Nothing really to say about anything at the moment.

That might be a shock for some people!!

But right now I am busy reading and attempting to digest the Apple Human Interface Guides.

They have a lot of words to describe very few things. So it's taking me a while to work out what are the relevant points. I'm pretty sure they could be condensed to a few pages.

So if you have something to say it's your turn now.

Many years ago, when I was young and innocent, I lived in a self-sufficient "closed" community but now that I am older, and more mature (?), it is more accurate to say that today I chose to "participate" or "belong" to several different communities.

In the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) the word "community" is used as a badge, often without any true understanding  of what the word really means.

Joomla, like many F/LOSS projects, claims to be a community project but have you thought what that really means?

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I received the following email last week

"Should we stall new clients until 1.6 is released, or build their sites on 1.5 knowing there will be some future re-work to migrate them to 1.6?  Maybe we should build now on 1.5 and leave them on 1.5?"

As I was writing a reply I realised that it might be better to appear here on the blog for others to read (and perhaps even comment).

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Whilst looking through the list of high traffic joomla sites at joomla.me I was disappointed, but not surprised to see that many of them were warez sites offering links to rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload etc.

Not all of these are offering joomla warez but almost every day a new warez site pops up on my google alert offering me the latest and greatest Joomla extensions and templates.

Is it worth the effort trying to close these sites down? At best all that you will really be able to achieve is to get the hosting account closed down and they will spring back up again in a few days.

If your work is being offered on these warez sites then take it as a compliment and a free advert that someone is ripping of your work and move along. I know I did.

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How many joomla sites are there in the world? Or perhaps of more interest what percentage of successful web sites are created with joomla? And what are the Top 10 joomla sites.

The number of downloads of joomla is interesting but it doesn't really give a true figure of installations, especialy as you could use one download 100 times or just install it directly from your host.

The only way to tell is to actually sit down and count them all.

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I can not think of a better site to start this new series showcasing some of the original web sites I have come across all powered by Joomla.

"Our Transport Heritage" not only features a clean, tableless design, with stunning imagery but it also uses some of the more familiar third party joomla extensions to truly inspire you.

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As we all know twitter has been up and down more times than a strippers panties in the last 24 hours, so what should you be doing instead.

When I was younger, a long long time ago, the BBC would always show a children's television programme in the school holidays called "Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?" and it got me thinking of things I could be doing instead of waiting for tweets to arrive.

(I'm suprised to find out that the show ran for 42 series between 20 August 1973 and 21 April 1995 and that Russel T Davies of Doctor Who fame was a one time producer/director)

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I've lost track of the number of people who have asked me to recommend a good book for Joomla beginners. If only I had a £/$/€ for each request.

With so many books to chose from it's not surprising that there will be both good and bad.

I have "packed in" reading books from one publisher they just don't do it for me, another publisher needs to get "real" and not think they can get away renaming a 1.0 title as 1.5 without even remembering to make simple changes like mambots to plugins. Finally I'm not sure who was the "dummy", me for buying that book or the author thinking they knew enough to write the book.

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Over the next few weeks and months I will be following up the popular "5 minute interview" series with a new series of blog posts presenting Joomla sites to inspire you.

In the early days of Joomla, when I was browsing the web, I regularly stumbled upon a site and quickly realised it was "powered by joomla".

All the sites appeared to have a similar look and feel and there was little originality. Today, thankfully, things are much better and it is often quite a while before I realise the sites provenance.

In this new series I hope to present you with some Joomla sites I have found that are not the "norm".

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