Eric, that's AWESOME!

I wanted to let everyone in our user group get an early preview of my new extension, JURL Shortener. The software allows you to easily create short URLs on your Joomla site in the same way as services such as "bit.ly" and "fb.me". This can be very useful in social media, blog comments, etc because you can link to external websites but still give some attention to your own website. You can also combine tracking tags with short URLs for better analytics. Instead of just knowing that a link you posted on Twitter brought people to your site, you can use a tracking tag to figure out which specific post was most successful. You can see all the features at the product page on my website.

You can read more, see demos, and read documentation over at: http://webdesignhero.com/jurl

For all my friends at Joomla Chicago, you can use discount code JCHICAGO25 for a 25% discount, limited time only. The software is also GPL 2.0 licensed and MVC, so you can easily setup layout overrides.

I will be at this week's meeting (August 11, 2010) if you want to ask any questions about JURL Shortener in person, or you can get in contact with me at http://webdesignhero.com/ticket

Hey, folks! What's up with this week's meeting? Does anyone have any particulars? We're still on, right?

An interesting follow-up to yesterdays meeting:

http://www.websitemagazine.com/scripts/sub/digital.aspx?issue=19

Check out the articles on page 20 and on page 26.

Darrin - I love your sites! (Hope you're coming to Milwaukee - among the people who will be there from Milwaukee, one is doing a rugby league on Joomla and the other doing minor league baseball franchises!)

John: Can we have more than one site showcased each month?

The next one we would like to tee up is:

www.crewchicago.org

I would like to have the project sponsor come in and be recognized with that one, too.

Excellent! Let's get you on the schedule, yes. We can do some pre-publicity on it too, so folks will have clicked on your site(s)...I'm going to try "create a Discussion" on this too, just to see what the difference is between "Wall" and "Discussion."

Great meeting today. I though I would share some of my Joomla sites:

http://www.koelnmessenafta.com
http://www.keepitmovingchicago.com
http://www.gametimesportssystems.com
http://www.chitownlacrosse.com

If you would like me to present any of them in at future meeting I would be glad to do so.