Vertical Scope, the Canadian-owned giant that touts a whopping 30 million unique monthly visitors amid its 300-plus web properties, according to its Google Analytics report March 2011, announced yesterday via Twitter that rumors of its acquisition of what is purportedly the largest off-road website upon the web, Pirate4X4.com, were in fact true, adding to its massive portfolio of automotive, powersports, power equipment, sports, action sports and technology websites.

DVS Shoes is hip. Any association with the action sports shoe manufacturer garners a certain amount of recognition. A mere mention of the name upon any website will earn amiable attention in the form of web traffic.

It seems as if every time an industry convention or some business mixer emerges, my calendar shuns the event and any hope of mixing it up with forum friends and community colleagues. And when it comes to this year's inaugural Open Camp, which takes place this August 27-29 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Addison, Texas, there is no exception, as it conflicts with one of my favorite stateside desert off-road races, the 2010 Best In The Desert (BITD) Vegas To Reno on August 19-21.

I dabble in Drupal. I work with Wordpress. But I'm always jamming with Joomla. The CMS framework is ultra extensible and includes numerous native Joomla extensions and a multitude of others that form a bridge to other popular software applications. Moodle, phpBB, Wordpress, SMF, OpenX are just a few hot scripts you may have your way with when working with Joomla. Well, here are some of the hottest Joomla extensions I happened upon during this morning's work with my favorite content management system.

Shred or die. Skate or die. I remember the days roaming the San Gabriel Valley in the back of Chris Sanchez' pickup truck and hunting down the sweetest skate spots of the SoCal skate scene. It was grungy. It was on the fly. And it was no big time action sports marketing venue in the making. The average day of the SGV skater was not web casted onto YouTube. And it wasn't promoted by the X-Games might. It was raw and in the flesh. Wounds ran deep. Broken bones snapped to attention like the hard core scene that it was.

This guys are working hard to become the kings of Joomla admin extensions. They make Joomla website usability user friendly and make for fast action publishing. Their business model works for cheapskates and big buck pros alike. Perhaps my favorite free Joomla extension of the lot is the Cache Cleaner. But when you've got nothing better to do in life, you'll want to the not-yet famous What? Nothing! Joomla Plugin - engineered for those who want your website to do absolutely NOTHING!

I had mentioned I squeezed the trigger on a Gallery2 open source photo gallery install. Installing Gallery2 was quite simple. Though, integrating Gallery2 into the Joomla CMS was a bit more difficult but not like pulling teeth on a angry bear. I used the JFusion bridge component.

Numbed with the effects of a novocain-like spell. It must've been the easy-to-use user interface or perhaps the intuitive administrator interface. Maybe it was the search engine optimized capabilities or maybe even its overall extensibility.

It's late. It's me. And I'm tired. I have another site that generally serves to host all my off-road racing photos. It used to turn a profit on them and retail e-commerce sales. That is why I was long deserting the idea of hosting a photo gallery here. Why do so when the photos were contributing to my bottom line and double up on the work for nothing.