Recently I have discovered the value of blogging, both for it’s SEO and online marketing value. Honestly, I have found it very personally fulfilling and rewarding. In October 2009, I posted the story of how I learned Joomla and created ANewRelevance.com, the RSS powered news and information site that I use daily and am proud to call my baby (and has also been accepted to the Joomla Showcase). The story’s title: Democratizing the Web: Adventures in Joomla. After submitting the article to HubPages.com, Squidoo.com and EzineArticles.com, I posted the article here at 1300WillowStudio.com. My hope was that those who found it would find the courage and inspiration to learn open source software. Whether it be Joomla, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, or any other, they would see that they weren’t the only ones that saw them as daunting or impossible.

This evening (January 6, 2010), I decided to check in and see how my posts were doing. Sure, just writing and posting the article was rewarding, but it would be nice to know that somebody actually read it. Interestingly enough, I found that there were two thoughtful and complimentary comments posted about my article. Problem was, they were posted at JoomCoder.net. Interestingly-er enough, I never posted it there, the text was altered from my original version (and poorly at that…no offense whoever you are), and I was in no way credited.

So…

How Open Source Software is Democratizing the Web: My Adventures with Joomla.

Read on if you’d like to learn how a web designer with no programming experience was able to create the RSS Powered News Supersite ANewRelevance.com.

While in the shower, lightning strikes and you have a great idea for a website (my best inspiration always seems to reveal itself in the shower). Problem is: 1) you don’t have the skills or know how to create it and/or 2) you don’t have the budget to have it built. What a familiar conundrum, your brilliant website idea is all dressed up with nowhere to go. This summer I ran into the same situation.