General/Question Preparing for the social media maelstrom

If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him.  If he is in superior strength, evade him.  If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him.  Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.  If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.  If his forces are united, separate them.  If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them.  Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”, 5th century BC

When I created my first website on the internet, some twenty-plus years ago, it was a fairly nerve-racking experience.  I had dabbled with HTML and Javascript for a couple of years before that but I knew nothing about cross-browser capable websites or CSS or all the other features we take for granted these days, and this internet thing was a whole new experience.  Suddenly my work would be on show for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people to see{footnote}I still have a copy of my first website stored on a CD somewhere.{/footnote}.

Over time, as I practised my webcraft, I became more confident and adventurous—exploring the opportunities of DHTML, client-server applications, etc.—and, by the time I left the workforce, I was in a good position to use my experience … perhaps to make some spare change.  Who knows?

My first experiments with Joomla! were a shambles.  I must have created forty or more test websites before I came to terms with it.  I spent entire days just reading:  books, online tutorials, forum discussions, anything I could lay my hands on.  Fortunately, I stumbled onto a group of people who were willing to offer me their help and things just snowballed from that.

It’s probably no surprise that, for the first few years of my involvement with Joomla!, I really had no sense of purpose about what I could do with it in my retirement years.

As nerve-racking as it is to put yourself “out there”—spending whole weeks or months preparing for the journey into the unknown—Twitter comes along and it's life-or-death in 280 characters