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Rackspace Conference Interview

May 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

rackspacelogo-thumb1[1] A few months ago I was interviewed at the Rackspace Reseller Conference in Atlanta, Georgia about a variety of topics related to Rackspace. 

As some of you might already be aware I am a huge fan of Rackspace as a company and their CEO Graham Weston, who shares a very similar service philosophy as my partners and I.  If I look a little rough in the video, please keep in mind that we were out until pretty late the night before this was shot and I am working of just a few hours of sleep. That’s my excuse…

My partners and I thoroughly enjoyed the conference and met a lot of really cool resellers from around the globe including Dubai, the Netherlands, Germany, and Mexico.  I also serve on the Rackspace (NASDAQ: RAX)Customer Advisory Board.  In the upcoming months I have also agreed to be part of a webinar focused on email archiving solutions, a product that Pleth has rolled out in a big way recently.

For more on the conference, please see the related links below…

Filed Under: Web Hosting Tagged With: ,

#WCFAY Live Blogging

May 29, 2010 By 3 Comments


Filed Under: Wordpress™

Thoughts on BP Disaster

May 28, 2010 By 3 Comments

bplogo I have tweeted several short rants about the BP oil spill this past week but have tried to stay somewhat silent on the issue until I learned a little bit more. I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, but seeing what’s happening to the beaches in Louisiana has me pretty ticked off. The problem is that we really aren’t learning a lot about what’s going on.  BP is feeding us what they want us to see and with each failed attempt to plug the leak the nation is losing confidence in their ability. 

I have not been a big proponent of government regulation in the past but w/ all of the things that have came to light regarding the good ole boy system that has been in place in Washington for years I think it might be time for stricter oversight when it comes to things that could have tremendous environmental impact like offshore drilling.  I get the impression that a lot of thought of what could happen in this scenario wasn’t given until it actually happened.

The sad and helpless thing of this whole thing is that no one really knows what they can do to help.  There have been several campaigns to boycott BP gas stations but honestly that won’t do a lot of good because BP doesn’t actually own their gas stations, they are owned by franchisees, just ordinary people like you and I that are as far removed from this situation as we are.  Another frustration that we are feeling, especially the people in Louisiana, is that not a lot is being done to start cleaning up the mess before it hits our ecosystems and beaches.  You can’t tell me that a country as advanced as the US can’t multi-task and get the cleanup efforts started.  In Louisiana they don’t even know who is in charge of the cleanup operation, and there is a lot of finger pointing.  I sure hope that the right people can get their game plans together soon and remedy this situation.  It’s just plain sad.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

Pleth to Sponsor Wordcamp #wcfay

May 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

pleth-logo-new[1] My partners and I are pleased to announce that Pleth will be sponsoring this years Wordcamp Fayetteville on May 29-30, 2010 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  This will be the first ever Wordcamp in Arkansas.

From the minute I heard about the conference I knew that I wanted our company to be involved with it in some way.  The WordPress open source CMS accounts for a large percentage of our clients projects these days and with the advances expected in version 3.0 I can only see it’s deployment within our organization growing.

A week ago I had one of the planners from Wordcamp Fayetteville, Christopher Spencer, on The Cotton Club Podcast to discuss the upcoming event and to give us a rundown as to what we can expect to see at this inaugural event. In case you missed it, here’s a link to the show…

Below is a press release about Wordcamp Fayetteville that was released earlier this year:

 

Also, if you are on the fence about attending Wordcamp Fayetteville, here’s some incentive, there are only 5 spots remaining, better jump on Eventbrite and register now!!!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Web Development, Web Hosting, Wordpress™ Tagged With: , ,

Funny Church Sign

May 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

LOL, this kind of cracked me up this morning when I saw this article on CNN this morning…

image

Filed Under: Funny

Your Thoughts on WordPress?

May 18, 2010 By 6 Comments

wordpresslogo-discussion I pretty much develop all of my clients websites these days using wordpress as the backend content management system unless there are some really far out project requirements that I don’t see wordpress as a good fit for. Honestly I don’t hear many project requirements these days that won’t work inside of wordpress, especially given the number of plugins that are available.

In fact, did you know that you can now deploy a plugin that will more or less turn your wordpress installation into an auction website like eBay?  I was just testing a plugin for a friend a few days ago that does exactly that, and it’s pretty robust too!

This past week I have been working on a project involving wordpress 3.0 and the studiopress genesis theme framework and I have been amazed at just how much more control the end user, or client, is going to have once this version is released.  Granted, there is a slight learning curve for developers when it comes to learning everything that is new w/ 3.0, not to mention how genesis from studiopress operates, but once we all get it, lookout!

