Like all good C programmers before me, and to come, we simple must have the obligatory "Hello World" article. Welcome to my site (tada) and my company. Both have been around since mid-2005 but this poor old site has been neglected - what do they say about builders' houses? Someone graciously commented that it's "minimalist" - a nice way of saying it's bland (and that's my fault). Hopefully I'll have my favourite designer run over it with some of his magic very soon.

There's quite a bit of padding and spacing to fix, but we'll get there.

Basically I want to accomplish two things:

1. For this site to be a presence to promote my company and it's services (basically the stuff that puts food on the table).

2. For it to hopefully serve as a learning tool for some of the more mundane and also some of the more odd-ball things you can do in Joomla! (basically the part where I get a give back to everyone who has helped make Joomla! successful, and indirectly help me earn a living).

The first thing is to work out why this layout override is not showing the "by" and "created" dates properly. Haven't worked out if it's me or the base code yet - I should heed the "Beta is not recommended for production" warning shouldn't I. But when I do find out I'll let you know. I've been working with the layout override system for over a year now (having built some of the original parts for it) and it one of the most powerful and most exciting developments that are included in Joomla! 1.5. The same component on two different sites can be made to look worlds apart. It really will revolutionise template development for Joomla! because designers now have no excuse for doing absolutely insane things with their sites.

So, hopefully we'll look at that over time, how you leverage the feature and make it work best for you.

I've also added to the site a Cool Stuff page. It's nothing fancy, just an Article with a heap of links in it but some that I hope newbies and verterans alike will find useful. Most important (to inspire the creative energy waves while coding) is the list of my favourite composers sites - well the ones that have free MP3 downloads anyway.

So thanks for visiting, and thanks in advance for coming back.