What’s In Your Toolbox?
It’s going to be a long weekend…
With the help of my good friend Keith Crawford, I plan on reformatting my primary development machine today and doing a clean install of Windows 7. This project is long overdue, I can’t remember the last time I reformatted my drive, in fact this SATA drive that I am using now initially ran XP and then VISTA before I upgraded to WINDOWS 7 last year. Fortunately I am pretty diligent when it comes to backups, so the project isn’t as daunting as it could be.
Where to Start Reloading Software??
While preparing my plan of action last night I went through my list of installed software to see what I would need to reinstall once I got the OS reloaded. After going over the list I realized that I don’t use half of the programs that are installed on my machine. This got me to thinking, what else is out there that I might be missing out on? What tools / software do you use to develop client projects?
Here’s a list of the software and desktop applications that I use, please leave me a comment and let me know what you are using and if there is something on the market that I need to look at…
- Microsoft Outlook (Productivity) – Email, Calendars, Tasks, Notes, etc.
- Evernote Desktop (Productivity) – Notes.
- Microsoft Office Ultimate (Productivity) – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
- Microsoft Live Writer (Blogging) – WYSIWYG Blog Editor.
- Jasc Paintshop Pro (Graphics) – Lightweight compared to PS and faster for some jobs.
- Adobe Photoshop (Graphics) – All of the Bells & Whistles for Graphics.
- Adobe Illustrator (Vector) – I haven’t found anything else that compares for Illustrations.
- Adobe Dreamweaver (Code Editor / WYSIWYG) – My favorite WYSIWYG editor.
- Notepad++ (Code Editor) – Probably my favorite straight up code editor.
- Eclipse (Code Editor / IDE) – Rarely do I use this anymore.
- Xlinesoft PHPRunner (Code Editor / IDE / Generator) – Saves a ton of time
- Microsoft Expression Web (Code Editor / WYSIWYG) – Rarely do I use this anymore.
- Coda (Code Editor / WYSIWYG / CSS Editor) – Very nice but only works on my MacBook.
- TopStyle Pro (CSS Editor) – I haven’t found anything that compares
- IPSwitch WS-FTP Professional (FTP) – All of the Bells & Whistles for FTP
- Filezilla (FTP) – Fewer features than WS-FTP but a lot faster.
- Camtasia (Screen Capturing / Recording) – I haven’t found anything that compares.
- SwishMax (Flash / Vector Animation) – A lot faster than Flash to work with .SWF files.
- Audacity (Audio Editing / Recording) – I haven’t found anything that compares.
- Garage Band (Audio Editing / Recording) – Only works on my MacBook
- EZ Audio CD Ripper (Audio Editing / Ripping) – Fastest CD to MP3 Ripper I have found.
- Skype (Communications) – My favorite chat, voice, video conferencing app.
- RingCentral Call Controller (Communications) – Ties into our corporate phone system.
- SSH Explorer (SSH) – Rarely do I have to use this anymore because we have an admin.
- MySQL Administrator (Database) – I occasionally use this to connect to databases.
- TJPing (Ping) – I sometimes use this instead of command line.
- PuTTy (SSH, Telnet) – Rarely do I use this anymore because we have an admin.
Do You Wireframe Client Projects?
Recently I have been trying to move toward computer generated wireframes because they are a lot cleaner than the mockups I have been sketching out by hand for clients. I have found that these mockups give me a starting place while meeting with the client to markup a game plan or layout changes that may not have been considered initially. Granted, drawing the layout for a project from scratch is still a lot quicker for me, especially if I use SmartDraw or Microsoft Visio that are somewhat clunky.
The other day I had someone recommend Mockingbird to me as an online tool for creating wireframes so I decided to go check it out. I created a free account and within just a few seconds I was able to get up to speed well enough to mockup a future redesign of this website (much needed). It only took me a few minutes and I was able to work from my MacBook while riding down the highway connected to AT&T’s wireless service. With Mockingbird you can also save your project and come back again later to make changes. I think that I might be using Mockingbird a lot more in the future to layout client projects but before I commit 100% to this product I wanted to find out…
What product or solution do you use to wire frame your clients projects?
Do You Use Project Management?
