I give a lot of presentations throughout the year and last night I represented Joomla at the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in a panel debate on Open Source knowledge/skills gaps across HM Government.
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.
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).
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.
Writing a blog post or any type of documentation on line is a challenge. One of the many things that I try to do is to write in a style that is appropriate for you the reader.
I am aware that for a large percentage of my readers English is not their first language. As a result I try to avoid using complex words, phrases or sentence structures. Of course I often fail but I do try.
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.
Bullying is perhaps one of the oldest and most unpleasant human traits. With the rise of the internet we have moved from the playground and office bully, who is easy to identify, to the more anonymous cyber bully.
Sadly cyber bullying is something that is on the rise and schools and the workplace are still attempting to establish means to identify this and handle it appropriately.
Over the last year I have been working closely with several schools across the UK to raise awareness of the issue of cyber bullying and to establish policies and best practice to handle this appropriately and considerately.
Earlier today I read a tweet that led me to a web page that led me to another web site that finally dropped me into spending 25 minutes watching a video on Vimeo.
Now I'm not usually a great watcher of online videos, especially when I'm travelling and on a dodgy 3G internet connection but something about this presentation grabbed my attention.
If I could be bothered I would spend some time summarising the video and abstracting the key points. But as you should know by now I'm lazy and don't like to repeat things if I really don't have to.
So grab a coffee, some nice biscuits, settle down in a comfortable seat and watch the presentation.
We all know that the vast majority of email is spam or UCE (unsolicited commercial email) and that there are people out there whose sole aim in life is to harvest your email address.
I'm sure that you are very careful about placing your email address online, ensuring that it is protected by javascript, or using contact forms with hidden email addresses.
But when you add your email address to a newsletter or service do you consider the security of that list?
