An incredible thing happened. My apple mac laptop crashed, and on the screen appeared this mysterious glyph I’ve only seen once or twice before in my life. My heart skipped a beat and the unfamiliar panic of losing unsaved work hit me in the pit of my stomach. I haven’t felt this way since Windows 98’s blue screen of death .. the last time I’d used a Microsoft product by choice.

The room was quiet. The soft glow of the monitor fell on my cheeks as I stared at my now paralysed laptop. I reached for the power switch.. wait.. where is the power switch? I don’t think I’ve turned this thing on or off since I bought it. Oh there it is, in the top right. Right next to F12. Both relegated to the farthest reaches of the keyboard through obsolescence.

And there it is.. the old startup apple chord, a C-major. I haven’t heard you for a while old friend. And I probably won’t hear you again for some time.

Once upon a time nobody cared about Content Management Systems or “CMS” but back in the late 90s and early 00’s there was a modular framework called Mambo that did something similar. Back then, before “blogging” was adopted into the general lexicon Mambo was a “portal” based on the then-popular slashdot.org website. Essentially it was a news feed with comments and some plugins.

In 2005 the codebase for mambo forked into Joomla which professed to be truly open source and quickly became the most popular CMS in the world. I used it back then, and it was impressive. It handled everything you’d expect from a modern CMS and had a vibrant community of developers that extended what you could do with it.

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If you’ve ever used SEO “tricks” to get your website to rank better like hidden text or buying backlinks you can start to panic now. Chances are your site just lost some ranking position. As we’ve always said SEO is not about tricking google, and if that’s what you’ve been doing then you deserve to lose your spot.

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