The Cotton Club — Business

Allocating Personal Time / Priorities

May 22, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib Leave a Comment

Part of my ritual everyday is reading a daily devotional that is waiting on me in my inbox each morning from Streaming Faith. Some mornings I read these and then move right onto YouVersion for my daily scriptures and then start the process of responding to emails, but this mornings devotional got me to thinking about all of the things that I do through the course of the day and it kind of hit home.

Two days ago was my dad’s birthday, and as I walked in my office that morning my intentions were to call him first thing to wish him a happy birthday, but before I could pick up the phone it rang and it was a client who was urgently needing me to walk them through a process. Well, needless to say I was on the phone for a lot longer than I had planned helping them get lined out, and granted, this was important. This particular client has been a client for a long time and as a result has sent a lot of business my way through the years. Well, before I had even gotten off the phone with this client I noticed an urgent email roll into my inbox from another client so I immediately went from the first phone call right into another phone conversation with the second client, I usually call this “putting out fires”. Well, once I had the second issue resolved I realized that I hadn’t eaten any breakfast and my stomach was letting me know about it so I walked into the kitchen to fix me something to eat, and it was then that my phone rang and it was my dad (we speak on the phone everyday, sometimes 2 or 3 times). It was deflating for me because I wanted to call him first since it was his birthday, and I know that at the end of the day it really didn’t matter to him as long as we got to speak to one another.

I wished him a happy birthday and then we went right into talking about the usual stuff (what I am working on and how things are going on the farm), but it continued to bother me a little bit that I didn’t have the opportunity to call him first thing that morning. Well, now that I have laid the groundwork, you can see why this mornings devotional struck a cord w/ me…

Establishing Priorities
Bishop E. Earl Jenkins

"Teach us to use wisely all the time we have." Psalm 90:12 CEV

Growing up, Dr. Tony Campolo says he spent many Saturdays at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia visiting Ed Bailey, the guy who ran it. Campolo writes: "His encyclopedic mind fascinated me. He knew something about everything…I was friends with Ed until he died. After a serious stroke I went to visit him…I told him all the places I’d been to speak and how I’d come right from the airport to see him.

He heard me out, then said, ‘You go all over the world to people who 10 years from now won’t remember your name. But you haven’t time for those who really care about you.’" Campolo continues, "That…hit me hard and changed my life. I decided not to let all my time be used by people for whom I make little difference, while I neglect those for whom I’m irreplaceable.

"One day a friend of mine got a call from The White House asking him to consult with the President. He said no, because it was a day he’d promised to spend with his granddaughter. The nation survived…the President didn’t miss him, and his granddaughter had precious time with her Pop-Pop."

Somebody said that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing! David put it like this: "Teach us to realize the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom" (Ps 90:12 NLT).

Time is an equal-opportunity employer. We all get 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds daily, and we must account for how we use them. So ask yourself how you would spend the next 24 hours if you knew that you’d stand before God tomorrow – then get busy!

I am not going to say that I plan on drastically changing the way I prioritize my day, but I will say that I am going to pay closer attention to the things in life that are more important. One thing that I have always admired about my partner Greg is that he makes a conscious effort to spend time with both of his sons just about everyday. It might not be anything other than going to Karate or a ballgame with them, but he manages to be there for them. We haven’t ever spoken about it or anything like that but I have noticed it over the years and never really gave it a lot of thought until today at how well he has managed this arena. There are other folks that I work with that are just as diligent about prioritizing their time with the ones they care about but he came to mind first.

Filed Under: Faith / Family Tagged With: Business, Faith, Family, Friends

Business Continuity Plan

May 16, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 1 Comment

My business partners and i have been working with consultants for the past few months to help us assess or corporate infrastructure and it has been a valuable process. We have been extremely blessed as a company, and as a result we felt that it was important to have some “outside eyes” come in and take a look at our infrastructure and give us their opinion as to some things we could improve upon. In addition to consulting us on things like Life Insurance Investments, Performance Bonding, and Operating Agreements, they have also prompted us to look at our Business Continuity Plan.