I had someone ask me on Facebook and another on Twitter this weekend, which project management software I recommended. I immediately said Basecamp. Although recently, we switched to ActiveCollab at Pleth for managing our open projects because it integrated w/ QuickBooks a lot easier than Basecamp. For a company like ours w/ offices in 3 cities and hundreds of clients out there, we need everything to connect and work well together…
I am interested in hearing what everyone else is using for project management. Also, if you have an interest in discussing any of the other project management solutions on the market today in an upcoming episode of The Cotton Club Podcast drop me a note below…
Bringing Gowalla to Your Site
![2767_0931061454738_thumb1_thumb[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/06/2767_0931061454738_thumb1_thumb1.png "2767_0931061454738_thumb1_thumb[1]")
It’s no great secret that I am a Gowalla fanatic. Out of all of the geo-social apps on the market today (Foursquare, Brightkite, and Loopt) I see Gowalla as the premier app. As soon as Gowalla gets it’s Blackberry app going full steam I think we are all going to see it steal a lot of market share from Foursquare. To position yourself to be ready for the great Gowalla explosion you might want to consider leveraging your Gowalla account on your website or blog. Fortunately Gowalla has an API that will allow you to roll your own integration if you are a developer, but if you are not a programmer this might present a challenge.
Fortunately for Wordpress users there are already a few really nice Gowalla plugins starting to show up from various developers in the community. I am going to touch on a few of these and give you some insight as to how I think they can best be used.
- WP-Walla: This is probably my favorite plugin so far for integrating your Gowalla checkins into your blog. I actually have it running on this website in the sidebar. One day when I am able to sit down and do a redesign of this site it’s going to have a much more prominent location. This plugin allows you to present your most recent checkins in a sidebar widget. It’s a really clean plugin that has a lot of flexibility. You can exclude the Gowalla icon if you want, however I think it looks cool to have it there. You can also limit how many checkins you want displayed. Based on your vertical real estate you might want to have 3 or 4 locations stacked in your sidebar. Each checkin is also linked back to Gowalla’s main site. I highly recommend this plugin.
- GoWPWalla: This is another really nice Gowalla plugin that pretty much does the same thing. I think it might have some additional functionality w/ it as well but for me I think the out of the box layout and design of the sidebar widget takes up too much vertical real estate. One thing that this plugin does if you are a location is that it also allows you to display recent check-ins at your location. There are some great screenshots here if you are interested in checking this one out. I haven’t spent a lot of time w/ this plugin so I don’t know a whole lot about it other than to say it’s pretty freaking sweet.
- Gowalla Spotter: This plugin displays activity in a Gowalla Spot in a Wordpress Post or Page. It uses the Gowalla API and requires the unique Spot ID saved in a custom field in Wordpress. While custom fields might not be the easiest thing in the world to explain to clients, it could still be pretty useful if you are a developer and you are deploying pages for them. I really like how this looks on a page.
I am sure that as time goes on there will be plenty of other Gowalla related plugins in the plugin directory but right now these 3 should give us all something we can use to get started sharing our geo-social content with our visitors.
Project: Wordpress Theme
One of the coolest things about Wordpress in my opinion is that when a client calls and wants a redesign or a fresh look for their website, it’s just a matter of sitting down and coding a new theme. I launched Indian Hills Country Club first in 2001 and we have redesigned the website 3 times since then, this is the first dramatic departure from their initial design that we have attempted. I used Studiopress education theme as my foundation for this design but you can tell from the finished product I spent a couple of hours this evening coding CSS and knee-deep in Photoshop. We haven’t launched the project yet, it’s still pending review but here’s a sneak peak.
Note the new logo for the club, the simple feather w/ 1973 below it. That’s something else I put together for them a few weeks ago to commemorate the year they were established. As another sidenote, I have heard some great things about the course at IHCC recently and I am looking forward to playing there very soon…
Excluding Category from Feed (WP)
![wordpresslogodiscussion_thumb[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/07/wordpresslogodiscussion_thumb1.jpg "wordpresslogodiscussion_thumb[1]")
I know that there are probably some plugins out there that will accomplish this same exact thing but if you are looking for a way to exclude a category on the fly with a wordpress website, this method will work. Just locate the category ID# and append it to your feed in Feedburner like so…
Why would this be useful? Let’s say you have a newspaper website that runs Obituaries as a category and you have the RSS Feed plugged into another site that wants to share everything but obituaries, this will do the trick.
