Yesterday was the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a day of remembrance, repentance, confession and fasting. It is unique in that it is almost universally observed, even by the most secular of Jews for whom it might be the only day of the year that they attend a service.
Central to Yom Kippur is the Al Chet prayer where we are asked to consider the sins we have committed intentionally or unintentionally, what are our sins of commission and our sins of omission and what have we done inadvertently by doing nothing at all.
9 years ago today, on 17th August 2005, I was just one of seventeen brave (or foolhardy) people who announced that they were leaving the very successful Mambo project and starting out on their own. It was a snap decision and truth be told if we had stopped to think about how much work lay ahead of us in the coming months I suspect we might not have been in such a rush. We were greatly helped at the time by Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Centre and I believe we were their first "clients".
I arrived at J & Beyond not in the best of moods. I'd been off work sick for the previous month and to be honest I was tired, run down and a little depressed. There are just times when things become a constant battle of frustration and nothing seems worth the effort and that's exactly where I was. After months of preparation for JAB14 I was no longer interested and was determined that this would be my last JAB and probably my last Joomla event. Mood 0/10
I had convinced my JAB teammates to introduce two new features for 2014 and I was no longer certain that the Make it Happen or J!Factor events would be a success. I didn't see the commitment and support from the community that I felt these two initiatives deserved and as they were intended to be a major focus this year I just felt JAB would fall flat on its face together with any reputation I might have established for being involved in successful events.
Read more: Create your own Joomla manual
Documentation in any Open Source project is seen as the Holy Grail. It's great to have but somehow never quite fulfils the needs of the users.
Joomla has an excellent documentation resource but I think it is fair to categorise these docs mainly as "reference" material and not "user guides".
Some people are able to open up a graphic editor and produce stunning original artwork for their web sites. I'm not one of those people. For me it's usually a case of searching the net in the hope of finding the perfect graphic that exactly matches my needs. Usually I fail in that search and end up with the closest thing I can find.