This is something that I honestly hadn’t given a lot of thought until we started discussing yesterday afternoon what would happen if one of us crashed a plane or choked on a lobster tail. Granted it would be a very tragic occurrence but it’s something that we need to definitely keep in mind for the welfare of our company. Since I have two partners we each more or less take care of managing our own ends of the business, and from day one we have always worked very well together and served the needs of our clients extremely well, but without one of us there, how would the other two pick up the slack and keep things running smoothly? This is where a Business Continuity Plan comes into play…

I sat down this morning and mapped out my home network which consists of 2 development machines and a test server. I outlined all of the critical processes that I have running from my office location and how to operate those processes. I also outlined where all of my client project data is stored from the past 11 years and sent copies of all of this to my partners, they have done the same thing on their end.

In addition, I sent a copy of my instructions to my survivors including my wife, parents, and in-laws, stating that in the event that I should become incapacitated or dead that it would be imperative that these systems and files be immediately turned over to my partners not only for the well-being of our company but also for our clients that have entrusted us with their business over the years.

The entire document only took a few minutes to put together, but it’s very detailed as to what all critical data I have at my office and it will save anyone who has to come behind me to retrieve any of this data. Maybe we were behind the curve a little bit by not already having a plan like this in place, I personally had never seen a plan like this before in the 10 years or so I have been involved with this industry, it definitely makes a lot of sense to me though and I thought that it was something that might be worthy of considering if you haven’t already got one. Another way of looking at this whole thing, if not just to give your business partners and employees the peace of mind knowing that if you should die that they would not be in a bad position moving forward, would be to think about the peace of mind you could provide your clients moving forward as well…

Just random thoughts…

Filed Under: Web Development, Web Hosting Tagged With: Business, Pleth

Acxiom Knows All About You…

April 27, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 1 Comment

It’s almost scary how much Acxiom knows about you. Most people don’t realize that right here in the natural state there is a database holding 750 billion pieces of information about you. Information like, if you are right handed, and how many pets you have in your household.

I love it when Arkansas companies get publicity, that’s why I decided to repost this when I saw that my twitter friend, @akvalley posted this article about Acxiom. It’s amazing how much data Acxiom has at its disposal, but what amazes me more is how this data is getting put to good use by Fortune 500 companies around the world.

John Meyer is the man in charge of these sensitive details in one of the world’s largest consumer information databases: approximately 1,500 facts about half a billion people worldwide.

Surely I can’t be on there. I have nothing to do with Acxiom, a little-known, US-listed $700m (£500m) data gathering and marketing services company.

"Oh we do have you on our database. I guarantee you," Mr Meyer assures me. "Your name address, phone number. You have a cat. You’re right handed. That sort of thing." This is true. I’m not sure if it’s a lucky guess, but I’m impressed.

Mr Meyer, a brash, confident chief executive, explains that while the company has been nervous of promoting its activities in the past, he has no fear of a higher profile.

"We’re the biggest company you’ve never heard of," he grins, with a hint of Southern drawl. "In the past we were afraid of people knowing us, but I’m trying to get business awareness and if consumers have privacy concerns I want to know."

All information on the database has been given away freely by the consumer through anything from registering for services online, to questionnaires or buying magazine subscriptions, Mr Meyer claims.

This is how Acxiom, which had a turnover of $1.38bn last year, is able to supply clients with a list of female skiing fans from Georgia, or right-handed women from Leeds.

It is also the largest player in the credit card market checking customer loan history and it can confirm whether CVs tally with job histories for employers. With a 12pc market share, its nearest competitors are therefore not market researchers like TNS and Nielsen, but information businesses Experian and Epsilon.

Mr Meyer took on the job a year ago after spending 18 months commuting from Paris to his home in Texas as head of global services for technology company Alcatel- Lucent. Under his leadership, the smooth marketeer has rebranded Acxiom as a "global integrated marketing services" company, compiling databases to conduct marketing for clients from Gap to General Motors.

"Not spam," Meyer says emphatically, wagging his finger at me. "People bristle first and then we characterise what we do as limiting junk mail, not sending you junk mail. For spammers, you’re just an active email address, period. It’s not how to market if you don’t want to be hated."

To help soften the anonymity of cold contact, the company makes sure that the marketer at the other end of the phone or email is as close in age, class, gender and interests as possible to the consumer.

One newer use for consumer information is verifying that online exam candidates are the right student by asking four personal questions, such as: where was your father born? What breed of dog do you own? "If you answer them correctly, statistically, you are who you are," Mr Meyer says with certainty.

