Inspired in large part by this great post from Wordpress expert Andrew Rickmann, as the second half of 2009 begins I’m tackling lots more than this site’s overdue migration to Joomla 1.5.x and Wordpress 2.8; I’m contemplating the important questions of what I do and why — and why it matters to my clients and readers (and even a few Twitter followers).

1. What is Mango Digital?

2. Why base the business around open-source projects, products & services?

3. What is community?

4. What is the Mango Digital community?

5. Why does this matter?

6. Where is this going?

I’ve written several website business plans, web-strategy presentations and Joomla extension translations, all of which are free. However, as Wayne Smallman comments in the same blog post cited above: “my reimbursement has been and continues to be the exposure my skills and expertise enjoy as a result of people using and sharing my products, which is an extension of my knowledge.” So that’s definitely still going to be an important part of the purpose of Mango Digital, and I’ll make information and advice available in myriad forms – Twitter, downloads, SlideShare, emails, etc. – yet my time is not free (and gets increasingly more valuable).

I’ll continue to provide advice and development services for  clients’ projects and communities, but as you’ll discover in coming months, I’ll be dedicating my efforts and time on creating new & unique online communities that add value to a market, an audience or a place.

Where am I? I feel like I’ve been lost on some island in the Pacific: hard drive crash & recovery on my Powerbook not once but twice, knocking me out of commission for 2 weeks the first time (fortunately under warranty) and then 2 months the second time (oops, warranty expired). The 2nd time was the killer – the drive was dead, worthless, kaput.

In order to finance a new laptop — nothing less than an Apple Macbook Pro was acceptable — I had to juggle several projects, put others on standby, postpone some payments and trade work for financing my little pony toy tool. It wasn’t easy, but I’m back in business.

Over the past 2 weeks I have edited my sites (this one now has my portfolio and plans & pricing), updated my blogs to the most recent version of Wordpress, integrated open-source customer support help desk software, written up some job/collaborator descriptions (to be announced soon), and of course reinstalled, reorganized and backed up the contents of my shiny, new MBP.

Now that I’ve recovered my username and passwords, I have a lot to share with you!

PD: For those of you who read my blog at Apodo.tv, this story is a little bit different yet the title of this post was so good I just had to use it here too!