Much happening on the Accelerated Mobile Pages front these days. As AMP usage is expanding, and a little time has passed, I think we are now pass the initial problems of doing the AMP conversion, and getting more into the "industrial" phase of adding AMP to websites. Data confirming increased traffic all point to key point in success: AMP is all about the user experience. Display of AMP pages in Bing or Google results is very fast, but if users click on any link an those pages only to land on the slow-again standard mobile site, much of the benefit is lost.
In other words, we should strive to provide as much AMP experience as possible, and this is why from day one wbAMP let you display navigation menus, click through to AMP versions of other pages and navigate through pages of categories listing.
We have had to take the difficult decision of retiring Josetta, our translation manager for Joomla! native multilingual system. Despite the initial enthousiasm of the first years, when we created the concept and implemented it into Josetta, it failed to find a real audience and it has been a while since maintaining and supporting it has become a liability for us, rather than an asset. While I dragged my feet for quite some times, as Josetta really is something I love and that serves a real purpose, it just does not make sense to continue, considering the resources we have.
We have therefore decided to retire Josetta from January 20, 2017. Active subscribers will keep receiving support as per their subcription - or be refunded of their full subscription, if they so choose (please open a support ticket). However, no further update or bug fix will happen from this date on. Should a security issue occurs, we will fix it, though Josetta being a mature product we do not expect such thing.
It is important to note that this will have no effect on sites using Josetta. First, being licensed under the GPL, you can keep using Josetta for as long as you wish. Second, as it is a data-entry tool, not used in the actual display of a site pages, the Joomla! native multilingual system will carry on displaying your pages as before. Likewise, even if you decide to remove Josetta from your site entirely, now or in the future, no translation will be lost, as they are all safely stored in Joomla! itself (that was the beauty of the concept!).
Further to yesterday's post about my JandBeyond Accelerated Mobile Pages talk, here is more details about my second talk: Using Google Analytics and Search console to improve your site SEO. Both Analytics and Search console are great (and free of charge) tools to measure things and get great insight into your web site and visitors behavior, but very often it's hard to get past simply looking at the number of visitors or pages viewed per day. And then, what to do with that? which page should I change, and how?
In this talk, I try to outline a simple method we use here to help identify parts of the site that may need work, or actions that should be taken (such as working social networks, or adding more content), in order to be more efficient in day to day operation.
As mentioned in my last message yesterday (yes, we won an award!), I wanted to get back with more details about my talks at JandBeyond 2016, in Barcelona. I had the chance to speak twice, first about wbAMP and then about how to use Google Seach console and Analytics to improve your site results.
The wbAMP talk is an introduction to whatAccelerated Mobile Pages is, why you would want to enable them, and how you can do that on your Joomla site. You will find below my slides for this talk:
Once again we participated in this year JandBeyond edition, and what an edition it was! This time, the Joomla! crowd of more than 200 gathered in sunny Barcelona.
As usual, the event spans 3 days, with a fairly busy schedule of talks and keynotes, but it also leaves plenty of times for discussions and informal meetings - most of times with plenty of food an drinks availables! There are 4 synchronized tracks, meaning you can switch from one to another at any time. I'll get back to the programme in a minute, but this time, something happened that made this year very, very special:
wbAMP was selected as Joomla! innovation of the year!
A regular fixture at JandBeyond is the J.O.S.C.A.R.S. event. Attendees pick the finest extensions, templates, sites or services of the year. This year recipients include such famous Joomla names as Akeeba Backup, AcyMailing, Gantry and individuals such as Brian Teeman, Radek Suski or Jean-Marie Simonet. But as they put it on the internet, you won't believe what happened next...