Smoothing down his bright yellow tie, he tells me of another technology on the cusp of becoming a highly desirable tool: location marketing

"When I walk by a Starbucks, I could get an ad for coffee to my phone," he tells me. "But most of the phone companies thought: ‘That’s going to scare the consumer. Now they physically know where I am, everywhere I am’." But Acxiom has developed a cunning way of using location-based marketing in public places.

"We did an opportunity with a casino, that wanted to develop a relationship with their big gamers."

When the punter checks in, many give out their mobile numbers to get messages about special offers.

"They have a private network inside the casino, so when you’re leaving the casino they’re giving you a special offer to bring you back in."

But isn’t that still a form of tracking movement that some people could find slightly creepy?

"You as a consumer benefits. The casino benefits," Mr Meyer explains. "But it will be limited to individual forums. It’s because of that fear. Are you being tracked?"

He is keen to distance the business from Phorm, the targeted advertising company that has been fiercely criticised for taking data from people online to store anonymously. Acxiom, Mr Meyer says, has a dedicated privacy officer and spends time consulting with consumer watchdogs before launching new products.

But Mr Meyer believes the future of direct marketing is in high-tech data services, predicting that the company’s next acquisition will be technology related to interactive television or the internet.

It has recently conducted three pilots into the uses for product placement on US television, where the consumer can select a product, request details and buy it.

People will soon think of these forms of marketing based on information gleaned from a variety of sources as a natural, Mr Meyer argues, especially as the current tech-savvy generation grows up.

"You’re using Facebook to say all kind of things that you wouldn’t say in public," he says. "My grandmother thought that the phone was an intrusion into her life. Why would this person call rather than knock on the door? Now we just accept it."

Acxiom: the company that knows if you own a cat or if you’re right-handed – Telegraph

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: Business

What is Innovate Arkansas?

April 27, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 1 Comment

Innovate Arkansas works with new, technology- based entrepreneurs to turn inventions and high-tech concepts into viable businesses. Our goal: Create high-paying Arkansas jobs in the knowledge, technology, and information-based industries. The result: A rise in Arkansas’ per capita personal income.

We are hoping to have a little bit more about Innovate Arkansas tomorrow night at our Central Arkansas Refresh Group meeting but here’s a video to kind of explain what the group does… (oh, and kudos to Brant Collins at StationX.com for the video job)

If you are interested in learning more about Innovate Arkansas, you can checkout their website: http://innovation.arkansasbusiness.com/

What is Innovate Arkansas? – InOV8 Blog – Innovate Arkansas

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

The Church Alive Wins Best of Show!

February 27, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 1 Comment

As I mentioned earlier in the week, Pleth Networks, LLC was the proud recipient of 4 silver and 1 bronze Addy Awards at the 2009 NEA Adfed Banquet held in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In addition to the silver and bronze awards, we were also honored to have one of our entries, The Church Alive, chosen as this years coveted best of show for Interactive media. It has been a hectic week and I haven’t been able to blog about the award until now.

The Church Alive project has been a pet project of mine for the past year or so, and it is also where my wife and I attend church. My partners and I could not be more proud of this award, it’s our first Best of Show award from the American Advertising Federation. Below is a screenshot of our winning entry:

I would also like to say congratulations to all of the other winners at this years Addy Awards. If you are not familiar with the NEA Adfed or the American Advertising Federation, here’s a little information about the group:

AAF-Northeast Arkansas is made up of members who manage, buy, sell, create, produce, teach or study advertising, marketing, public relations or related fields.

AAF-NEA exists to bring together those interested in advertising/marketing for an active exchange of ideas. We strive to provide our members with professional development, recognition and networking opportunities. AAF-NEA is a local affiliate of the American Advertising Federation, a national organization that represents the Advertising industry.

Building a stronger advertising community through education and networking by promoting advertising as an essential element of the Northeast Arkansas economy and culture.

Also, here is a photo of the “best of show” trophy. I currently have it at my office in Conway, but I am going to have to eventually give it up to go on display at our office in Batesville unless we can get duplicates made of it. It sure looks great on my bookcase!!!

AAF-Northeast Arkansas | Home

Filed Under: Press Releases, Web Development, Wordpress™ Tagged With: AdFed, Business, Clients, Ministry Solutions, Wordpress™

Web Development is Moving On!

February 5, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 2 Comments

Web Development is an industry that never get’s boring, there is always a new technology or technique emerging that we are being drawn to in order to stay relevant and on top of our game. My partners and I share new things with each other several times a day, that’s what keeps us on top of our game. Interaction we have with other developers from other firms also comes in handy as well in staying on top of what other firms are doing. Fortunately, most web developers are eager and willing to share their experiences with their peers within the community.

Christian Heilman, from ThinkVitamin, posted a great article titled, “Web Development is Moving On – Are You?” this week and it got me to thinking about how much our industry has evolved since I first started building websites about 9 or 10 years ago. Back in the day web developers, or most of the ones that I knew were using tools like Frontpage Express and Coffee Cup to build small websites that had little or no functionality at all.

I can remember registering my first domain name for my computer business with Network Solutions, something I would not do today if you were pointing a gun to my head, but back in the day they were the only show in town for registering domains. Today there are a lot of alternatives out there, just like there are programming languages and development platforms. PHP was a language that was totally greek to me as I struggled to get my mind around Frontpage Extensions and why they didn’t work well on my Linux server.

Today development is so different, as Christian points out in his article, we use a multitude of ready made components and more or less construct a house out of lego blocks. These ready made components might consist of a CMS framework, or remotely hosted database or application that we tie into using an API. Would I want to go back to the way things once were? Sometimes I miss the days of building websites from scratch in Frontpage and all of the creative expresion that went along with it, but then I remember how boring projects used to be and realize how much more advanced the projects we launch today are in comparison.

This is a great article, I recommend it if you are a developer.

It is quite interesting to see how web development turned from a niche for brochure-ware and intranets to one of the biggest software development environments in the market over just a few years.

“The web as the platform” is a hollow dream no longer ‐ you can now run and develop a web application without needing to host anything yourself and you can even get the data from other sources. With this radical shift comes a lot of change for developers, but the question is, are you keeping up?

Change is good – we need to get our act together in any case. It’s 2009 and we have the chance to start this year by tackling issues that concern everybody: the general recession, inevitable lay‐offs and lack of investment in non-profit generating parts of organizations. Now’s a good time to get real, regroup, and reassess the ways in which we approach our jobs.

We are in a crisis – have you watched the television lately? It doesn’t make cheerful viewing. However, with every crisis comes the opportunity (and the necessity) to improve and see how we can work more efficiently, producing things that are more valuable and relevant to the people we want to reach. The hype is over ‐ it’s time to get busy, working as professionals.

Back When All This Was Just Fields

When I started web development every article, tutorial or introduction to a system started with “open your editor, read this documentation and start writing your app, (or web site, css trick or javascript trick)”. I loved it. I downloaded the article to a floppy disk at work, went home and in the evenings without the internet (remember you paid by the minute) wrote my first solutions and battled with the documentation. Later, the only thing that changed was that I didn’t work on it at home but on a laptop on the train instead.

Nowadays, things look different. First of all, for the most part it’s impossible to develop offline ‐ this is because we use hosted services, APIs and most likely you’ll write something that uses some data stored elsewhere on the web. Offline web development is becoming very rare indeed, which can be terribly frustrating if you are in a public space or hotel rooms. In other words, we build on already tested and proven concepts instead of building everything ourselves. This means we have to do much less work, but it also means that we don’t have full control. We rely on data being available to us by third parties or ‘the web’. This is pretty tough for developers as we tend to be control freaks.

Aiming Higher and Wider

The other thing that can be a hurdle for the old school developer is the fact that we tend not to build new systems any longer. Back in the day we worked on the bleeding edge: almost everything we built was the first of its kind on the web and clients came to us to build their first web presence. Users were easy to come by and people were eager to do things easier and quicker on the web. This is pretty much over.

Unless you have a ‘very’ compelling product or idea clients will already have something in place that they use and will have already spent a lot of time and money on it. Maintenance is much more common than innovation. Users are much more spoilt by choice and already spend a lot of their time using other products ‐ just building something and hoping that users will come is not enough any longer.

Most products you’ll build these days are aimed at piggy‐backing on existing user bases and use cases, rather than creating something entirely new. The web has become much more of a commodity than it used to be and a lot of people rely on it for their day‐to-day chores and social communication. For example, the amount of people that started to get in contact with me after years of silence is staggering. The reason? Facebook and how simple it is to use. These are the same people that asked me if my e-mail address would change when I moved to another city!

These social networks create huge traction, and even hardware developers jump on them to sell their newest products. Just yesterday I saw a mobile ad at the train station telling me that the new smart phone automatically gets updates from my friends on Facebook. Sounds a tad creepy to me, but I’m sure it boosted that manufacturer’s smart phone sales and I am sure many a teenager will be asking for this one for their birthday.

Social networks are taking over in all kind of environments.
The same is happening to search engines.

For example, I do see a lot of movie posters on my way to work and realized lately that the film industry has stopped bothering with domain names for movies (I guess domain squatters blackmailing them are to blame). Instead I started to see “enter xyz in Google to learn more” and one movie even used a bebo and myspace address instead of a domain. This is quite commonplace in South East Asia already.

A ‘New’ Breed of Developers

What shall we do about it? We could sit sulking in our developer corner claiming that these things will never work but the fact is that this is where people invest and the money still flows. It is also where the users are. There is a big market in some technologically underdeveloped countries for Facebook applications and even blog systems. Using out‐of‐the‐box solutions companies can easily cover both the development and the maintenance of the content. Can you for example guess where http://s2999.com is written and maintained?

The interesting fact for businesses is that these developers are pragmatic. They don’t cost much for a business to hire, they deliver the job without trying to lecture you and all they expect is a share of the outcome. Us on the other hand, leading and amazing developers that we are, are rumored to be tricky to work with, grumpy even. We don’t want to use things that other people made and are very happy indeed to tell any business person that they are wrong and we know all about the web. Who’d you work with?

Sure, this is nothing new – outsourcing shops have promised cut‐price development for years and most of the time the outcome was appalling (funnily enough, in a lot of cases not because the developers were bad but the management didn’t know what they wanted or failed to give precise delivery specs). With the systems in place though, development becomes much more of a ‘use’ case than a ‘build’ case and this is the biggest challenge we now face.

Goodbye White Canvas, Hello Lego Bricks

In essence, web development these days doesn’t start with a blank document but with downloading an SDK or entering your application data in some web app to get a developer key. In other words using a system that is much larger than anything you’d ever have done yourself. This concept is very hard to swallow for us battle‐hardened masters of the command line and I myself have problems getting enthusiastic about using a chunk of ‘hello world’ code and turning it into something great.

If we look at it logically, however, and leave our ego to go and play in the garden for a while it’s clear that there are many valid reasons to use SDKs and hosted development environments. It’s exactly the same thing we do as clever developers ‐ build ourselves shortcuts, hack our development tools or assemble our very own library of snippets – in order to avoid having to do the same things over and over again.

Using SDKs and hosted development environments shouldn’t mean your work will be dumbed down or that people won’t respect you as a developer. It means that they are helping to take the pain away and have taken away the hoops that they jumped through so that you can just build something interesting without worrying about the underlying architecture, security of the system or its performance.

Abstracting these away means you can easily do fixes or improvements should the need occur ‐ and boy will it occur. It is not fun to maintain a site or a server these days. The amount of people that want to hack you and inject malicious code is staggering and their skills are impressive. The only way to battle these threats is to have one system to fix ‐ not millions of little applications.

Abstraction also means that many more people can start developing applications. Geeks build geek tools, designers build designer tools, ‐ if you lower the entry barrier to developing, all groups can bring their expertise to play with the system and subsequently you can build really cool tools together. Of course, there is a lot of pointless and bad work being done too (no, I don’t want your teddy bear to travel on Facebook or catch dozens of sheep) but that’s like saying HTML is bad because people can use tables and fonts to create layouts fast instead of using CSS.

So Are We Obsolete?

Does this mean that the tinkerers, the people who spend hours fixing an IE6 bug or open the border of the screen to show sprites outside the dedicated area (yes, C64) are obsolete and should just move on? No, it doesn’t ‐ not by a long shot. If we cave in now and grumpily sit in the corner pointing at the kids with their fancy SDK toys we are indeed obsolete, but there are a lot of things that this brave new world of development needs us to do.

It needs us to analyze the systems and see where they need improvement. For example the amount of accessibility issues that can be fixed in social networks with very little effort is staggering. Most of these issues are not there because people are lazy but because they just don’t know about the consequences of their actions.

Why not help with turning these systems into a working network of systems. Open Social is a great idea but suffers from too many people shouting ‘FAIL’ at it instead of helping to fix it.

Why not work on bridging the gap between our two worlds. There is no sense in offering people a text box in an HTML page to develop in. I have used one of these and the resulting code is ‘always’ terrible. The same applies to code editors in a browser doing the indenting and colour coding for us ‐ they are flaky and when they crash they take your whole app with it (and the pictures of kittens you had in another tab). There are some Firefox extensions that allow you to edit text in your editor and then enable you to pull it back into the text area with a keyboard shortcut ‐ more of those please. Show by example how your expertise can make web applications better and how communicating with you upfront makes for better APIs and SDKs.

So What About the Future?

If I knew that… However, what I will say is that the way some web developers deal with market forces and business people is wrong.

Our craft is becoming a commodity and people in charge don’t care about the quality of the markup, CSS or how short our JavaScript is. What matters is how fast you can get it to market, how many people it reaches and how cheaply it can be built. I think that web development has come on in leaps and bounds in the last years, not because of top‐down decisions and empowerment of the folks on the ground, but by geeks just doing the right thing without asking for permission first. We should follow standards and build solid code to make our own life easier ‐ not to impress other people. Then show the code and explain its merits to people outside of the development world to improve it for everybody.

So, (a little late) here are some of my New Year’s resolutions for this year:

Give things the benefit of the doubt before judging them. In other words, keep the ‘FAIL’ shouting to the funny blogs where it belongs.

Take time to have a look at the SDKs, hosted services and frameworks out there and write about them instead of showing yet another proof of concept.

Try to talk to people in charge of these systems to stop them from aggravating the developer crowd with decisions that are perfectly logical to them but don’t hold up in our world.

Great API developers don’t necessarily know HTML and their demos might be atrocious table and font monsters. Instead of shunning the API provide examples of how to do it better. Explaining the effects that bad API design can have goes much further than judging only by our own standards.

Clean up the demo code of the systems, SDKs and APIs that I have direct access to. There is nothing worse than a bad example being replicated million fold as people copy+paste instead of reading docs.

Write human readable documentation and don’t expect a degree in Klingon. Ask non-developers how real people use systems and what they like most about them.

What do you think? Is it time to live in the now and help build a good web 2.0,3.0,4.3212 and so on or have we lost the battle for a beautiful, valid and semantically rich web already?

Just as a footnote to this article, my partners and I sat around our board table a few days ago and looked at several of our clients analytics reports and discussed the whole IE6 thing for almost an hour, I guess that classifies us as “tinkerers” too…

Web Development is Moving On – Are you? | Think Vitamin

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: Business, Pleth

NASDAQ: Acxiom Shares up $4

February 4, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 1 Comment

Acxiom shares were trading this morning at $10.55 a share, that’s up $4 from where they were trading at in December. That’s a pretty good increase in my opinion considering that a lot of Acxiom’s clients have been adversely affected by the economic downturn the country has been seeing.

It’s great to see another Arkansas doing well in the global marketplace, especially one that is technology driven like Acxiom. Acxiom’s Conway campus is located just a few miles from my home and they are one of the largest employers in Conway, if not the largest. Acxiom delivers a wide variety of solutions that are in the realm of consumer tracking and business intelligence.

Old_NASDAQ Info Quotes – Stock Prices – Stock Research

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: Business

Keep Sane Working from Home

January 12, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib Leave a Comment

Looks like the guys from Sitepoint are looking out for guys like me again. It’s evident in one of Josh Catone’s most recent blog posts where he lists 12 ways to keep sane while working from home.

As a lot of you may already know, I work from home a vast majority of the time. I live in Conway, but our corporate headquarters is located in Batesville. I try to get there as much as possible to meet up with the rest of the crew but it’s not always easy w/ projects rolling and client updates, etc. These are some pretty good tips, in fact I already do a lot of these. I would be interested to hear of any other suggestions some of you might have. (Not that I am going senile or anything, I am actually pretty content.)

