Open Source Rules!

How could I ever have been skeptical? Oh yeah, here's how: A programmer buddy told me about Linux back in say, 1998. He was singing its praises. Then he tried to actually install it on his computer, and the honeymoon died on the vine (it's not mixed metaphors so much as a metaphor potpourri...). His hardware pieces couldn't speak to themselves, never mind each other. He tried for weeks, and finally re-installed Windows (Win98, I think...). It loaded itself, booted right every time, and he was a happy, happy man, saying things like, "Windows is a pretty slick piece of code". (Verging on heresy, according to his previous opinion!) That was my early brush with open source. Clear message to me: don't try this at home! Well, times have changed!

You probably haven't heard of Joomla. I hadn't until approximately two weeks ago. It's such a geek thing, a content management system (CMS in geek-speak) that is fully customisable, scalable, and all these other fancy words that used to mean "over my head". But no more!

Joomla (I'm not linking to it. Google it yourself, lazypants! Oh sure, go ahead and point out that it would have been easier to link to it than add this unnecessarily long disclaimer. I don't care. I'm stubborn!) is a brilliant solution to a problem that many webmasters face -- how do you organise your content? It does away with the concept of pages. (They're such a left-over from the analogue world anyway...) Instead every piece of content is on its own held together by an intricate (or not, your choice) system of menus. I couldn't find much to help me get going with it. I think that's because it's dead simple. Well, it is, and it isn't. You know what I mean. Right? And there's a whole bunch of community to help you out if you haven't been fitted with your php-decoding-wet-wire yet. (Yeah, and what are you waiting for, anyway!?)

Long story short, I came late to this open source party, but I'm here to stay. Barkeep? Keep me another shot of Joomla with an order of mambots on the side. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, that makes two of us. But it's fun, right? At least geeks have finally given themselves fun syllables to toss around... Mmmm, mambots...)