I've not had time for quite a while to do anything but add articles to this site. I still don't have time but I'm getting tired of looking at half hacked up modules and components. There have been several Joomla components and modules that I've not been satisfied with but I've not had time to find replacements. As of today the commercial MyBlog component is gone. This is something I paid for but ultimately didn't like the way it handled things nor did I like the fact that I couldn't add features to it. That's right, I wanted to work for free to make it a better product but since it's commercial I can't. My second choice was IdoBlog which is under the Creative Commons license. It says I can modify the code but all changes have to go back to the project and I can't give them to anyone else. This too isn't good enough. I'm now just running under the standard Joomla Sections and Categories with JomComment for comments and social bookmarking. I'll be looking into tagging and expanding RSS feeds in the future.

Also the sitemap is gone but will be back. The component I used for that was really nice but it too took over how things looked. If you clicked on an article instead of getting the standard Joomla article you got something formatted by the sitemap app. I didn't like MyBlog doing this and I don't like my sitemap doing this. Consistancy is the key here. If Joomla has a failing it's that you can get lost in a Joomla site just because the same article can look 3 different ways depending on how you got to it. I don't like this.

I've been going through the menus as well to make things simpler and more user friendly. The side bar will only be used for apps that deal with the content in the main pane. Before I had duplicate menus there for usability purposes. If for some reason someone couldn't use the top menus they could click on the section name and then have a second menu on the left. I don't like this. I'll be considering options.

I have some new exciting things that I may be springing on grantmcwilliams.com that I've been wanting for a while - namely reviews. I paid a chunk of money for  commercial review module and even though it worked great I couldn't use it with Joomla 1.5. The author updated it and wanted to charge me again so I deleted it. So far I've paid about $200 for commercial components and outside of JomComment they've all been a waste of money.