For instance, I was wrestling today with a header issue on a client project and ran across Nathan Rice’s Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin, compliments of Brent Passmore, this plugin alone extends wordpress further than it’s ever been pushed by allowing the end user, or client, to input content – both shortcodes and php code, into one of the many hooks located on a websites theme. All of this from inside the user-friendly dashboard of WordPress. Incredible.  There is also the PODS CMS plugin for handling different content types and extending the wordpress custom fields option. Is there really anything you can’t push wordpress to do these days?

I know that I have a lot of developers that read my blog so I thought I would invite everyone in for a discussion on this topic, here are a few starting points:

  1. Do you currently use wordpress exclusively for projects?
  2. What are your thoughts on wordpress vs the other open source solutions?
  3. What content management solutions do you offer your clients?
  4. How much of a factor is wordpress’ name recognition becoming?
  5. What are some of your favorite wordpress plugins / themes?
  6. What are some of your likes / dislikes about wordpress?
Filed Under: Wordpress™ Tagged With: , , , , ,

My Sunday Evening Rant

May 16, 2010 By 3 Comments

waltercronkite I was in my office this morning working on a project and before watching our church live stream I turned on some of the Sunday morning political pundits to see what they were talking about.  I heard one of the hosts say that The Huffington Post was celebrating it’s 5th year online this weekend.  They also went on to say that The Huffington Post was neck in neck w/ The New York Times in terms of traffic to their website.  This got me to thinking.  Arianna started 5 years ago, and The New York Times was founded when?  Oh, 1851… hmm…

I am not a follower of The Huffington Post, I’m not a big fan of news outlets that lean too far in either direction when it comes to their political reporting.  I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, just tell me what’s going on and I will form my own opinion. It’s for that very reason that I don’t watch Fox News. I don’t need Glen Beck to give me reasons as to why I should be mad about things, because honestly I figure myself to be a little sharper than his average viewer.  I don’t mean that in a bad way, that’s just how it is. 

Now, I do think Glen Beck has it going on, as long as people are buying into his show, he is going to continue to make a bundle from it.  Isn’t that what it’s all about at the end of the day?  You pay me what they pay him and I will go on television and convince people they can fly. haha.  But, by getting on the level that Fox does w/ a lot of their programming, haven’t they left themselves wide open to have their market share consumed by other angry and opinionated bloggers like Arianna?  It’s not just Fox either, it’s almost all of the news agencies today, print, television, radio, etc.  Back in the day it didn’t used to be that way… 

I bet the average person never really knew Walter Cronkite’s personal political leanings, he just did his job and reported the news. That’s why he was the most trusted man in America at one time, he didn’t try to put a spin on it, didn’t have to, he’d never heard of a blogger.  It was what it was w/ Cronkite.  We landed on the moon.  Kennedy is dead.  The Nation Mourns.  Of course later in life, when he wasn’t behind the CBS news desk he did do some freelance work for outlets like The Huffington Post and a few others, but he used this outlet to express his views and not from behind the news desk! 

Now, fast forward 40 years…  News outlets complain about losses in revenue, market share, etc., but by injecting their agendas into their product (the news) haven’t they left themselves wide open for this the entire time.  I have to think they sort of did.  I think it’s great that anyone w/ an opinion can fire up a blog and become a media rock star overnight.  Sort of evens out the playing field a little bit. Now, again for the record, I don’t follow Arianna Huffington, nor do I agree w/ many of her ideas, but kudos to her as a blogger for what she has been able to do.

The bottom line I guess, if I was trapped in a corn maze w/ Arianna Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, and I had to work with one of them to find my way out of the maze, Rupert is SOL…

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

EP:010 – The Cotton Club Podcast

May 13, 2010 By 3 Comments

In this episode of The Cotton Club my guests Keith Crawford and Christopher Spencer discuss the upcoming Wordcamp Fayetteville scheduled for May 29th in Northwest Arkansas.  Since this is the first Wordcamp to be held in Arkansas it’s kind of a big deal for those of us who use WordPress daily and build client solutions with it on a daily basis.

If you are interested in attending Wordcamp Fayetteville you can register online via Eventbrite.  Better jump on it soon though because there aren’t a lot of open slots available and the prices are going to increase from $40 to $50 in a few days.  Also, if you are planning on attending, be sure to leave me a comment here or send me a tweet so we can hookup during the conference.

In this episode we also discuss the beta release of WordPress 3.0 and the Genesis Framework from Studiopress.

10 [ 47:35 ] Play Now | Play in Popup
Filed Under: Podcasts, Wordpress™ Tagged With: , , ,

EP:009 – The Cotton Club Podcast

May 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Just wrapped up another episode of The Cotton Club Podcast tonight w/ guest hosts Brant Collins and Robert Blake.  The topic for discussion for this evenings show was SEO, or search engine optimization.  I have actually gotten a lot of requests from people to do a show on this topic so hopefully we did a good enough job explaining our viewpoints without confusing everyone.

On the show we discuss some popular misconceptions regarding SEO as well as some standard practices that we all put into our clients projects for SEO.  We also discussed which search engines you should worry about, and what market share the big SE’s have at this time.

