If you haven't gotten started yet, now is the time to get involved in the Joomla Chicago online community.  In just the last few weeks, there have been daily increases in activity -- and that means more opportunities for all of us to network with other Joomlaistas and expand our web skills, our web activities, and our web businesses.

Try these three simple ways to get into the swing of things:

• * log onto Joomla Chicago and update your profile to tell the rest of us about yourself
• * take a close look at all those snazzy pictures of the other members and pick a few to "friend" - it's fun!
• * follow the links to recent updates to discussion posts. Add your two cents! You'll start getting emails as other people join the conversation

Get started now! You'll be amazed a month from now to see how many great connections you've made!

What's your favorite way to interact with the Joomla Chicago online community?

Being so active within the Joomla Development Community and recently talking so much about the benefits of social networking recently I was thinking about all of the resources that I knew about that most other people using Joomla probably never knew existed. I thought I would share some of these valuable resources here with you.

For those that have a Twitter account and want to follow primarily Joomla related tweets here are a few links that you WON'T want to miss. You can follow everyone on these lists in one easy click.

Main list of Joomla Experts
http://tweepml.org/Joomla/

Some of the best Joomla Extension Developers
http://tweepml.org/Best-Joomla-Extensions-Developers/

http://tweepml.org/joomlaextensions/

Some of the best Joomla Template Developers
http://tweepml.org/joomlatemplates/

There are also 2 additional and might I add, very complete lists of RSS feeds from everything Joomla that you can imagine. 

http://start.joomlaworks.gr/

http://joomla.alltop.com/

Although this is a short list of resources in this blog post if you click on these links you will find that these links will provide you with an extreme amount of very valuable information right at your fingertips.

I suggest that you bookmark these links as they are constantly being updated and added to.

Enjoy!

I'm writing this post as this is the only way I could find out to communicate with all other members of this community.

It appears at the moment that JomSocial is more group-oriented than is community-oriented. In a sense, it breaks off the community by separating users within each group. 

Groups have all the tools to build and grow healthy communities, but if you are not part of a group or if you are a new member and would like to ask a questions and get quick response, how do you do that?

Using JomSocial now, there is not much you can do to interact with the community, besides write a blog post or the article, in order to ask a simple question. Also, if you want fast response, you should probably spam all the members with PMs. 

You would be in everybody's favor :-)

Anyway, the question I had was, should we put the link to this blog in a main menu? 

Of course we should, how else people will find it?

:-)