My web host has installed a new, state of the art SQL database and I am moving my sites over to it one by one.  As some of my databases are super large I can't export them to my computer and then import them to the new server without the import process severely timing out.

However, I am able to migrate the contents of one database to another using the following commands in SSH - shelling into the server (I use putty.exe).

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is recommended that you avoid declaring a character set in a meta tag because that disables the lookahead downloader in Internet Explorer 8 and that can slow down the Joomla page load time for people using that browser.

To remove the <meta http-equip> tag in Joomla 2.5.6 comment out (put 2 forward slashes at the beginning of) lines 72-102 in the file libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php  (see below)

I use the Joomla! component sh404SEF on the Cybersalt site. It's great for giving my pages SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs. Unfortunately, sh404SEF does not include something very helpful to make the urls even more SEF friendly - canonical url specification.  But it will with a little tweaking!

You see, Google does not like duplicate meta descriptions on a site and if you have enough of them you may get penalized because the presence of these duplicates gives the appearance that you are trying to trick search engines into weighting your site higher for traffic.

I just helped a friend today who has two customers still running sites on Joomla 1.0.  He is upgrading his servers to run mysql5.x and the Joomla 1.0 installs were not displaying any content.  This meant it was time to migrate (it was well past that time actually).

I had him send me an sql dump of the databases and then I imported (one at a time) each dump into a database called "client10".  I then did two very quick, and basic installs of Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7.0, each using databases named "client15" and "client17" respectively.

I've just solved another little problem that arose from migrating my the Cybersalt Site from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 and beyond.

In the wonderful sh404SEF add-on component, there is an area where urls generating 404 errors are listed along with tools to redirect them to their new SEF url. When you click on the url generating the 404, you are supplied with sh404SEF's best guess(es) as to what the redirect should be.