We live in a blame culture. We are always looking for someone to blame whenever a situation occurs. We are in control of so much of our lives and yet instead of taking control and changing what we can change we expect someone else to do it for us. The reality is that it isn't someone else's fault - it is mine. And when I say mine I mean yours.
Every time we face an issue instead of looking at someone else to blame we should be looking at ourselves and saying - it's all my fault.
When I redesigned this web site earlier this month one of the challenges I faced was how to ensure that it worked as I intended it to work on multiple devices. And I didn't just wanted it to work I wanted it to look great as well.
There is not much point investing time, and perhaps money, in a design if it looks terrible on every device apart from your own. All your hard work, time and effort is wasted just because you didn't do enough testing.
This blog is in English and it will never be available in any other language as I just don't have the skills to translate it myself. I am definitely not going to install some plugin to add automated translations as I believe that will give a very poor translation.
You might decide to add that to your site but I always feel that offering up no translation is better than a bad translation. On many sites the language switcher does not even indicate that it is a machine translation and what kind of impression does a bad translation create for your readers. So it is something that I have never done on any site I have been involved with.
Ask a Joomla web site builder why they use Joomla and the answer will most likely include "Joomla is easy, anyone can use it and you can have a site online in 5 minutes." But that's not really true.
Saying something is "easy" is a relative statement. Sure, building a web site with Joomla is easier than building a rocket to orbit the earth, but it is definitely not as easy as boiling an egg. Joomla is easy for me, and probably most of you, because you have done your research, read some documentation, watched some tutorials and most importantly have several years of experience.
So when we say "Joomla is easy" what do we really mean and are we setting the expectation for newcomers to Joomla at completely the wrong level?
2013 was a very quiet year for this blog but that is all changing in 2014.
Just because I was quiet here didn't mean I was quiet in the Joomla world, (do you really think I can ever be quiet?), as I tried to contribute in many new ways. For me some of those were successful others less so.
I have learnt new skills which I hope will I will be able to continue to improve. I definitely understand more code now than I ever did before and one day I will be able to completely stop asking friends for help.
