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).
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.
This is the first of several blog posts inspired by my recent trip to Joomla Day in Chile.
I began my keynote presentation in Santiago with an apology that the presentation would be in English. Being British I have a very poor appreciation of the importance of speaking any language other than English. Even at school the French I was taught would not really help me with conversational French (and even then I was not a very good student).
There is an English joke that if you speak loud enough and slow enough then everyone in the world will understand you but that simply is not true.
Woody Allen made a whole movie but here you will find links to movies, presentations and articles. Thanks to the hard work of Jen Kramer and others for compiling this list of useful resources.
I will be making a presentation on Joomla! 1.6 at JoomlaDay Chile next week and will add it here. If you have any resources to add please post in the comments and I will add them.
As many of you know I spend a considerable amount of my time fixing hacked websites and in the last two days there have been two very important postings for anyone who creates or runs a Joomla! web site.
Just as you can not be a little bit pregnant your website can not be a little bit secure or a little bit unsecure.
There are many extensions available for Joomla that "claim" to secure your site and whilst some of them will indeed block certain types of hacks none of them will make your web site unhackable.
I've said it before and I will say it again - I don't like Virtuemart as software for building ecommerce sites in joomla.
A tweet of mine is even being made into a t-shirt for me and I will wear it with pride.