Brant and Robert also shared some findings from a few of their own personal analytics reports to help give us some insight as to what they are seeing and we also touched on what impact social media saturation can have on a websites traffic.  We also discussed quality versus quantity in terms of traffic analytics.  If you own a website and would like to maximize your search engine rankings, you should definitely check out this episode.

To wrap up the show we each talked about our favorite iPhone apps of the week.  Robert mentioned a game he has been playing called Angry Birds, Brant mentioned an augmented reality browser app called Layar that sounds pretty interesting, and I shared an app called Wind Meter that uses your phone to measure wind speed.

As always, thanks for listening and if you have any questions or topics you would like to see us address on the show be sure to drop me a line at: cotton.rohrscheib@pleth.com and I will be happy to consider it.

EP009-TheCottonClub [ 37:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup
Filed Under: Podcasts, Search Engines Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Genesis Framework 101

May 12, 2010 By 6 Comments

home_project_wordpressorg[1] I have been working on a project involving the beta release of WordPress 3.0 and the Studiopress Genesis Theme Framework this week and I have to say the more I use this combination I can see how things are fixing to change in the CMS world.  For the better too I might add.

The WordPress 3 release is still in beta but some of the new things it’s going to bring to the table are phenomenal and well thought out.  I don’t recommend running 3.0 beta on any production sites yet but I do recommend putting it on a sandbox and getting familiar with it from a developers perspective.

On the theme / design side of things, Brian Gardner and the Studiopress team always turn out awesome products.  Their Genesis framework is no exception.  Everyone that knows me well knows that I am a huge fan of their themes and use them for starters on a lot of projects so I have been getting a lot of questions in passing about Genesis so I figured a blog post was in order. There will be additional posts to follow but this one will touch on some of the basics.

There are a couple of things you should know about how Genesis works with child themes and of course the parent theme, Genesis. however before you dive into it.  Here are some basics that I pulled from the Studiopress website to get you started…

What is a Child Theme?
A child theme is an extension of a theme framework which is comprised of typical theme elements – with Genesis, it includes a screenshot, theme files, a stylesheet, a functions file and an images folder. These elements are grouped together in what’s known as a child theme folder and can be activated like any other WordPress theme. To help explain the relationship of a child theme and the parent Genesis theme framework, I’ll go into detail with each one.

A Screenshot
All WordPress themes have a screenshoot image included – typically this is called “screenshot.png”, is 600 x 450 in dimension and is a visual display of the theme, which can be seen on the Appearance > Themes page inside your WordPress dashboard. Since child themes have their own folders and are activated like any other theme, they require a screenshot like a standard theme.

Theme Files
The Genesis theme framework, which in essence is the parent theme, is where all of the theme files are kept. This would include the typical theme files such as 404.php, comments.php, footer.php, header.php, index.php, page.php, single.php and so on. Child themes can also include these files – and the hierarchy works in a way that if any of those files exist in the child theme folder, they will override the parent theme. In other words, if you customize a footer.php file and place it into your child theme folder, that will be used in lieu of the one in the Genesis parent theme. Currently the only theme files that may be found in some of the Genesis child themes are a custom home.php file, which will control the way a site’s homepage will appear. If one is not a part of a child theme, then the theme will use the index.php file, in the Genesis-parent theme, for the homepage.

A Stylesheet
Many theme frameworks are built in a way that imports the parent theme stylesheet, then allows for customizations to be made by way of the child theme stylesheet. While there is nothing wrong with the way that works, we’ve chosen to simplify things and just give the child theme it’s own stylesheet. In other words, if a child theme is being used, the style.css file in the child theme folder has complete control over the way the child theme looks. You don’t have to compare and sift through multiple stylesheets to look for and change style elements.

A Functions File
Most WordPress themes have a functions.php file – which is typically a file where you can control certain behaviors of how WordPress is run or how the theme outputs various things. For instance, a functions file can register sidebar widgets and how they are styled, as well as a number of other “function” related things. With Genesis, the functions.php is simple – it calls the entire theme framework to run and that is the only code found there. The great thing about the way Genesis is built, is that the child theme’s functions file is where a number of things occur – additional sidebar widgets can be registered, and from a development side, custom functions are defined as well as filtered and hooked. (more on that in upcoming posts.)

An Images Folder
This one is pretty self-explanatory – as with any WordPress theme, there is an images folder which is used to hold any images that a theme requires. Use this to hold background images, icons, navbar gradients, and what not.

If you are currently running MU or WordPress Buddypress, I recommend checking out Studiopress for your themes because they have some great themes and also some links to the child theme for buddypress that are very nice.  Stay tuned as I post some more notes about what’s happening w/ WordPress 3.0 as well as our Genesis project we are helping deploy for a client.

Filed Under: Wordpress™ Tagged With: , , , ,
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