Premium Wordpress Hosting
![plethlogonew1[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/06/plethlogonew11.jpg "plethlogonew1[1]")
I have been thinking a lot lately about our hosting business at Pleth. We never have really fit into our industry very well because our philosophy is completely different than 90% of the hosting companies in business today. Most web hosting companies offer low-cost hosting plans with very few bells and whistles so they can keep their costs down and undercut their competitors prices. Services like DNS Management, Website & Database Backups, Storage, and bandwidth are often sold separately as add-on items because they have little or no profit margin in their hosting rates.
My partners and I have never wanted to take our hosting business in that direction, primarily because the market is saturated already with companies trying to do exactly that. Another reason we haven’t went that route is because it’s just not our style. We see ourselves as niche hosting providers with a unique perspective in that we are also developers. We cater to a large population of clients that could care less about web hosting, they just know they need it for their website to stay online, and they will pay extra to have someone else worry with all of the technical issues surrounding it.
Our business philosophy when it comes to our hosting business has always been to add value to our infrastructure as opposed to looking for ways to cut corners and reduce overhead. Since we started we have established our NOC (network operating center) in Dallas, as well as an alternate location in Houston. We have also put a lot of thought into things like Bandwidth, Storage, Virtualization, and Automation. We also have system monitoring in place as well as automated backups that will allow us to quickly restore any of our clients data that might have become lost or corrupt. In addition to our robust backup system, we also have the industry’s leading control panel software, Plesk, running on our shared servers for our managed hosting clients. Our server admin, Matt Critcher, has also devoted countless hours configuring our security solution, mod_security, to fight off security threats.
Before I go any further, I should probably say that we have done quite well with our hosting business. I would venture to say that we have several hundred hosted domains running at any given time and our business continues to grow leaps and bounds despite the fact that we haven’t ever spent one penny on advertising campaigns, etc. Our entire business has grown via word of mouth. I have often wondered what our business would be like now had we promoted ourselves, but I honestly don’t see how we could bring on many more projects than we are handling currently.
The past few days I started thinking back to this past weekend’s Wordcamp Fayetteville where I met a lot of people who work with wordpress on a daily basis, and that utilize a lot of premium solutions, such as premium themes and plugins. Something I noticed at the conference was that the vast majority of people there were developers and bloggers who have their website(s) hosted by a third party provider. This got me to thinking about premium wordpress hosting. Granted, not everyone would be interested in paying for hosting their blog when they can get it for free or next to it from a handful of providers in the industry, but here’s what I keep coming back to. The days of the Mommy Blogger sharing recipes and baby photos are behind us, I know several women right now who are actually bringing in a substantial income from their blogs, the same goes for men too. My thoughts are that if someone has a blog that is bringing them $10,000 monthly in revenue, then they probably have already given some thought as to what they would do if the server their website is hosted on crashed. I think this is the target market for this premium offering.
In my mind, premium wordpress hosting not only consists of web storage for your database and files, but it also includes disaster recovery / backup solutions built in w/out having to purchase add-ons. Premium Wordpress hosting also includes a secure environment made possible via our ever changing security protocols and configuration. One thing that I also feel is very important is redundancy and failover connectivity, for example, our network has 19+ backbone providers.
Last night I started mocking up a child theme for Genesis / Studiopress that would be a clean, simple, and very user friendly landing page of sorts to promote this premium offering. I decided to use the enterprise child theme as my starting point for the project and somehow in between catching up on client emails and answering the telephone, I have managed to get the vast majority of the design & layout coded. Below you will find a screenshot of the home page.
