I've been playing with the latest version of Joomla in order to evaluate it with a view to recommending it's use on customers sites, to investigate some of the more useful and interesting Joomla modules that are out there now, and to see how easily new Joomla templates, components and modules can be developed. Also, it's about time I spent a bit of time on the site.

So, I converted the old site templates to the new template format, and added some advertising to the site to see how the advertising works, if it works and to scrape a few pennies back to cover the costs of hosting this server.

The referrals button at the top right links to some useful applications or services hosted or distributed by Google. If anyone is still using Internet Explorer, I highly recommend installing Firefox instead, for a whole plethora of reasons. The GooglePack is pretty cool too.

The advertising on the right is just the usual 'Content'-based Google advertising. Dull, but supposedly targetted based on the content of the page it is being hosted in.

I've never been a proponent of advertising, especially where it is excessive or obtrusive (such as on sponsored TV gameshows!). However, this is an experiment, so please bear with me.

I've installed a shopping cart module too, with a view to selling some paintings by an artist friend, and general nick-nacks that we find at the market that might interest people. However, some of the links are still broken, and I'm still not quite happy with it's layout etc, so I've disabled it until I get more time to play with it. Look out for a 'shop' button coming soon!