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 ...

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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!

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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.

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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 int…

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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!

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Despite the fact that we don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia we are indeed quite happy to take a moment to stop, and say thanks. So as a big thank you to our all of members and of any future members, we have just made a new coupon available for you to use.

Just use the coupon code "bamboothanks" on the final page of our check out (remember to hit apply) and you can receive a 25% discount off any of our subscriptions.

Existing members can also take advantage of our standard discount for renewals and receive a further 20% off using the standard renewal code to get an even better deal.

This coupon is valid until Monday 26th November.

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The design of this blog has been in a much needed refresh for some time now. This is a soft launch, as we iron out some wrinkles, but based on the state of the old design I thought it was best to push a soft launch now and fill in the details later.

I've also improved the font size, line height and line width so you should find the text to be a lot more readable.

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Most of our members will already know that subscriptions to our Joomla template club are priced using US Dollars. In an effort to make our life a little easier and process our accounts faster, I've just changed our prices from USD to AUD.

What does this mean to our customers?

The difference in USD and AUD at the moment is very minimal and has been for the best part (or perhaps more) of the last 12 months. The currency change will only mean an extra few dollars across all of our subscriptions.

Current exchange rate for USD to AUD is sitting at $1 AUD is worth $1.03 USD.

What does this mean to us?

The benefit to us ( I hope) will be considerable given that we will now be dealing solely in Australian dollars which will make our accounting processes a lot more transparent. In addition to this, we will also avoid Paypal's (how shall we put it?) "creative" conversation rates when making a withdrawal from a foreign currency. This will actually improve our bottom line and allow us to give more back in the way of coupons.

Please note: This is a trial change and we may or may not revisit this further down the track.

Coupons? Did someone say coupon?

As a sweetener for this low impact change in our system you can grab a 20% discount off any subscription by using the coupon "USDTOAUD". This coupon will be valid until Monday morning Australian time.

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We are pleased to announce that we have recently partnered with SiteGround to deliver hosting services for the JoomlaBamboo website. In fact, we moved servers a few months ago but I wanted to hold off on the blog post as we put the new server through it's paces.

SiteGround knows Joomla

SiteGround is a well known supporter of Joomla and has been offering specialized Joomla hosting services for many years now. They currently host more than 80 000 Joomla websites and have proven to be a reliable, secure and specialized Joomla hosting provider. That's why we chose them in the first place.

A faster website

If you've noticed the tremendous performance burst in the Joomlabamboo website, now you know the reason. As of the last month or two, our website has been generously hosted for free on their platform and we're nothing less but extremely pleased with the service we receive from them. In fact this increase in speed has translated in to a significant bump in traffic.

Decrease in page load time.

The graph below highlights the change in average site speed for Joomlabamboo. As you can see there was a significant drop in page load times for the month of August and while the average is still a little high for my liking much of that is down to on-page and template optimisation.

(As a disclaimer, our previous server setup was a well tuned VPS, while our current setup at SiteGround is a dedicated server so you would expect to see an improvement here. But in Google's new world order shaving a second or two off page load can mean the difference of a front page vs second or third page result.)

Increase in traffic around the same time.

The new server was switched on on the 2nd of August and the high point on the graph below reflects the number of visitors we received for the month of August. The graph is a little deceptive but it represents around a 25% bump in traffic. There are a few factors that go towards traffic spikes of course, but it's undeniable that site speed is a big factor when it comes to google ranking and organic site visits.

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