Joomla!day Greece 2011 - Report

May 30th, 2011 at 10:20 AM CEST in Events

Right now I'm at Athens airport, waiting for my flight to depart. I only have one hour of free internet and no clue when that hour exactly ends. Let's hope I can 'Submit' this blog before the hour ends! Given the one hour limitation I'll post the pictures I've made at a later point.

At one of our great diners out here in Athens, Ryan (Ozimek) asked me "I wonder how you always manage to get these reports on events up so fast" to which I replied: "I just start typing". I think Ryan has gotten the message because this morning when I was checking my Twitter at our favorite free wifi spot (half-way to the event location, just passed the drinks 'n' food stand) he had already gotten up his recap of the event before I had any chance to write it due to my 'early' flight this morning. Congrats on beating me this time ;-)

Location

Both the venue, hotel and country were great. The event was held in the Danaos Cinema which is a awesome venue with one large hall (600 people) and one smaller (100 people). I gave a presentation in both the large and the small hall and therefor can say that both halls were very suitable. Of course the 11.5 x 4.5 screen in the large hall was quite cool!

Most of the international speakers were staying at the President Hotel which is located about 500 metres from the venue. It had nice and spacious rooms, with a good airco, shower and breakfast. The highpoint of the hotel however was the penthouse at the top of the hotel, equiped with both a bar and a swimming pool. Lounging on a nice soft couch, sipping a margarita and listening to some nice jazz music while discussing the latest additions to our Joomla!day Greece 2011 book club (Oprah, eat your heart out!), life was good.

Greece is a pretty amazing country. While I had been in Greece before (on this islands Kos and Rhodes) the experience I've had in Athens was different, but certainly great as well. Warm, sunny, amazing food, Dutch beer (Heineken and Amstel, unfortunately) and of course the Acropolis. The metro (in which I didn't get lost!) was very cheap at EUR 1.40 for unlimited travel during 1.5 hours).

People

I've spend most of my time at the event with Ryan (Ozimek), Johan (Janssens), Alex (Kempkens) and Max (Milbers). I really enjoyed being able to discuss various Joomla and non-Joomla related matters with them. As it seemed while walking to the bar in the evening, Max didn't seem to be able to stop talking about Joomla for more than 5 seconds ;-) Of course our Greek friends Fotis (and Katia), Nicholas (and his wife of which I unfortunately forgot her name, sorry), Nick (of JoomlaPolis) and many others were great company too.

Presentations

I think Joomla!day Greece 2011 had great presentations. While a large part of them was in Greek (and therefor I had no idea what they were about), the ones in English were splendid! The presentations that first come to mind are the keynote of Ryan (with a record breaking amount of slides/min), Max telling us about the new features of the upcoming Virtuemart, Alex explaining us about Joom!Fish, Johan giving his keynote about pirates (which he actually made up during our conversation at the pool the night before) and of course my own two presentation about SEO myths and Joomla 1.6 SEO. I loved giving both presentations and I've noticed that my fluency in English has increased greatly in the last couple of days. At the end of both presentations there was such an enourmous amount of questions that first Fotis and later his lovely girlfriend (not wife, yet) Katia had to come in to tell the audience the time was up.

Conclusion

All in all Joomla!Day 2011 Greece was a great event! Once again thanks to Fotis and his crew for making this first Joomla!Day in Greece happen, and I love to see you all again at a next Joomla!Day.