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.
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.
This week, 21st to 27th November, is Inter Faith Week in England and Wales.
Wherever I go I am always asked why I am involved in Joomla! and why I give so much of my time to a piece of software. Working together with people across the world to produce software that will help, in some small way, activities like this take place is exactly what motivates me.
Of course I am excited to see large multi-national companies and government bodies using Joomla but it is when I see small charities or non-profit organisations able to organise events and spread their message, using Joomla, that I am really happy.
This month a survey by cmscrawler.com of 2,944,914 European web sites has been able to identify the publishing solution used in almost 494,040 of those sites.
Unlike other statistical analysis this was restricted to European TLD (top level domains) and does not limit itself to only testing sites in the top x million based on traffic.
Does that make it more accurate? Probably not but by removing the traffic filter it does allow us to look at the usage of web platforms more generally.
Over the last few years I've given a lot of presentations and I like to think that I am quite good at it. Or at least that's what people tell me. What they say behind my back I don't know.
Unfortunately I've also seen far too many bad presentations so I thought I would take this opportunity to present my purely personal tips and advice.
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.
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.
