Steve’s Blog

June 10, 2012

Moved from Alledia.com to steveburge.com

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…

May 29, 2012

Our New Product: Admincredible

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…

May 14, 2012

First Peek at a New Business

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: I’m really excited about this project: It involves a lot of great Joomla people that I’ve met over the years. Some of them I’ve been hoping to work with for a long time. It scratches my own itch. OSTraining is my main business and that is designed to scratch other peoples itches. Even if this side-project completely flops commercially, I’ll still use it myself. Intially it will be a Joomla project, but I…

April 19, 2012

A Short but Honorable List

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: DrupalCon Munich DrupalCon Denver DrupalCon Copenhagen JoomlaDay New England JoomlaDay Netherlands 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”.

October 31, 2011

No Upgrades? You’ll Scare Your Users Away

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. No Upgrades? Your Customers See an Exit Door 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…

September 5, 2011

The 4 Pillars of Open Source Communities

In 2006 I quit my job to work full-time in open source. It was fortunate timing, because the years since then have seen extraordinary growth. What was once a hobby or a sideline has now taken over the web. It’s almost certain that more than 20% of the web will run on either WordPress, Joomla or Drupal by the the end of 2011. What is even more amazing to me is how fragile it often seems on some days. Having worked in and paid close attention to the people and structures running our three huge projects, I’m constantly amazed by…

July 25, 2011

Joomla! Explained and Why Writing a Book is So Hard

Phew. Joomla! Explained is finally out. If you’ve written a book, you know how I feel. Phrases like “piece of cake” and “walk in the park” aren’t involved. Why Is Writing a Book So Difficult (Particularly for Web People)? Print. Oh man, the boot was on the other foot this time. If you’re a web designer, you’ve had a requests like these: “I’d like the image to be 5.4 cm high” “I have this pixel-perfect magazine ad that want translated into a website”. I’ve been guilty in the past of making light fun of print designers who try to tackle…

May 27, 2011

Some Personal and Business Updates

2011 is turning out to be a pretty busy year and I’ve got some updates to mention in just about every area of my life. Why the Updates? It all starts from the same point: we’re having a second little girl later this year. She’s due in mid-August. I naively thought that two babies wouldn’t be much more work than one. I’m already wrong.

April 11, 2011

Any good CRMs or ERPs for Online Businesses?

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get a better handle on our business over at OSTraining.com. Since the launch early last years, things have been growing faster than my ability to analyze and understand it. It’s been a pretty sobering experience so far and I ended up experiencing some pretty eye-opening problems with all the tools out there? First, I realised once and for all that the major payment gateways are really living in the 1990s when it comes to their websites. We use PayPal and Authorize.net for payments and “wow!”, they do not make it…

January 25, 2011

The Open Source Wall Revisited: Drupal and Commercial Modules

I’ve been on record here saying that Open Source project should focus on learning from one another rather than competing. So it’s been interesting to see the Drupal community talking about commercial modules this week. It’s very similar to the discussion that took place in the Joomla community during 2007 and 2008. Back then I wrote a post detailing the experience of some friends and colleagues called “Hitting the Open Source Wall“. Earlier this week an eerily similar post started the conversation in Drupal: Is it Evil to Ask For Payment?. You can follow some of the debate by following…