According to Wikipedia, a content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server.

Content types include web objects, download-able objects (media files, software, documents), applications, real time media streams, and other components of internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries).

There are currently three main CDN extensions available for Joomla, and I've just installed one on this site. I'm happy with the result - I hope you notice the difference in speed! In this post, I'll look at what CDN is, take a look at two different CDN extensions for Joomla and how to set up CDN using jomCDN from corephp.

Sometimes, we all need to get a reminder on what to do to improve our Joomla sites. I know I do. The site has been sitting there for a long time and you know it needs to be updated and improved. You just don't know where to start. Maybe what you need is a kick you know where to get started.

In this post I've listed 10 things you could do to improve your own or a client's Joomla site.

Last week, I published a post about my hard disk crash and backup problems. This is definitely not something I would wish on others.

Even though the hard disk was not recoverable (without a spending a LOT of cash), I was rather lucky. With emphazis on lucky! There was not too much information lost and I've been able to recover from the crash with minor real damage. It could have been a lot worse!

This week, I would like to focus on backup - what you can do to secure yourself from losing your Joomla web site.

Advanced SEO by CloudAccess is a Joomla extension that seamlessly integrates more flexible titles into your content items.

Featuring smart plugin architecture, the SEO extension provides high quality solution without hacking the core files of Joomla.

I get a lot of questions about the menu I use on this blog. Many readers like it and wonder if I've made it myself or if it's a component.

The menu is part of the YooTheme template I'm using.

More specifically it's part of the Warp Template Framework by the same provider. 

Recently, I wanted to place a quite complex image map on several pages in a Joomla site.

Normally, you would enter the complete code of the image and image map into every article where the map should occur. My challenge, though, was that the image map would need to be updated regularly. Thus, I'd have to create the image map in Dreamweaver, and manually change every instance of the map. Changing the code in every article (15-20 articles) is a tedious process, so I needed a simpler approach.

There are thousands of Joomla templates and extensions available on the market.

In this post you'll find a large listing of Joomla template and extension providers, and directories of the same. You'll find both commercial and free templates and extensions.

If you find yourself constantly clicking through the menu systems of Joomla to get to a particular place, I have a time-saving tip for you.

It's really quite easy to create a custom list of shortcuts you often use and place it in the control panel of your Joomla admin.

Making sure the most relevant ads show up on your blog or website might seem hard to do. Google decides, right?

As you will see from this post, there are several things you may do to help Google present more relevant ads to your users.

First of all, you can set a code in your template to show Google what part of your site contains the actual content. This is what Google calls section targeting.

This post is written using the blog editor in the Flock browser. I've set up the MetaWeblogAPI and the Real Simple Discovery (RSD) plugins for Joomla and configured Flock to work with this setup.

There's been a lot of buzz in the Joomla! community about the new Joomla plug-in SuperBlogger from JoomlaWorks.

However, many users have had problems with getting the plugin to work with the SEF component sh404SEF. Now, the problem is located and solutions offered.

There's a huge selection of addons for Firefox available.

I've found my favorites for Joomla work and recommend them to everyone.

They will save you a great deal of time, especially when trying to figure out a template is built, bug tracking and fixing and in your day-to-day work as a web developer.