams a reality in part.

For us, sh404SEF was a tool that seemed to have a golden chance to give us a little part of what we wanted. Sadly, it was a complete and abject failure in that regard - but we didn't find out until later.

Our site had the on-board Joomla SEO/SEF capabilities enabled and sh404SEF was added. After a eighteen months, we only had around 180 out of 800 URLs indexed.

Soon after the Ubuntu 10.04 update, we realised that sh404SEF was broken owing to deprecated MySQL commands. The update was not free, so, we decided to abandon it temporarily. We took the "suck it and see" approach.

The site was updated and we lost a lot of index positions. We only had 29 indexed pages! Not what we really wanted to see. Lost indexed pages means less traffic and less market awareness and less new clients. Fucksocks.

Time to fight back. We 301'ed all the 404s to the new URLs. Ran a new site index tool, uploaded to all the right places.

Ka-fucking-ching. Ka-ching. Boom-chaka-fucka-lacka-boom. w000t.

Three weeks later, we had >350 indexed pages out of 800 odd. Our traffic has increased by more than thirty percent. The number of indexed pages and the number of uniques is still growing. The length of stay from new unique IP addresses is increasing - even though we're posting less new content.

Why? Well - the only change we made was removing sh404SEF. That's it.

Us? sh404SEF and our deployment method? Fail.

You? Try it. YMMV.

Us now? w00t. More traffic. More uniques. More customers. More biz. Happier times - for doing LESS.


Cheers - The TechnoHippie.

Ubuntu? YOU SUCK!

For previous upgrades of Ubuntu LTS releases, I decided to go ahead quickly. After all, an LTS release means that it's more likely stable or more stable than the the x.10 releases.

Well - that's what I thought.

Some sour experiences of being an early adopter caused me to take my time in choosing to upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 for my workstation. I waited about a month. There were still rather too many fuck-ups, I mean "upgrade issues", for my tastes. Most of it was OK, but promises like "supports iPhone out of the box" turned out to be 100% A-Grade, pure-n-tee bullshit. OS released in April and it still does not support iPhone sync out of the or even with modifications and it is nearly time for the 10.10 release.

Ubuntu? Are you sure it's not South African dialect for "bullshit"? After all, "Microsoft" is Seattle-ese for "we lie, and how!", in general opinion, isn't it? Let's not even go anywhere near what we can interpret from those 'fine' folks from Cupertino. The only thing that differs is how much these fuckers pay each other and one another.

Why do I say Ubuntu sucks? Because the 10.04 LTS release tramples all over the ISPConfig install from the previous LTS release.

It does not merely trample over it. It tramples on it. It digs it in deeper. It adds new sod. And then it pisses on its grave. In my experience.

The only escape, the only repair is a complete reinstallation of ISPConfig.

If you don't know of the excellent references at 'Perfect Server', then I suggest you attempt to expand your Google-fu.

Grace, and good luck to you!

Cheers - TheTechnoHippie.