Brian Teeman

At the end of October I had the great honour to present the keynote session at the first ever Joomla!Day Denmark. It was a fantastic event with almost 200 people attending over 2 days in the picturesque city of Kolding.

The venue itself was the IBC school which was unlike any school I've ever been to. If my school had provided such a relaxed atmosphere perhaps I would have concentrated harder.

For the next two days I will be speaking and participating at the first ever JoomlaDay in Denmark.

With almost 200 people expected in the very small town of Kolding, not far from LegoLand this is an amazing turnout and shows the true strength of Joomla even in a very small country.

I hope to video my presentations for http://hiddenjoomlasecrets.com but I do have a sneak preview you can watch right now.

If you're anything like me, and I suspect most of you are, then you probably upgrade your computer on an almost annual basis.

But what do you do with your old one?

Does it sit in the corner of the room for emergencies that never happen?

Does it gather dust and take up space waiting for you to get around to doing something with it?

Of course you can't just chuck it in the bin.

Not only would that be against the law (in the UK) but it's a crying shame to see all that working processing power and alot of money go to the great landfill in the earth.

During the Joomla!Day West event that took place at the beginning of October the Community and Production leadership teams were able to get together for several days of discussions, planning and team building.

I've been keeping an eye and ear out for some sort of reports from these events on joomla.org but haven't seen anything yet.

Suffering from JCD (more about that in a later blog post) I've managed to gather some information from the event to share here.

This time last year I said I was speechless when I discovered that I had been nominated for an award for the the Open Source in Business blogger of the year in the prestigious UK publication ComputerWeekly.

And only a few weeks later I was shocked and suprised when I actualy won the award.

I've just returned from travelling to the USA where I attended a meeting of the Milwaukee JUG and Joomla!Day DC where I had the opportunity to meet many friends, old and new, some of whom I've previously only met online.

One of the great things about meeting in person is to share stories and adventures, consider new ideas and of course get to know the real person behind the avatar or nickname.

Over the next few days I'll be writing several blog posts as a direct consequence of the trip but before I do that I wanted to share a small story about my adventures travelling to the USA this trip.

Perhaps the greatest things that has happened to me by being part of this amazing Joomla! community is that I have met so many people from all over the world.

Of course I'm not alone in that and probably every one of you reading this blog will have made new friends as a result of your involvement in Joomla!

But making online friends is only the start of it.

Several months ago the "new" OSM board published a set of accounts.

At the time many people in the community questioned the amount of money that was being spent on Legal and PR agency fees.

Today I saw that OSM have published an updated set of accounts and I'm really pleased with what I saw.

The amount of money being spent on Legal and PR have been drastically reduced. Thank you OSM for listening to the community and taking action.

On the 5th anniversary of the release of Joomla 1.0 I have decided to launch a new web site.

Suprisingly it is probably only about the third or fourth site I have ever built just for myself and not a client.

HiddenJoomlaSecrets.com is the new home of all my presentations and videos, which I hope to be adding to considerably in the coming weeks and months.

Last night I started writing a new blog post and it quickly became apparent to me that it really should be a video.

Not a problem I thought, I know how to produce videos.

Just this morning I was telling some friends how brilliant iMovie is on the Mac for producing videos.