My initial plan was to just add a page to our existing corporate website, which runs a different CMS than Wordpress so after talking w/ a few people I had discussed this with earlier, I decided to create a small simple landing page site w/ details about this premium solution. As of right now, I have no idea as to when this site will come online, it’s going to be a very basic site w/ only a few pages outlining our service offering but it’s likely going to take me several weeks to put together all of the content together given my current workload so stay tuned to this blog for more info on this project…
If you are interested in Premium Wordpress Hosting, don’t hesitate to drop us a line…
#WCFAY High Points
This past weekend Keith Crawford and I headed to Fayetteville w/ our wives to attend Wordcamp Fayetteville. We were also meeting several friends from Central Arkansas at the conference like Brent Passmore, Daniel Spillers, Aaron Baker, Tonya Smith, Shelley Keith, and a few others (I probably left someone out, sorry).
When we got into town Friday night we went to the informal tweetup and met Christopher Spencer, Tammy Hart, Nash Vegas aka Mitch Canter, and Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner.com. We had an awesome time at the Friday night tweetup and met a lot of cool NW Arkansas people. I finally got to meet Colin Condray of Blue Zoo as well, he and I have communicated back and forth for a long time via social media and it was nice to finally put a face w/ the name.
Saturday morning Keith and I showed up early for the Wordcamp and met up w/ one of my team members, Marcus Creasy, who was in town to checkout the blogger track for wordpress at the conference but we talked him into hanging w/ us and doing the developer track, which was a little more technical than the blogger track. The first session we attended was Mitch Canter, I have posted the video from this session for those that might have missed it, Mitch spoke about how you can take Wordpress and do anything you want with it through the use of plugins. Some of the things he touched on that I found particularly interesting was e-commerce and podcasting. Two things that we get requests for all of the time. Mitch also talked about Flutter, which is an alternative to Podscms that doesn’t involve creating new tables in your database. At the end of the session Mitch also went through his list of tools / plugins that he likes to use on most of his wordpress projects. I mentioned to him after the session that I thought our toolboxes were almost identical, out of however many hundreds of thousands of plugins are out there for wordpress, that’s pretty ironic.
Another session that Keith and I really enjoyed was a small presentation by Tammy Hart on how to sell Wordpress. There was a lot of good feedback in this session from various people in the crowd. Daniel Spillers brought up an interesting question that pertained as to how you can legally sell wordpress based on the terms of use. I found that discussion to be pretty interesting as well as the way that Tammy works with her clients. There was a lot of dialogue in this session as well.
Probably the most mind boggling session of the day was Michael Van Winkle’s on PODSCMS. I knew a little about PODSCMS from having installed it and played with it on my sandbox a few times, and a while back Nick Brewer did a presentation at Central Arkansas Refresh on PODS and I have been quite impressed. Michael’s presentation was one of the few that was primarily all developers / coders so he was able to get pretty detailed w/ his info and I have to say, several times Keith and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Deep Info! I left the presentation pretty inspired to spend more time in PODS on my sandbox to test it’s boundaries. Michael’s presentation is on slideshare here…
In closing I would like to mention that at #WCFAY I finally saw a practical application for Google Wave that extended the software further than making lunch plans. Keith had the idea to live blog the sessions so I joined in. Before we knew it, we had about 10 or so other people join in on the conversation w/ us via Wave. I have to admit, it was pretty cool. You can see the embedded wave here…
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention some new friends from Springfield, MO that decided to give me a new nickname this weekend. 
So hello to @sugarcube and @jenny8675309!
#WCFAY Mitch Canter – WP3
Mitch also did a session this weekend on Wordpress 3.0 because there was a lot of buzz about 3 since the release candidate 1 was just pushed out the door the prior week. In this session Mitch touches on some of the high points that are coming w/ version 3.0.
There’s some really good information in this presentation but my recommendation for getting acquainted w/ 3.0 is to just install it on your own sandbox server and test it for yourself. There are some pretty cool additions in this release.
#WCFAY Mitch Canter – Plugins
This is the video of Mitch Canter’s session on making Wordpress do everything. In this session he touched on running e-commerce through Wordpress as well as podcasting. He also mentions some very nice plugins that he uses on just about every project, ironically we have almost identical toolboxes when it comes to staple plugins.
I had the opportunity to visit w/ Mitch a few times during the conference and he is a very sharp guy, I am looking forward to staying in touch w/ him and following his posts. If you ever have an opportunity to attend a Wordcamp that Mitch is speaking at, i highly recommend it, he covers a lot!!!
As a sidenote, I will likely be posting videos from the conference off and on this week when I have free moments.
