Hagen Graf's blog

Once a year JandBeyond, the international Joomla conference is held in Europe. This time, the venue was, again, the Dolce Hotel in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Elvis Presley lived in Bad Nauheim during his time with the United States Army in Friedberg. 

My initial plan was to meet with Christine (my beloved wife :) ) at JandBeyond, attend the event and drive home together with her. The days before she was in Germany and I was in Switzerland. She prepared the session "Peace, Love and Leadership" and worked the weeks before the event together with the responsible working group on a Proposal for a new Joomla project structure (Discuss the proposal here). She was asked to attend the leadership meeting after the event. Unfortunately it was not possible for her to attend because of some trouble making a decision on behalf of the leadership team so she finally quit her participation.

If you attended jab12 too, please be so kind and add your preferred social media accounts in this Google doc and please post your links to photos in this Google doc.

And now - my story :)

I arrived Friday morning and as part of the video team I had to record sessions.

Two days ago Raouf Ibrahimi Nasab and Seyed Mohammad Safavi (students of information technology engineering), which I met at JDay Iran, asked me to do a 15 minutes video on e-commerce for their seminar at Islamic Azad University of Bushehr (http://www.iaubushehr.ac.ir/). Both are responsible for the seminar which is part of the scientific association of that university.

Well ... let's go :)

What is e-Commerce?

Before we talk about e-commerce let's have a look at the word commerce.

April 12th Christine and me attended the first Joomla!Day in Mashhad, Iran.

The JoomlaDay team around Saeed worked one year to make this event possible. Due to ongoing sanctions against Iran it was not possible for Open Source Matters to support the event with 500 US$ as they usually do for an official Joomla!Day. I announced the event personally in several chats, meetings and JoomlaDays (last time in New England) but people had concerns about the political situation and often fear to get involved in that. For our company cocoate which is based in France exists regulations too that make it impossible to support the event financially. At the end of the day we decided to have a look by ourselves, fly to Iran and attend the event.

First problem was to figure out how to get a visa. For getting a visa you need a confirmation of a hotel reservation with a price in. Especially in Mashhad the hotel staff speak Farsi and Arabic but very little English. Confirming a price longer than a few weeks/days is hard for them because of a rising inflation in the last months. At least we found the Bahram Hotel which is located near Iman Reza shrine and near the house where Ali Khamenei سید علی حسینی خامنهای  was born.

We had to add our names to a list of the German "Auswärtiges Amt" and they told us to be very careful, don't take personal computers, cameras and other equipment with us and several more security advices. It is not possible to use our credit cards in Iran so we had to bring in cash for the hotel and our expenses. The money has to be changed somewhere (be careful when carrying high amounts of cash in your pocket ...).

We got more and more unsure whether it was a good idea to go to Iran but the curiosity and the hope that people are nearly the same in the whole world was still bigger.

The frontpage of cocoate was in the past a mixture of different languages.

Today I separated the content of the frontpage depending of the language you have configured with the language switcher.

The default language of cocoate is English. If your browser is tied to a special language these language should appear as default for you. E.g. if your default browser language setting is French, the French cocoate frontpage should appear.

We have a possibility to set a content "Language neutral". It will be shown in each language like this blog entry.

A lot of the old content is still "language neutral". I will change that in the next days.

This weekend Christine and I attended Joomla!day New England in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. The event took place in the local Marlboro College Graduate School and was organised by Jen Kramer, Andrea Tarr and many more people (btw, they should be mentioned somewhere on the site). It started Friday evening with a template workshop held by Matt Thomas and Barb Ackemann. We arrived just on time to attend this workshop, had pizza and learned a lot about the construct template framework.

We ended up in a bar near our hotel, the Latchis, which is a famous Art Deco building in Brattleboro.

Next day the Joomla!Day started with a

Barcamp Bodensee 3 will be on Saturday June 9th and Sunday June 10th 2012 on the Campus of Zeppelin University at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. (We plan do a get together on Friday nite for those already present.) The event series (barcamps around lake Constance) has the tag #bcbs. The camp in 2012 has the tag #bcbs12

Barcamp Lake Constance is (besides Berlin) one of two international Barcamps in Germany.

That means that international visitors are explicitely welcome, that the organization language is English and that all sessions, where non-German speakers are present, are expected to be in English.

The idea is to bring the net and Barcamp crowds together on a European level - and beyond.

Former camps have been in 2008 and 2010 in Friedrichshafen (which has an airport) and Constance (which is easily reachable by train from Zurich Airport). Up to now we had barcampers from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, France and Serbia. We are looking to expand this range.

The historical backdrop for the idea to create such a camp in this location is that Lake Constance was a European center in the Middle ages. (Council of Constance, 1414-18 and Reichenau Island)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Constance
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichenau_Island

So: let's geek

Cleveland, OH, January 25, 2012

"Joomla! 1.7: Beginner's Guide" and "Joomla! Development: A Beginner's Guide" has been nominated for a 2012 Small Business Book Award in the category of Technology.

Joomla! 1.7 Beginner's Guide	Joomla! Development - A Beginner's Guide

The Small Business Book Awards recognize business books that were published in 2011. Small business owners often seek advice and information through books. While there are many thousands of books published each year, it's those of interest to small businesses and entrepreneurs that the Small Business Book Awards seek to honor.

"With so many books being published each year, we wanted to recognize those that made a difference to small business owners and managers and startup entrepreneurs," said Ivana Taylor, Book Editor at Small Business Trends, which produces the Awards. "Our annual Small Business Book Awards are a way to highlight the books that entrepreneurs are reading and learning from."

The Awards are an honor to the authors who write books for the small business and entrepreneurial community. Says Anita Campbell, CEO of Small Business Trends, "For many of the authors, writing a book is a labor of love. Often they get up early in the morning before the rest of the family awakes, and they devote their evenings, weekends, holidays and vacations to writing. They deserve recognition."

Ok, to understand my thoughts you have to spend a bit time, follow the links and watch the videos and sources I linked to (or may be not, if you know them all).
I know it's complicate and it takes time, but the world isn't that easy :)

Step by step

• January 18th
  The whole world protested against a law in the US (SOPA/PIPA).
• January 19th 10am:
  Apple held an event about spreading iPads in schools (Video).
  Concerning the iPad platform, have a look at that video Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation [28C3] (from Dec. 2011)
• January 19th 11pm:
  I read that the Police in New Zealand arrested Kim Dotcom (Schmitz), Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato and Mathias Ortman and shut down the servers of their company megaupload (Press Release FBI: Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement).