The old saying that you have to be in it to win it, has been slightly twisted today because "Everyone who was in it did win it" ... Well one person won it slightly more than the others, but everyone who entered the "Show us your workspace" competition from a few weeks ago will receive at least a 3 month subscription just for the effort of entering the competition.

I really enjoyed all of the entries and seeing all of your spaces. As I've mentioned previously, while web work can be physically isolating, there are ways that we can make our online experience more intimate and personal.  One of those ways is to see where the people we email, skype, post forum threads to and tweet with works.

So without further to do ... drum roll please ...

I had the good fortune to chat with Rod Martin from OS Training a few weeks ago as a part of their OS Talks.

It was good to meet someone I've only ever tweeted with or spoken to via skype or email. Even though the interview wasn't face to face, it was great to finally put a face to the name.

If you are interested, you can see what I look like without my hat on. I've had some feedback that I'm bald (I prefer bald-ing), scruffy (I prefer relaxed casual) and that my accent (what accent?) was hard to understand. But I'll let you be the judge of that.

Enjoy!

At the end of last year I moved into a new studio space.

For the last five years, Ive been running Bamboo HQ from the front room of my house in Melbourne, on a very busy road, amidst the craziness of living in a house with three young children, a Grandpa with a penchant for loud tv and an exuberant schnautzer.

A move to something more “official” had been on the cards for quite sometime and after close to 6 weeks in the new studio I am absolutely loving it. It certainly begs the question why didn’t I do this before but you know how that goes.

So as a way to celebrate my new found freedom, I have put together a show us your space competition. Just attach an image of your office / workspace in the comments below and you will go in the running to win a 12 month developer subscription - worth $225 AUD.

The winner of the competition will be decided simply by a matter of the most commented workspace by personal bias and whim. So if you like someone’s space - let them know in the space below.

A few weeks ago we announced our move to using the T3 framework for building our Joomla templates. Since then we have had some great feedback and some great questions from users who are curious to get a little more detail.

Since that time we have also released two new templates, Grid3 and Inspire, and have a number of older templates in various stages of “porting” to T3. So I thought that now would be a good time to dig down into the detail of our workflow with T3 as well as answer some of those questions.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of sitting down with Peter Bui from PB Web Dev to record an episode of his new(ish) podcast all about Joomla. In this Joomla Beat episode we talk about our shift to T3 and some of the background behind that change, plus a few other bits and pieces. There is a little coupon action at the end of the podcast as well.

If you are in the mood for a little weekend Joomla listening then this may be the perfect way to get yoour Joomla fix.

Listen

Despite the wild claims that we were close to the end of days, it appears that the world did not come to an end on December 21. After all of the speculation it looks like we will indeed see and get to use Joomla 3.5 and beyond. 

To celebrate this joyous occasion I have just made available our final coupon for 2012. 

If you use the coupon maya on our checkout page you can receive 20% off the cost of a subscription. Current and renewing members can add this to the usual 10% and 20% coupons to save even more on your subscription renewals.

This coupon offer is valid until 1st January, 2013.

Save on subscriptions now

As I mentioned earlier in the week we are working on updating our knowledge base and doign a little restructure at the same time. Documentation is the kind of thing that gets left till last when it comes to releasing stuff and even though we dedicate a lot of time to it for each template released there are a number of holes in the documentation as it currently stands.

one of the challenges is to figure out at which end we should start - beginner or advanced. So this is an open call for you to have your say on what we need to prioritise in the restructure. If you have soemthign constructive offer please fill out the form below and that will get posted directly into aour documentation todo list. We will go through and set priorities for the tasks offered based on what you add here.

Thanks again folks and appreciate the feedback.

Last night I took the wrapper off the new activity stream. If you click on the stream menu item above you will see a stream of my creative stuff from my flickr feed, to dribble screenshot posts to twitter ramblings. I just need to find a way to load in feeds for my music selection and then the stream will be complete.

This is actually part of a new social module that we are looking at offering. The next  template - called collector - will actually incorporate the functionality but we are yet to decide on the best way to deploy it.

At the moment you can load the following feeds:

• twitter
• flickr
• tumblr
• facebook
• youtube
• digg
• pinterest
• delicious
• vimeo
• custom rss feeds

Anyway ... I hope you enjoy it!