Kevin's Papers

Anyone that is technically inclined or a nerd by nature is already up to speed with the abortion that is happily named Microsoft Windows 10. Probably the biggest problem those of us that build our own systems have with it, aside from the rest of the problems Windows gives us (forced restarts, Windows P2P, The scrolling Apps list in the start menu, default browser, Cortana sending you to Bing, Windows Store, replaced PDF reader with the Edge browser, and many many more issues) is this issue where somehow Microsoft went from being the worst driver manager on the planet to now forcing its drivers on us without the option to disable it.

Google has released a new way for us to market on our YouTube videos. It is called Cards and from what I can tell it is a huge improvement from the old style grey box that they used to have. Cards allows you to add a new layer of interactivity to your videos and the good news is unlike the old way of doing it cards are rendered for both desktop and mobile views.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks you already know about the new changes Google will be implementing on April 21. In case you have not heard Google will be rolling out a mobile optimization algorithm According to Google's Zineb Ait Bahajji of the Webmaster Trends Team, she was quoted as saying that the algorithm will be used to expand their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and this change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in their search results. This is set to be the largest update we've seen from Google to date in terms of how many sites will be affected. Bigger than Panda and Penguin! This algorithm is an expansion of their mobile ranking demotion algorithm em that they launched back in 2013.

We are constantly trying to keep our Joomla sites out of the hands of the low life scum that would do us harm for no other reason than their personal kicks. There is one way to help in that endeavor that is easy to setup with a minimal side-effect.

When I first started working with Joomla nearly 6 years ago the update path was different than it is today. Up until 2.5 it seemed to work just fine and while it always felt like the odd ball to me it worked. So the general rule was until a version reached .5 it was considered a short term stable release (STS), which meant you could still use the .x version prior to .5 but you did so at your own risk. If you absolutely needed what was coming in the new release you installed it and dealt with the constant struggle of updating it and fixing everything that broke along the way. Otherwise we was told to wait until the long term stable release (LTS) was out.