My name is Bob Bloom and I am a professional freelance Joomla specialist in Toronto Canada.
I started freelancing in the fall of 2006, specializing in Joomla right from the start.
It didn't take long to get into Virtuemart, the only free open source ecommerce extension at the time. People paid for Virtuemart help, so I ended up spending more and more time on Virtuemart. Having a certain persistence with the code, I built my specialty.
Like so many people, I was thrust into freelancing. I'm lucky, because I have accounting, info tech, and an independent streak that came in handy. But being on my own was an education on its own, despite whatever head start I had, and I'm glad that that initial period is behind me!
My Virtuemart breakthrough came when a shyster client (I didn't know he was a shyster client at the time!) needed a product to skip the VM shipping method. I decided to crack open Virtuemart, and my Shipping Bypass add-on was born. It was incorporated into the VM core for version 1.1. But, boy, those were late nights!
A lightbulb went off and my e-marketing premise changed to "people come to me". I had a specialty, so time to e-market it. So I posted my add-ons on my new forum, I did a blog, and people found me. It really worked. I hit diminishing returns with this "let's do free add-ons and free forums", though, which led to the creation of my new subscription site VirtuemartGuy.com. That site is gone, barely off the ground, but the idea lives on with my new subscription site.
I launched VirtuemartGuy.com in tandem with my joining the new-old Virtuemart team that was incorporating JMart back into a Virtuemart MVC version. Yes, Virtuemart was forked into JMart, then JMart was folded into Virtuemart. My site would be a Virtuemart news site, among other things. As part of being the "news guy" on the new-old Virtuemart Team, I tested the idea of an internet radio show. The short version is: I decided to switch to the new kid on the Joomla ecommerce block: Tienda; and, I continued with my show idea with a Tienda bias.
Now, I am getting on with my post-Virtuemart phase of my freelancing career. And it's going to be a good one!
-Bob
