My grandfather Leslie passed away this week at the age of 93.
He was a rock for our family, and remained mentally and physically strong until the very end.
Even a few days before he passed, he was healthy enough to make a final trip to his favourite holiday town in Devon. We were together in that town just last summer:
In many ways, my family and I were very fortunate.
My Dad first had cancer in 2000. He went on to survive multiple fights with several forms of cancer. He had 20 years of absolutely world-class medical treatment from England’s National Health Service.
We had 20 extra years with him, thanks to that treatment, and his own resilience and determination.
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. Continue reading “Saying Goodbye to Georgia”
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY_RtYRHRGo
I’ve been heavily involved with Joomla and, to a lesser extent, Drupal for a good number of years now.
During that time, I’ve seen forks come and go but they’ve never really sparked my interested. Here are 6 reasons why:
#1. Money. I’ve kids, a wife and a mortgage so I need to pay the bills. There’s rarely enough money in small projects to pay the bills and forks are always small projects.
#2. Open source. I’m far more attached to open source than I am to any brand name such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress. I work with open source because I want to see live in a society dominated by open rather than proprietary systems. A large and popular project provides a much better platform to make that happen.
#3. Chance of success. 99.9% of forks fail. In fact, 99.9% of open source project fail. People wildly overestimate how rare it is for an open source project to succeed. I saw a very naive comment on Reddit the other day: “the creation of an ecosystem is trivially easy”. Projects like Joomla and Drupal are 1 in 100,000. They caught lightning in a bottle. Your project probably won’t.
#4. People. I’m attached to the people in each open source project rather than just the codebase. I’m a trainer, not a developer, so that’s the way my mind works.
#5. Different place, same drama. I’ve heard people say that they want to start afresh to avoid the drama in the old project. Sorry, but people are people. The grass probably won’t be greener on the other side.
#6. Be different. Rather than forks, which offer more of the same for the first few months or years, it’s a lot more interesting to see something completely new. A great example is Ghost as an alternative to WordPress.
None of this is to say that forks are bad things or that you shouldn’t launch one. These are just the reasons why I probably won’t be interested.
Six years ago, I quit teaching and became a full time web designer.
At that point I had three things to my name:
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: