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Meet Dwight David Honeycutt

December 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This political spoof video of Dwight David Honeycutt, Conway, Arkansas school board candidate, has been circulating around for a little while now.  It’s absolutely hilarious!  I debated as to whether or not I should post it to my blog or not because it has some bad language, but I decided this morning to go ahead and archive it on The Cotton Club because it’s just that funny! 

Be forewarned though, Dwight has a potty mouth on him and drops the “F” bomb a few times in this 5 minute video, so you might want to shut the door to your office before you watch it.  You have been warned.  Oh, in case you are wondering, yes, Dwight is on Facebook!  Be sure to become a fan…

Filed Under: Funny

Some Personal, Business, & Development Goals for 2010

December 23, 2009 By 3 Comments

Image2 The other day I was looking over my personal goals that I had set going into 2009.  I feel really good about what I was able to accomplish in 2009 but unfortunately there are still a few things that I am going to carry over into 2010. 

This is not to say that 2009 was a bad year, in fact I would say that 2009 was probably one of the best years I have had in a long time, especially in terms of business and personal development.

Personal Goals for 2010

I have set some pretty high goals for myself personally going into 2010 as compared to what I set for 2009.  I have learned that I respond well when I put pressure on myself.  Hopefully by setting the bar high I will be able to motivate myself to another level personally.

  • Private Pilots License: One of the goals that I had for myself coming into 2009 was to get my pilots license.  While I did manage to get a few lessons in I didn’t really devote a lot of time to accomplishing this goal.  I am going to try to put forth a little more effort this year to get my license.  I have checked into some classes offered by UCA for private pilot certification. 
  • Business Networking: One of the things I am most proud of in 2009 was helping to organize the Central Arkansas Refresh user group.  I reflected on the #Refresh group a few weeks ago and gave some insight into how it all came together.  Basically social media powered the group, but the group itself and our monthly meetings allowed me to make some awesome business contacts in the Central Arkansas area.  I hope to continue growing my personal network in 2010 through outlets like the #RefreshCA group as well as attending various conferences.
  • Speaking: I was fortunate enough to have been asked to speak at couple of events this past year on a variety of topics, primarily interactive marketing and social media.  I really enjoyed being a part of these events and I hope to continue to take advantage of these opportunities when they present themselves.
  • Diversify: While my passion is, and always will be, the internet, I plan on becoming involved in a few areas outside the web in 2010 as well.  I have a lot of irons in the fire right now and I am not ready to make any announcements regarding any projects or anything just yet but I can assure you this, whatever business deals I get involved in 2010, they will strictly be sideline projects.  I plan on staying actively involved doing what I am doing until I retire, these side projects will just hopefully help me retire a little bit sooner.
  • Run in a 5k: Another one of my goals coming into 2009 was to become more healthy but I obviously didn’t do as well in that department as I would have liked.  Hopefully I can do a lot better job in 2010.  In order to push myself toward this goal I am going to try to run in at least one 5k this year.  I haven’t decided on where or when yet, but after the first of the year I am going to start running and try to make this happen by at least the end of the summer.
  • Build my Personal Brand: In a lot of ways I have already been building my personal brand by blogging here at The Cotton Club and by staying pretty active on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but I am going to try to take things to another level in 2010 by adding some exciting new things.  One of the things that I will be adding is a podcast.  I haven’t worked on the specifics just yet as to how often it’s going to be released or even when the first episode will air but I can assure you that it will happen in the first quarter of 2010.

Business Goals for 2010

My partners and I had a great year in 2009 despite the economic downturn that plagued the nation.  We managed to pick up some great new accounts as well as further refine the focus of our business.  I would like to build upon some of the products and services that we had a lot of success with this past year.  Here’s the list of business goals I have put together so far…

  • Email Outsourcing / Archiving: I have blogged a lot the past few months about our premium email products and archival solutions because a lot of attention has been placed on regulatory compliance in a lot of industries.  I think that we have a very competitive solution that will continue to do well for us in 2010.
  • Shared & VPS Solutions: Over the years my partners and I have made a tremendous investment in our hosting infrastructure.  Today, thanks to virtualization, we are able to provide VPS, or virtual private server, solutions to development firms for a very competitive rate, even on a national scale.  I am going to try to make an effort to promote our hosting solutions a lot more in 2010 than I did in 2009.
  • Ministry Web Solutions: This past year we launched Powersite ministry solutions to showcase our web design and development packages geared toward churches or non-profit organizations.  We have had a great response so far from the Powersite launch and I hope to continue that momentum going into 2010.
  • Social Media / Interactive Marketing: My partners and I had a lot of success this year steering a lot of our clients into the realm of social media.  We also saw some tremendous results from our efforts.  I hope to make social media an even-more integral part of what we provide for our clients in 2010.

Development Goals for 2010

I didn’t do a lot of custom application development this past year so I have come up with some goals for the upcoming year to get me back into the development mindset.  Here’s what I have come up with so far…

  • Develop 2 iPhone Apps: I have two ideas that I think could be profitable, I just have to finalize my project parameters and complete the markup models for each project, which I should be able to do by the first quarter of next year, then I have the rest of the year to familiarize myself with Objective C programming and knock these projects out. 
  • Develop 2 WordPress Plugins: I also have two ideas for WordPress plugins that I want to release in 2010.  I already have started coding on both of these projects but haven’t had the spare time to devote to wrapping them up.  I typically code on these types of projects after hours in between client projects.  Hopefully I will find the time in 2010, stay tuned to this blog for info on both of these plugins.
  • Develop 2 Web Applications: I also have two web applications, both geared toward the agriculture industry, that I should be able to launch in 2010.  Both applications are 75% complete, I am just waiting on some regulatory guidelines to be handed down by a few more states and then I can wrap everything up.  I won’t go into a lot of detail about these apps right now but will when we finally roll them out.
  • Develop a MODx Project: My business partner Greg primarily works in MODx while I develop most of my projects in WordPress.  While both solutions are great for content management, they are both very different in terms of their core foundation.  I would like to develop a project this next year in MODx so I can become more familiar with it’s operation and functionality.
Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Stay Tuned for NASCAR Posts in 2010

December 20, 2009 By 3 Comments

nascar-blog-link This past year I did a lot of blogging on the topic of NASCAR for a side project that my partners and I launched.  I covered probably half of the season and supplied content on a bi-weekly basis related to the drivers and teams involved with the sport.  While 2009 was an awesome season, I think that 2010 is going to be even better.  With that being said, I just wanted to let all of you that followed my NASCAR posts on other websites that it is my intention to incorporate NASCAR into the list of topics that I blog about here at The Cotton Club.

There is a school of thought that bloggers should stick to one topic and I have to admit I have even bought into this school of thought myself.  Since I primarily blog about my business, Pleth, and the products and services that we provide, which include Email Outsourcing, Managed Web Hosting, Graphic Design, Application Development, and Website Design, it literally flies in the face of reason that I would even consider adding another topic to my blog that is as unrelated as NASCAR to my categories.  I have to admit that I have given it a lot of thought, and even considered launching a NASCAR only blog separate from The Cotton Club but decided against it.

My reasoning for adding NASCAR to The Cotton Club is simple, my readers come to my blog to hear from me, not necessarily about a particular topic.  Occasionally I have blogged about Sports and other topics and for the most part those posts have been all well received.  I have also posted a lot of unrelated viral videos to this blog over the years and they have become very popular as well.  I looked around at what other bloggers in the industry were doing and noticed that a few of them have already broken out of the mindset that they have to stay on topic.  I have seen ShoeMoney blog about UFC fights in the past on his blog and if anything he has picked up readership.

In closing I want to say this, I don’t expect to post near as many NASCAR related posts as I do business posts.  In fact, I bet there will be a 5:1 ratio on my posts, if not more than that, I am just hoping to broaden my horizons in 2010 and have some fun.  If readership picks up, great.  If it drops, oh well.

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Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with NASCAR.  I am merely a fan of the sport and any views that I may express on this blog are solely my views and in no way reflect the views of NASCAR or it’s parent company, ISC (International Speedway Corp.).

Filed Under: NASCAR™, Sports Tagged With:

2009 Review: Huge Year for Facebook (Poll)

December 17, 2009 By 3 Comments

Going into 2009 I think we all knew that social media was going to transform the web as we knew it but I don’t think that any of us expected it to explode into the mainstream as fast as it did.  The 3 big social networks, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace all entered 2009 with some impressive numbers already but by year end, I bet they were just as surprised as we were.  In this year in review post I am going to focus on Facebook and some of the changes that we witnessed from them this year…

The Facebook Connect Rollout

Facebook expanded their social network domination by rolling out Facebook Connect in a big way this past year, I blogged several times on this topic, you can find those posts here.  In a nutshell, Facebook Connect allows Facebook users to authenticate themselves on external websites with their Facebook accounts, therefore taking their identity with them to external websites.  This has rapidly become a preferred method for authentication for users that don’t want to manage separate logins for every site or web service that they use. This functionality gave Facebook another huge boost in surpassing MySpace, in my opinion, because of the openness of their connect platform versus MySpace’s.

Facebook Design Changes

2009 also saw at least two design changes to the user interface for Facebook.  These updates were met at first with opposition but I think eventually they were accepted.  Here is a post I did back in March regarding one phase of their rollout that affected their home, profile, and activity streams.  Facebook pages also underwent some changes, I blogged about those edits here if you are interested.

Changes to TOS (Terms of Service)

Some other big stories for Facebook this past year had to do with their TOS (Terms of Service) changes, I blogged a few times on this topic if you are interested, see here and here…  For the most part I think that this was a whole lot to do about nothing, but I do know of a handful of people that disappeared forever as a result of these changes.

A Huge Year for Growth

Facebook is the king of the mountain in terms of users with over 350 million.  Of the 350 million Facebook users, 50% of these users are active on a daily basis.  The word Facebook can be heard on just about every newscast you watch everyday as well as an appendage on the marketing materials for just about every major company out there, this probably hasn’t hurt Facebook’s growth one bit.  Here are some additional statistics provided by Facebook, some of this is extremely interesting:

Here are some additional statistics provided by Facebook:

  • More than 350 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • More than 35 million users update their status each day
  • More than 55 million status updates posted each day
  • More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
  • More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
  • More than 3.5 million events created each month
  • More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
  • More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
  • Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
  • Average user has 130 friends on the site
  • Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
  • Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
  • Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
  • Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
  • Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
  • Average user is invited to 3 events per month
  • Average user is a member of 12 groups
  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Facebook is Finally Profitable

For someone not familiar with how the web operates, this next point is probably going to come as a shock.  Up until 2009 Facebook had not ever turned an actual profit.  Yes, the company grew, but it’s growth was a direct result of angel investors that were able to get in on the ground floor of this emerging fireball.  I did a blog post back in September where I discussed Facebook’s announcement that they were finally profitable if you are interested.

Incorporated into Search Engines

When we learned back in September / October of this year that Bing and Google were planning on adding social media to their search results I think a lot of us already saw this coming.  While it’s really early to predict how Facebook is going to play in terms of the search equation at this time, I think we will learn a lot more about that in 2010.  I did a few posts in relation to this topic here and again here if you are interested.

Facebook Usernames & URL’s

Facebook launched Usernames and URL’s this past year for both users and businesses inside their network.  There was a silent goldrush as companies battled to secure their Facebook vanity urls.  This “goldrush” just solidified Facebook’s position as an online marketing outlet for corporations in my opinion.

What’s Next for Facebook? Marketplace?

I think that a couple of things are going to be big topics for Facebook followers in 2010.  One of these issues will be privacy controls.  Facebook has already implemented some changes to their privacy controls in 2009 but I think we will see some even more detailed streamlining on tap for 2010.  I think that another area worth watching for 2010 is the Facebook Marketplace, I posted on this topic recently if you are interested, I suspect that as Facebook rapidly approaches an IPO the marketplace will be one area that they will focus a lot of their efforts.

Head to Head w/ Twitter?

Personally, I still don’t see Facebook and Twitter as direct competition to one another, so I won’t weigh in on any strategies Facebook might have for going after Twitter, but I will say that their recent move to get into the URL shortening market has me scratching my head wondering why they would want to venture into that direction.

Developers, Developers, Developers…

I think that the openness of Facebook API will further encourage developers to roll out more fun and useful applications for the network.  Since I am not a heavy application user in Facebook I don’t have any predictions as to what kind of applications just yet, but I suspect there will be a Farmtown on Steroids that all of our mothers can’t live without at some point in 2010.

What About FriendFeed?

One last thing to watch for in 2010 from Facebook is FriendFeed.  This past year we saw Facebook purchase this company, and for the most part a lot of us inside the industry slapped our hands on our foreheads and asked “why??”…  FriendFeed is an extremely popular social aggregator / network that has tremendous user loyalty.  It will be interesting to see what Facebook does with this purchase.  I blogged about the purchase of FriendFeed back in August if you are interested…

In closing, please take a second to let us know which social network you will spend the most time inside 2010.  Also, I still maintain a pretty active presence on Facebook, if you are a Facebook user be sure to add me as a friend…

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , ,

2009 Review: Open Source CMS Advancements (Poll)

December 16, 2009 By 1 Comment

Since CMS, or content management solutions, are a pivotal part of the web development industry, I thought that I would do a year-end review of the top open-source solutions that are on the market and try to highlight some areas of advancement that took place.  One thing that was evident to me in 2009 was the core advancements that were made in many of the open-source content management community.

Not only did we see a lot of core improvements to established solutions like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, but we also saw some some emerging solutions make some big strides.  One of these solutions that my partners and i utilized this past year was MODx.

Content Management Systems in 2009

In terms of market share WordPress led the group of open-sourced content management solutions by a large margin (averaging 433,767 downloads per week).  Second on the list was Joomla (averaging 189,429 weekly downloads). Drupal was the third most popular content management solution (averaging 62,500 weekly downloads).  These figures are from CMS Wire’s 2009 report, a very interesting report if you are a web developer.  In terms of installations and evaluations, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal also topped the group.  The rankings according to adoption were flip-flopped with Drupal gaining the most ground, followed closely by Joomla and WordPress.  In terms of brand recognition and overall perception, WordPress led the pack by an impressive margin.

Advancements in Plugin Development (WordPress)

Aside from the core advancements that were made in 2009 there were also a ton of plugins released by the development community.  In the case of WordPress, the CMS that I follow the closest, I was most impressed with some of the plugin releases that addressed common needs such as e-commerce, messaging, event management, and social media.  There has also been a lot of talk about paid or premium plugins this past year.  This idea was met w/ a lot of debate inside the wordpress community.  For years everything wordpress has been readily available for free.  Personally, I have no problem with paid or premium plugins.  I think that if developers are able to actually put a price tag on their contributions that it will go a long way toward advancing the plugin options that we have available to us as developers.

Advancements in Theme Development (WordPress)

There were also some major advancements in the wordpress theme community as well.  Some leaders in that community like Brian Gardner and WooThemes really stepped up to the plate and delivered some nice foundations for us to design our client projects from.  There were also some nice multi-purpose themes like Thesis and WP-Remix that gained a lot of traction.  I reviewed the WP-Remix wordpress theme earlier this year here if you are interested.  Another neat product for theme development that I stumbled upon this past year was a WYSIWYG theme generator called Artisteer, I also reviewed their product here if you are interested.

What advancements will we see in the wordpress theme community in 2010?  Honestly I think we are going to see some major advancements, I know from following his tweets that Brian Gardner is working some pretty cool things at StudioPress.  I also think that we are going to see more solutions become available like PSD2CSS that will convert PSD Photoshop Files to WordPress themes.  I have also heard of this being approached from a Photoshop plugin perspective as well, meaning that you could export wordpress themes from WordPress.  It’s just a matter of time if you ask me, this is where it’s at.  Functionality for WordPress is already there for WordPress, design limitations are the only real constraints at this time.

Poll: What is Your Favorite CMS to Work With?

Please take a few seconds to complete the poll below and let us know what your favorite open-source content management solution is to work with.

Filed Under: MODx CMS, Web Development, Wordpress™ Tagged With: , , ,

WordPress Plugin: Max Banner Ad Plugin

December 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This past week I have been working on a project for a sports radio station in WordPress.  One of the requirements for the project was that they wanted to be able to run a lot of advertising rotations (banner ads) on the site.  My partners and I have an ad server of our own that none of us are really that fond of but it gets the job done.  I wasn’t looking forward to adding a lot of JavaScript’s to the theme I have been working on all week so I decided to see what WordPress plugins might be available for serving ads.

I found quite a few plugins out there but not a single one I installed on my sandbox machine worked the way that I thought it should until I ran across one called Max Banner Ads.  This is a free plugin that is made available as “review-ware” to the WordPress community.  From the minute I activated this plugin it has worked exactly the way that I thought it should.  One of the biggest considerations I have when using an unfamiliar plugin with WordPress is how easy am I going to be able to demonstrate this to my clients so that they will be comfortable using it.

The beauty of this plugin as opposed to our internal ad server is that I didn’t have to go in and modify the theme at all.  Basically the plugin allows you to add banners wherever you want them to go.  There are 4 pre-defined positions already setup, you can add a new position if business picks up.  The 4 predefined locations are 1) Top of the Posts 2) Bottom of the Last Post  3) Within a Post (usually under the page title) and 4) Show as a widget.  I really like the ability of dropping in several widget ads and being able to move them around to accommodate for the other widgets the client has requested.

The Max Banner Ads plugin not only serves ads exactly where you want them but it also gives you some metrics for your ads so you can track how well they are doing.  Granted, I have seen more elaborate traffic analytics but for most small business clients this should do the trick.

Some other things that I like about the plugin are that you have the option of loading a banner add by uploading it from your local machine, which is what a vast majority of my clients are going to want to do in the first place.  It also allows you to display remotely hosted graphics if you run into a situation like that.

Again, I have been using the free version of this plugin, I noticed that there is a link located below the ads that you can remove if you decide you want to buy the pro version.  I think the price for that plugin was in the neighborhood of $50, which isn’t half bad if you are looking for a solution to serve ads inside of WordPress.  The best part, it’s simple to manage.

Filed Under: Monetization, Wordpress™ Tagged With:

20 Advantages w/ Pleth’s Business Class Email

December 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday I was speaking with a close friend who owns a software company that caters to a Niche market inside the healthcare industry.  He has had a lot of success in the software industry over the years and is a whole lot of fun to collaborate with.  As of late he and I have a couple of personal projects that we have been  working on together and it’s been an awesome experience.  We have been looking for some opportunities as to where we could actually partner our two companies together with a product or service offering of some sort.

We have had a lot of ideas so far, but nothing to announce yet.  One thing however that he and I have discussed was the popularity of our business class email solutions.  I was telling him how easy our solution is to roll-out and how cost effective, even for larger scale operations, it can be as opposed to managing email in-house.  Another aspect that he and I have been monitoring closely is the need for a solid email archiving solution in the healthcare industry.  Just about everyone of his existing clients right now are required to do some sort of email archiving and data retention.  This is an area that my business partners and I feel like we can be extremely successful in 2010, so look for a lot more blog posts from me on Email Archiving in the upcoming months.

My friend asked me to put together some high-points about our Email Solution that I thought might be of value to his niche client base in the Health Care Industry so we could have a starting point to put together some sort of partnership / plan of attack.  Here’s 20 talking points in relation to our email solution.  This is just a broad overview, if you are interested in additional information, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

    1. No Hardware Leases or Software Licenses to Manage!
    2. No Long Term Contacts (Month to Month Service)
    3. Standard Accounts Have 10GB of Mailbox Storage Space (Scalable)
    4. Standard Accounts Have the Ability to Send / Receive 50mb File Attachments.
    5. Standard Accounts Have Free Backup & Synchronization Tools.
    6. Extremely Intuitive Ajax Driven Webmail User Interface (Access Email From Any Computer)
    7. Compatible with Desktop Email Clients (Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)
    8. Compatible with Smartphone’s (Blackberry, Palm, HTC, iPhone, etc.)
    9. Compatible with all Standard Email Protocols (PHP3, IMAP, SMTP)
    10. Popular Groupware Applications (Shared Contacts, Calendars, etc.)
    11. Popular Business Productivity Apps (Tasks, Subtasks, Notes, etc.)
    12. User Level Account Management (Change Password, Personal Settings, etc.)
    13. Administrator Level Account Management (Management of Services, Users, etc.)
    14. Administrator Level Reporting for System Interactions (Users, Activity, Date, Time, IP Addresses)
    15. Advanced Spam & Virus Protection (Server Level)
    16. Advanced SSL & DoD Encryption w/ HMAC=SHA1 Authentication for Device to Device Communications
    17. Top Tier Secure Datacenter / Multiple Backbone Providers / Redundancy
    18. Scalable for Future Growth / From 1 Mailbox to 10,000
    19. Adherence to Regulatory Compliance Regulations (PCI, DSS, SBO, HIPPAA, etc.)
    20. Optional Email Archiving & Retention Solutions (Low-Cost Add-On)
Filed Under: Email Solutions Tagged With:

Thoughts on Email Archiving & Regulatory Compliance

December 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I recently wrote a post for our corporate website about Sarbanes-Oxley and the impact it has on corporate email archiving and retention.  Lately I have been hearing a lot of friends in the IT industry talk about how they are being forced to comply with stronger regulatory guidelines for industry compliance.  Granted, this is not anything new, the whole Sarbanes-Oxley thing went into affect in 2002 right after Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom left their shareholders wondering what had happened to their investment portfolios.  The ultimate goal for Sarbanes-Oxley, as best that I can tell, was to mandate a level of accountability and transparency to corporations, especially publicly traded corporations, and to protect the interests of shareholders and investors.

Since 2002 there have also been many instances where records from corporations have been subpoenaed by a grand jury to investigate various allegations.  In some of these instances the corporations claimed that they did not have these records.  The regulatory compliance and data retention aspect of how many businesses do business today is still unacceptable so many industries are starting to roll out these regulations (that all resemble Sarbanes-Oxley in some form or another) to protect the integrity of their industries. 

This is where Pleth gets involved.  Our premium email solution has been an extremely product for us over the years with many of our business clients.  Whether it’s a small business or a Fortune 500 company, our email solution is top notch.  Given the fact that a lot of our existing clients are starting to inquire about email data retention and archiving we have added that service as an add-on to our email service.  There is a per box fee for archiving tacked on at the end of each month, the charges for this service are nominal in comparison to what it would cost to bring an archival system in house. 

If you are interested in learning more about email archiving, please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss your needs.  My partners and I would love the opportunity to work with your company in 2010. 

Filed Under: Email Solutions Tagged With: ,

Instead of a Christmas Letter, Some Random Thoughts…

December 10, 2009 By 4 Comments

christmaspic-1

In lieu of our usual long-winded Christmas letter detailing all of the exciting things we did this year, I have decided to share some things that have been on my mind lately.  This may come as a surprise, but occasionally I do have my serious moments where I am not blowing things up in the backyard.

The Things We Take for Granted…

A few days ago I was talking with some friends in Texas who informed me of a little girl who had put on her Christmas wish list that all she wanted for Christmas was a bed.  Not a Dora the Explorer doll, or a purple 3 Musketeers Barbie Doll (don’t ask me how I know about these) but just a bed to sleep in, something we all take for granted.  This has marinated in my head the past 2 days and it has just about driven me crazy.  The things we take for granted can sometimes be viewed as luxuries by others.  Also, why is it that the only time of year we even go out in search of situations like this is during Christmas? I think that a lot of times it’s our own selfish desire to end the year on a good note by giving to those less fortunate than ourselves than it is anything else.  I am not pointing fingers at anyone but myself, and certainly not knocking any of the charities doing great work this time of year for those in need, I applaud what you are doing.  The point that I think we should all ponder is this; what if we all were on the lookout for situations like this little girl all year long, and when possible help them out, regardless of the season?

Cherish Every Moment w/ the Ones You Love…

For the past few weeks I have been praying diligently for a friend that has spent every day for as long as I can remember at his wife’s side in a hospital while she battles for her life.  Meanwhile, I complain when my wife asks me to hang my clothes up in the closet.  What in the world would I do if I was in a situation like my friend is in?  I know exactly what I would do, I would hang on to every second we have together and cherish it like it was our last.  I love my wife dearly and love the fact that she and I are together just about every hour of the day.  Even though I would never admit it to her, I can’t even stand for her to be gone to the grocery store without me, we have that much fun together just hanging out.  I once had an anxiety attack in the parking lot of UAMS while she was just having a medical procedure, I can’t imagine what my friend is going through, but I do know that he has tremendous faith and it’s that faith that will see him through.

I have also been praying for 4 friends that lost their jobs this past year and haven’t been able to find jobs.  Sometimes I take for granted that I am doing what I love to do for a living, and that I am one of the co-founders of a successful web company that despite a strong economic downturn this past year, we were able to prosper.  I also have two of the best business partners a guy could ask for, as well as some of the best clients imaginable.  I can’t imagine what it’s like to be unemployed, especially this time of year.  I am extremely thankful for all of the blessings God has bestowed upon our business.

This past year our families have been brought even closer together by a series of traumatic events. One of my aunts had a stroke, another one had a terrible fall.  This past year we also dealt with the passing of Donna’s grandfather and have watched Alzheimer’s take its toll on her grandmother. While all of these events were each devasting in their own way, we have all become very mindful that things could always be worse, and if it wasn’t for God’s ultimate mercy, they would have certainly been worse.

Looking to God During the Hard Times…

The most traumatic event for my wife and I this year happened back in October.  As I am sure a lot of you already know, Donna and I have been trying for 4 years now to have children.  We have spent thousands on fertility treatments, inseminations, etc., and finally after some adverse side affects from one of our last fertility treatments I told Donna that I didn’t want to proceed any further down that road because I loved her too much and didn’t want to see her go through the side affects any longer.  About a month or two after we stopped the treatments and told God that we knew He wanted us to have children so we were going to leave all doors open for Him to give us our baby, and that included adoption, we started filling out paperwork, requesting information, etc. I bet I hauled in 200lbs of adoption literature from the mailbox that month.  Well, wouldn’t you know it, we got pregnant on our own.

We were approximately 5 weeks pregnant and were in Oklahoma City attending church with our Brother and Sister in Law when Donna started having terrible abdominal pains. I immediately rushed her to the hospital and was even considering a med-flight to UAMS when we got the news that we had miscarried.  We spent the next 2 weeks clinging to each other trying to make sense of the emotional roller coaster we had just been on.  It would have been very easy for us to become discouraged, and I have to admit there were moments I questioned God as to why this happened, but in the end, God showed my wife and I both what we needed to see.  It’s not that He was telling us we couldn’t have children, He was just telling us that we didn’t need anything other than Him to get pregnant. No fertility or doctors, just Him.  He also showed us that this miscarriage happened for a reason, we don’t know the reason, it could be any number of things, but it did happen for a reason and that we will get pregnant again in His timing.  The lesson I learned from all of this was to just turn things over to Him and let Him take care of it, something that I will never forget.  Now, I can’t say for sure when my wife and I will be pregnant again, but stay tuned to my Twitter and Facebook and you will be the first to know (well, outside of the immediate family I guess).

I certainly hope that this blog post wasn’t too big of a downer, certainly not the happy Christmas letter that a lot of you have come to expect from us in past years, these were just a few things that we wanted to share…

If we don’t see you over the Holidays,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
Cotton & Donna


Filed Under: Faith / Family, Miscellaneous Tagged With:

Current Projects: Custom PHP/MySQL Members CMS

December 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

It’s been a long time since I actually coded a custom standalone php application for a client and I found my skills to be a little rusty at first.  The reason I don’t get to code a lot of custom applications anymore is because most of the client projects we see today are built on top of a cms like wordpress or a framework like modx. In this instance the client already had their website developed internally and just needed us to develop an enhanced members area so they could communicate and share information with their members. 

The membership table for this project has approximately 500 members in it, each member has the ability to authenticate by login and then view protected content.  Members can also submit changes to their contact or login information that has to be approved before it’s accepted.  Of course the normal features such as lost password restoration are also in place. 

arhealthcaremembers1

This solution was built entirely using PHP and all of the data is stored in 17 tables inside a MySQL database.  For easier management of a large membership database with over 500 members, I also built in the ability to export and import data to the database from either XLS or CSV format.  This should be another convenient aspect of the solution for our client.

arhealthcaremembers2

I am pretty anxious to demo this application and bug-test it this next week.  I used the newest version of PHPRunner IDE to develop this project and even though I was a little out of practice I still was able to code the project a lot faster than if I had used another tool like Eclipse or Notepad.  The new version of PHPR is very nice, it’s been a while since I upgraded and have to admit that there are so many new features that I haven’t even looked into yet.

Filed Under: Current Projects Tagged With: , ,
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