When it comes to speeding up the loading time of my Joomla sites, I'm a big fan of the extension JotCache.  (To see how JotCache does this, check out this JotCache video tutorial I made for my clients whose sites use it.)

Today I installed the latest version of JotCache to my site and noticed that my Google Ads were no longer appearing on the site.  When I turned JotCache off, the ads worked fine so I concluded that somehow the Adsense codes on my site were getting a bit mangle beyond recognition by something in the update.

Read more: Google Ads Disappear After JotCache Update

For some time now Google Analytics has not been tracking the traffic to Grandma Cybersalt's piano teaching web page. I was positive I had everything set up properly, even triple-checking the exact same steps that worked on my other sites.  So today I determined to take the time to site down and find out whatever strange thing was going on.

Read more: Google Analytics Not Tracking Site

My church uses Jomsocial component (added on to Joomla) as the database for our church directory information.  The set-up is pretty slick as each person's information is stored in their user profile and they can edit their own directory  information they need to (well, they could - but usually it is our secretary that does so via her administrator access.)

Unfortunately, just as we got everything set up the way we wanted and tried to export everyone's information, we discovered that a number of records were not being included in the exported data (we use the Import/Export User Data For JS plugin from www.joomlaxi.com for exporting in CSV which we then open in Excel and merge to a Word template.)  After a whole lot of looking around in the Joomla admin area and also in the site's database, I noticed that the records not being exported belonged to users who had been assigned to custom groups in Joomla 2.5's ACL system.

Read more: Missing Records from Jomsocial User Export

It is recommended that you specify a character set early so that your Joomla page loads faster so why not do it before the page is even served up!  You can do this by setting a default character type in a .htaccess file?

I tried a number of different lines of code before I found one (here) that worked on my host's server.  It is:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

This is especially important to add to your .htaccess file if you have removed the <meta http equiv> tag as described here.