December has been a tough month for Internet security. The passwords and personal data of 1.3 million Gawker Media readers was compromised over the weekend, followed up by hacks of DeviantArt data (email marketing lists) and McDonalds. If you have a login for McDonalds (Monopoly?), Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, or Fleshbot (NSFW) you should change your passwords. Right now.

Last Thursday, the CartaNova team attended Hamilton’s Sustainable Cities Forum and a talk by on economist and recent author Jeff Rubin (TVO Video) at the beautiful Liuna Station. The forum brought together local professionals to discuss issues of waste management, transportation, energy, and sustainability. It was an informative morning where we were lucky to connect with like-minded people who are also working in the Hamilton area.

We've been working on a new AJAX-style (no-page-refresh) contact form for Joomla!, you can view the Alpha at the end of this article.

I'm not sure if we should make this totally free to download, collect a small token payment (it was the result of hard work, after all), or possibly just use the plugin to advertise our forthcoming Weever ("Your Joomla! Site.  Mobile. In Minutes") service. What do you think?

Editor's Note:  This post was *bumped* up again in our blog on March 25th due to high interest!

This is big! I'm very excited to introduce Weever, our new service that creates a mobile version of any Joomla! or Wordpress web site in minutes.

Joomla! Tip: Check out our extensive free library of Joomla! Tutorial Videos at HoldenCreative.com (my former freelance business, I licensed these vids a few years ago). We'll be introducing new videos for Joomla! 1.6 to CartaNova soon, but for now you can find Beginner, Advanced and Designer tutorials for Joomla! 1.5 and the older  Joomla! 1.0 platform.  Feel free to use these tutorials as you wish!

Note: Joomla.org also has some great under-used tutorials in the Documentation area.

Not a trick, but an important tip for Joomla! Web Developers: Don't forget to utilize the Joomla! Site Showcase.  The showcase is a free, volunteer-managed place to display the power and extensibility of Joomla!.  Being a highly moderated area for 'good' web sites, the showcase also appears to have a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value with Google.  This makes sense, as Google increasingly emphasizes 'brands' and 'trust' in search engine metrics.

We recently submitted our site for Alcast Technologies to the showcase and were surprised by a corresponding surge in visitor traffic and customer inquriries as a result.  So Joomla! Web Designers, what are you waiting for?  Submit your site!

We're proud to announce our new Code Labs, a place to share our tips & tricks with the Joomla!, Magento, JQuery and general open-source programming communities. We'll be launching two lab projects in 2011 - an AJAX Joomla! Contact Form and a *big* Mobile Project!

Sometimes in life it rains. Other times, though, it rains awesomeness and video game surprises.

We started off this week with a Green Space Meeting in Cootes Paradise, a wetland near our home city of Hamilton, Ontario. We spied the antlered whitetail deer (above photo) grazing in the marsh, along with a wild swan and about 100 cedar waxwings. More photos can be found on our new Flickr Stream and Green Space Meetings Flickr Group Photo Pool.

Magento 1.4+ includes an easy-to-use feature for connecting to the Google Merchant Center (formerly 'Google Base') and uploading product data for placement in the BETA Google Product Search.  Unfortunately, that feature is based on a single Google login, which may be a problem if you have multiple domains and stores in your Merchant Center Account.  Here's the solution: