Bringing Gowalla to Your Site
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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)
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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
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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.
Pleth to Sponsor Wordcamp #wcfay
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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!!!
Your Thoughts on Wordpress?
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:
- Do you currently use wordpress exclusively for projects?
- What are your thoughts on wordpress vs the other open source solutions?
- What content management solutions do you offer your clients?
- How much of a factor is wordpress’ name recognition becoming?
- What are some of your favorite wordpress plugins / themes?
- What are some of your likes / dislikes about wordpress?
