Six years ago, I quit teaching and became a full time web designer.
At that point I had three things to my name:
Here’s one of the subscribers we got to http://facebook.com/ostraining/ after advertising on Facebook for a week. We targeted only people in the U.S.:
I was watching the U.S. healthcare debate play out yesterday and it got me thinking.
I thought back to when our own industry was dominated by legal arguments, most of them half-digested and poorly-sourced. Including my own.
The GPL debates in open source were not a fun time and they dragged on for years.
So, I did some looking back and unless I’m missing something, the last real argument about the GPL was in July 2010, two years in the past. Continue reading “There is Peace in the GPL World”
[UPDATE] I was nervous before posting this but want to thank everyone for the big response. I’ve heard from a lot of people today and the great thing is many of them agree: we need to raise our game. The future can be bright. There are a lot of opportunities out there for Joomla. We just sometimes need to be reminded to go and grab them.
Sorry, Disqus is being a real pain and comments are sometimes missing on this thread after a server move.
Instead of commenting, go and do something positive. You’ll feel much better, I promise. Help move us forward. Here’s one place to start.
[/UPDATE]
It’s time for the Joomla community to professionalize.
I mean that in two senses: Continue reading “It’s Time for Joomla to Become Professional”
I always cringe when seeing people try to build an open source rival to Facebook. Projects like Diaspora gain publicity as a nice idea, but get little real traction.
However, I’ve come to believe that there is a potentially viable and very real open source rival to Facebook … WordPress.
That might sound silly at first, but hear me out: Continue reading “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress”
Alledia.com had a really great six year run. But, I’ve moved everything over to SteveBurge.com. I moved for several reasons:
1) Urgency. OSTraining traffic is going up, up, up. Visitor numbers are way, way higher than this time last year. I need to move as many sites off that server as possible.
2) Business. “Alledia” isn’t really me any more. It’s a company and one that has very little to do with open source. Alledia Inc. runs AppalachianTrail.com, LakeLanier.com and LakeAllatoona.com. For practical reasons related to #1, we couldn’t use Alledia.com, but the business is now at Alledia.net.
3) A Fresh Start. The Alledia.com old site was full of 10 years of accumulated junk. It dated back to a Mambo installation from 2003 and had been migrated through a couple of domains and Joomla versions until reaching Alledia.com where it grew and mutated for six more years. It was a mess.
4) Clarity. Finally, the purpose of both sites is a lot clearer now:
Over time I’ll try to move as many of my usernames as possible from alledia to steveburge. This site is a big first step.
Welcome to my new digs!
Housekeeping note: All the old content and comments are here. The URLs are also the same, so all incoming links should still work.
Remember that new product mentioned on the blog at the beginning of May?
I’m delighted to say that things are coming along great.
The name of the product is Admincredible and I know you’re going to love it.
We’ve absolutely loved building it.
In building Admincredible, I’ve had the chance work with a lot of people that I’ve long admired. TJ and Eddie from Joomlashack are helping me bring the product to fruition. Fotis, Chiara and the Nuevvo team are doing the design work. We’ve got some great coders on the project too.
Visit Admincredible.com to sign up and become one of the very first to know when we launch.
Tonight at the Joomla User Group in Atlanta I’ll be giving the first public peek inside our new business.
Details of how to attend are here: http://www.meetup.com/atlantajoomla/
I’m really excited about this project:
Someone asked me a question last night so I racked my brain and came up with the answer of “5”. I’m a little sad this list is so short.
So, kudos to these open source events:
Anyone know what these events did to make the list? Even better, any ideas for making it longer?
*Update* The answer is “events that are brave enough to invite speakers from other open source projects”.
Today is Halloween so it’s a good time to addresses a scary topic.
After a baby-hiatus this summer, I’ve been back on the road again teaching a lot of Joomla and Drupal. I’m talking to a lot of end-users and finding that there’s something really scary In our open source platforms.
I tweeted a while ago that a lot of people are migrating to Joomla and Drupal from the Vignette / OpenText system. Why? Because OpenText are dropping support for an old version and moving to the new version requires a major migration. People are using that opportunity to shop around. If they’re going to have to rewrite their whole website, why not see if there’s a better alternative out there? Every time there’s a difficult upgrade, your customers seen an exit door.
The worst part of every class with Vignette users is explaining that neither Joomla or Drupal are better with upgrades. It’s not comforting to explain to new users that they got out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Here’s the thing: people’s expectations have changed. This isn’t 2005 when phones never updated and new Windows versions often required buying new computers.
In 2011, your phones, computers and tablets update automatically. In 2011, WordPress runs 15% of the web and its updates are like butter. In 2011, we all run on the cloud and we never even notice the updates. That’s today’s standard. Any system which doesn’t provide an easy update path isn’t living in the 2010’s.
I hope that Joomla devs provide a smooth upgrade from 2.5 to 3.0 and that Drupal devs provide a smooth path from 7 to 8.
I fear a scary experience for the users of either platform if they don’t.