I was just cruising through a bunch of stats for some sites we run and got frustrated with the simplest thing... 

...Joomla's inherent URL paths are really annoying when you want to move quickly through your stats reports and see how specific site content is reacting with your visitors - even the stock 1.0.x Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs aren't too intelligible to people despite making Google slightly happier.  Things will change in this respect when 1.5 goes stable - its supposedly going to ship with a stock solution for human-readable URLs!! (yay)

So, until 1.5 goes stable and we all tackle site upgrades, I highly suggest installing a 3rd party extension to handle human-readable URLs... they'll make your site return in Google better plus make your stats data mining exercises less laborious.

Lots of people use Artio JoomSEF and a bunch of plugins for it are available to make it work with other extensions but I've got years of experience with OpenSEF and highly recommend it for simple sites that mainly deal with stock Joomla setups for publishing/content management.  In fact, the long-time stagnant status of the OpenSEF project's been kicked in the britches and its been renamed as NuSEF ...

One major criticism I have of Joomla 1.0x is that you have to use a 3rd party component to enable and control semantic URLs for your website.

The native Search Engine Friendly URLs that Joomla can produce are pretty good mind you - they're short, follow your section/category structure and are read well by Google.  That's great but its often still necessary to tell someone a URL that they can remember etc - personally, I've been using OpenSEF for quite some time on a number of sites.

I  must say, OpenSEF's pretty good - and there are arguably better packages available these days but I'm still annoyed at how we have to turn SEF on in Joomla *and* install some extra program to get nice clean human-readable URLs, which might break with funky characters in the article titles etc (the reason why JoomlaFeed has gone back to using plain old SEF URLs) - something which happens often when you republish content from external sources.

Anyway - I'm really excited for a big change in this area: Joomla 1.5 is getting far more accessible and Jinx has recently spent 6 weeks overhauling the whole URL writing architecture of the CMS - resulting in lovely structures like this:

http://localhost/joomla15/the-news/joomla-overview/faq.html

Ahhhhhhh  - yes folks, its the death of Item IDs!

Although it was just launched a few days ago, the traffic to Joomla Feed has been pretty good - and the feedback even better!  It seems that the Joomla community, like anyone I'd expect, enjoys reading aggregated news.

Personally, I've been using the site a couple of times a day to see what new extensions have ben released as well as catch up on a couple of news and blog sites - all in one place.  Lovely stuff.

I know its monday but I was surprised to see the site's Google Analytics stats just now - only about 30 people have been to it today.. then I did some poking around.. somehow a Google search for 'Joomla Feed'doesn't return the site yet 'joomlafeed' brings it in as the top item!

I always assumed that Google would look for combined words in URLs automatically !?

Ah well, I suppose its time to actually put my SEO cap on and get into the META tags (surely the most tedious aspect of web development eh - making sure people can find your site?  Well, that asides from making CSS work somehow in IE6!)

q./