Motivation is something personal to all of us and we all clearly have different things that get us all fired up and committed.  

I first saw this stunningly animated lecture a year or so ago and I was reminded of it when Ryan Ozimek quoted it in his presentation at Joomla!Dagen in the Netherlands last week. {...}

As many of you know I spend a large percentage of my time teaching people how to use Joomla. Sometimes that is for people who are complete Joomla virgins but more often than not it is for people who have had a Joomla web site built for them and now they want to know how to use it.

Perhaps the biggest problem these people face is that the web site they have had built for them has not been built the Joomla way. As a result the site will often have a complicated structure that is difficult to understand and manage, definitely not what Joomla is designed to be.

J and Beyond, an International Joomla® Conference in Kerkrade The Netherlands, is coming and the deadline for submitting proposals for sessions is on 4th March.

J and Beyond is not like any other Joomla! event, the entire programme of events is up to you the participants. Any and every participant has the opportunity to present a paper which can be either a presentation, tutorial or workshop. This is your opportunity to not only meet your peers but to share your ideas, experiences and projects.

When I gave the first presentation of "Joomla Hidden Secrets" in The Netherlands back in 2009 I stated that I was only presenting some of the "secrets" and that I would present more in the future. Well, for various reasons, I never did.

This week a tweet by Rafael Diaz-Tushman of Dioscouri Design complaining that joomlacode.org was exposing his email address in unprotected form to spammers etc prompted me to reveal at least one more of my "Hidden Secrets of Joomla".

I'm an avid reader of newspapers, not just the sport but everything, and despite it's slightly right leaning politics The Times is my preference. I devour every page, even the obituary column which provides a wealth of information not just on the rich and famous but also those more "ordinary" people who have led "extra-ordinary" lives.

Having travelled across large parts of the World this may seem strange to some of you as I've found that the newspaper in many countries has been degraded to covering just local news, sport and adverts.

As Joomla is free of cost to download and install should support for it also be free of cost? The same is also true of extensions for Joomla, if it is free of cost to download can you expect the support for it to be free?

Everyday on twitter I see Joomla extension developers moaning about the "unrealistic" expectations of users asking, or even demanding, free technical support.

Everyday on twitter I see Joomla users moaning about the lack of free technical support for the Joomla extension they have just downloaded.

Are users right to expect technical support, are developers right to moan about "stupid" users, or should we all be grateful for what we got and shut up?

Today I'm turning the blog over to you. 

Inspired by a facebook post by Jono Bacon, just use the comments to say where and when we've met. Of course if you have something more interesting to say about it feel free to do so and perhaps even link to a photo or video.

If you have seen any of my presentations, online or in person, you will know that I am not a fan of slides with hundreds of words. Usually I just have a picture and a few words or phrase.

These words are there for you, the audience, to remember the key fact and as a reminder to me about what I am supposed to talk about. Sometimes they're not enough and I have a few extra notes just for me. (At JoomlaDay Chile all my slides were in Spanish so the notes were very important to me as I don't speak any Spanish).

The Joomla logo is a pretty cool design and it does seem to appear on virtually all my t-shirts these days. There are even some people who have a tattoo of joomla somewhere on their body but I bet you never thought you would see the Joomla logo as a fashion accessory.

Painted nails are the hot fashion right now, especially in the UK, where every shopping mall has at least one booth where you can have your nails painted - not with boring colours but with hot designs.

And now you can have a joomla logo inspired design on your nails too. I wonder who will do this for J and Beyond?

Just one small beer too many and crazy ideas start to sound sensible. I'm sure you've all been there and had an idea in a drunken moment that in the light of the day perhaps isn't such a "no-brainer" after all.

That's exactly what happened during JoomlaDay Chile.

During Javier's presentation on OSM and the power of Open Source software he talked about his experience couch surfing and I suggested to Ryan Ozimek that we could probably travel the world, couch surfing and visiting Joomla communities as we travelled.

Ryan, being the big vision thinker that he is, not only embraced the idea but started to think about the possibilities and practical issues.