Quite a while ago, the EU Cookie Law was passed. I'm not talking about a law concerning how much milk you should drink with your cookies, or the size and shape of cookies. No, this law was passed to protect the interest of web users in the EU. That was the intention, anyway. The EU Cookie Law, or the EU e-Privacy Directive, was set to come into action on 26th May 2012. This directive forces web site owners to get explicit concent to store cookies containing information about visitors to their web site. In short, the legislators want every single user of a web site to click "Accept" on the site to say they actively and conciously accept that third-party cookies will be stored.

About a week ago, I received an email from an anonymous hacker. He had sent the same email to around 350 people in the Joomla community. They were all registered in the same affiliate system for a well-known software developer, and attached to the email was an Excel sheet with all of their contact info and user names. The hacker said he had extracted the info from an insecure system and offered "security services" to protect from similar hacks.

Apparently, people had been talking about this for a couple of days already on Twitter. Still, I wanted to check a little more what this guy was after.

The speed at which your site loads is very important. Firstly, a fast loading site will have your readers stick around longer. If they are served content fast, it is more tempting to click on another link to read more. Nobody wants to wait for a slow site.

Secondly, speed has become a major issue when it comes to SEO. Search engines, and particularly Google, now take the loading speed of a page into consideration when ranking the page for result pages. In particular, slow loading sites will be pushed down in the search results. The reason is that Google wants to serve its users with the most relevant content available, and in the shortest time possible. Giving people links to slow sites is not a good idea, so fast-loading sites will now appear higher in the search engine result pages.

There are several things you can do to optimize your site for speed. One way is to limit the use of installed extensions. In this post, you’ll learn some more ways to improve the loading speed of your blog.

As you know, one of the strengths of Joomla lies in its extensibility. There are an incredible number of extensions and templates out there for you to chose from. You can find something for almost any purpose, and the number of extensions and solutions for Joomla increases every day.

From all of these, there are things you can add to the blog that will add value for your readers. Commenting, social media integration and RSS feeds are some of the things you can make use of. In the following chapter, I will discuss how you can find useful, value-adding features for your blog.

At the moment, I'm working on a directory site based on Joomla and Sobi Pro. On this site, I would like to display news stories related to the topic the directory is about.

On one of the site's pages, I've used a new Javascript from the guys at Joomlaworks to pull in news stories from websites that talk about the same subject matter. However, sometimes the general news media also writes about it. That's not so easy to pick up. Of course, I could set up an automatic Google Reader feed and have it show all the results from that feed. However, that's too generic and will sometimes display undesired, irrelevant or, at worst, inappropriate content on my site.

The recent upgrade of Joomla to version 2.5 has made me think about the extensions and template providers I use. Whenever I choose a new type of extension for my clients, I take a look at the company's trackrecord. I ask myself some questions to determine if this is a developer I would like to bet my client's money on.

How long have they been around? What does users write online about their products? What do my friends in the Joomla community think about the product? How do they respond to support requests? What is their release cycle? How quickly are they supporting new, major versions of Joomla?