Steve’s Blog
Saying Goodbye to Georgia
Next week we leave Georgia after 10 years. My first experience of Georgia was as a kid. My grandparents loved, loved, loved “Gone With the Wind”. They had it on 4 or 5 VHS tapes and watched it almost weekly. Every 40 minutes the movie would stop, they’d get up and put in the next tape.
Blues documentary: You See Me Laughin’
From England originally, I’ve lived in the Deep South for the last 10 years. The South has forced me to change my mind about a lot of things, blues music being one of them. I couldn’t have cared less for the blues before arriving here. It took a while, but the music has turned my mind around 180 degrees. Here’s a brilliant documentary called “You See Me Laughin’”, filmed in 2002, just before I arrived here. It’s about the blues players on Fat Possum Records in Mississippi. All four parts are on YouTube:
Some quick thoughts on certification
Yesterday, Acquia announced that it was starting a certification program. Joomla is in the process of doing the same thing, although through the community rather than a company. This will likely have a noticeable impact on us at OSTraining, so I’ve a few initial thoughts:
WordPress Weekly #142 on WP Tavern
I joined Jeff Chandler and Marcus Couch on WordPress Weekly to talk about OSTraining, front-end editing, and my WICS system for comparing how easy Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are to use.
Open source has won the battle but is losing the war
I’ve seen this graphic many times on Twitter over the last few days:
Joomla cover article in Web Designer Mag
I was approached by Web Designer Mag a couple of months ago to write an article about Joomla. I’ve written for them before, but this was a much longer article which gave 20 reasons to use Joomla. It’s just been published and it ended up as the cover article:
Never be seen working on the weekend
I’ve always thought of myself as teacher. But, as OSTraining has grown in the last several years, I’ve found myself moving into the role of a manager rather than a teacher. Still, the two roles have a lot in common. One of the biggest similarities is that you really need to be careful about the behavior you model. For example, I often used to work weekends. Some Saturdays and Sundays, I’d send emails, make site changes and be noticeably busy.
A card from Chiara
This year, I had the pleasure of doing some work with Chiara from UntilSunday.it. Chiara helped redesign our logo and brand at OSTraining. At the end of the year, we got a card from Chiara. If you’ve ever met Chiara, you know that she has a unique and artistic flair. She put all of that talent into one of the most unique cards we’ve ever receieved. I apologize if my photos don’t do the quality of the card justice, but I thought it was worth sharing:
Todd Marrone: There’s Not One Correct Answer
One of my wife’s high school friends, Todd Marrone, passed during Christmas. Todd worked as an art teacher in Philadelphia schools for 15 years. I never met him, but after hearing the news, my wife was telling me about him. She was showing me some of his YouTube videos, including a TED talk from 2011. It’s a beautiful talk, and from the sounds of it, a fitting introduction to Todd and his ideas about being a great teacher: