Today I've noticed that our frontpage was taking more than 10 seconds to load. Which is by any means unacceptable. I fired up Firebug and had a look at the network tab. Everything seemed normal, except for the response from the server. The server was taking 10s to generate the first response. After that in just few ms all Javascript and CSS resources were loaded. Due to the fact that we haven't changed anything on the site lately & we also didn't have any traffic spikes what I immediately did was submit a ticket with our hosting provider.

In my ticket I explained what the problem was: "The frontpage is loading really slow, it takes more than 10s for it to load. Sub-pages seems to behave way better at around 2s.... Any ideas what could be wrong?"

A year ago I was helping a friend to make his homepage with Joomla. We needed a facebook fan page module. Actually we didn't needed it, but I was too lazy to add the facebook fan page code myself as I had to edit the template (to do it the HTML5 way...). So instead of doing it myself - I went on a hunt for a good Facebook page module. After a short look at the JED I found my module - it had the best reviews... I tested it - it worked! Hurray!

Unfortunately the other day the facebook fan box was not displayed by the module anymore. So today I decided to have a look at the actual HTML code that was generated & I was shocked to discover a hidden link. The link was pointing to a shop for flowers, so at least it is not a malware site... I immediately thought that the site was hacked and I went to look at the PHP code of the module. It turns out the website was not hacked & the link is generated by the module code. So I downloaded the last version of the module and had a look at the code again - well, this time there was again a hidden link, but it was pointing to another site. (you know what that means right?)