Clearly define your work space. – Working from home means that your work space and living space are often one in the same. It’s important that you keep them separate as much as possible, though. If you work while sitting in your bed, for example, you’ll constantly feel like you’re at work during your down time, and that will just create unnecessary stress when you’re trying to relax.

Take a walk. – There’s really nothing like some fresh air to clear your head. Often times, when I’m starting to feel a little claustrophobic, creatively blocked, or just a little burned out, I’ll go outside and take a short walk. Twenty minutes of fresh air is an amazing way to recharge myself for the rest of the day.

Take a nap. – Because working from home means your office is in your house, it becomes really easy to lose track of time and just work straight through the day. Or late into the night. Homeworkers very often keep strange hours, and as a result, I find myself getting tired at odd times. A quick 15 minute nap is a good way to charge back up for another few hours of working.

Have lunch with a friend. – It’s great to get out of the house, but it’s also a good idea to socialize with real people. I’m able to have lunch a couple of times per week with my girlfriend, which is a really nice break during the day and helps keep me from feeling too overworked. The human-to-human interaction that you miss from working with people in an office is important to replicate as much as possible.

Join a local user group. – Another way to recreate that human interaction is by joining a local user group. Meeting up with a local group serves three purposes: 1. you can do valuable professional networking, 2. you can learn from your peers, and 3. you get the face-to-face interaction with like-minded professionals that is vital to staying sane for homeworkers.

Engage with a community online. – User groups generally only meet one or two times per month, so in the intervening times, it’s a great idea to find professional camaraderie online by joining a web community that revolves around your industry. For web developers, we’re partial to SitePoint’s Forums, of course.

Use Twitter. – Among all the things Twitter can be, one of the best uses I’ve found is as the online equivalent of the watercooler. Workers both at home and at offices can connect around common causes and have quick impromptu conversations about any topic under the sun. The occasional tweet during the day can definitely help you feel more connected to the web working community at large.

Subscribe to a trade magazine. – There are two reasons to subscribe to a trade magazine. First, you’ll learn about what’s new in your industry and feel more involved with it. And second, a tangible printed magazine will force you off the computer once in awhile, which is very important for keeping your wits about you. Trust me.

Keep work and personal contact info separate. – Just like you keep your work and living spaces separate, when working from home you need to keep your contact info separate as well. Get a separate phone number, email address, and separate instant messenger accounts for work. That way, when the work day is done, you can more easily shut out the work-related stuff and focus on your life outside of your job. Doing that will be a lot harder when clients are calling your personal phone line or sending you messages on the IM account you use to chat with friends.

Get a cat (or a dog). – Having a pet around the house is an awesome way to keep sane during a long work day. Nothing melts away work-day stress like playing with my cat for a few minutes. Having a dog can also help to ensure that you take those walks during the day, as well.

Take regular breaks. – As we noted, when your office is in your house, it becomes really easy to lose track of time and just work straight through the day. For a lot of people, taking a break from work while at home feels like goofing off because you’re in the same space in which you relax and unwind after work. Anyone who has worked in an office, however, knows that hardly anyone works the entire day — people get up and get coffee, they play Guitar Hero in the break room, they chat around the copy machine, etc. Working from home doesn’t offer those social opportunities, so it becomes very important that you take regular breaks during the day.

Schedule time off. – A series of 15 minute breaks throughout the work day do not a vacation make. It’s just as important for your mental health that you take some time off. Unplug the laptop, turn off the phone, get out of the house, and don’t think about work for a week. Try to do that at least once a year.

SitePoint » 12 Ways to Keep Sane While Working from Home

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Web Development Tagged With: Business, Pleth

Top 15 Stories of 2008

January 6, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 3 Comments

I am a big fan of SitePoint, they not only put out some great resource books for web developers and hosting companies, but they also have a great list of contributors that post some great content.

I was reading their newsletter today and found the Top 15 Web Tech Stories posted by Josh Catone and thought that it was worthy of reposting. This is definitely a comprehensive look back at the year 2008 and all that we saw happen within our industry and kudos to Josh for putting together a great piece.

2008 was an eventful year on the web. From Yahoo! spurning Microsoft to Google launching both a browser and a cell phone (sort of), there was a lot to write about this year. Even though I only started writing about web technology news for SitePoint starting in July, I’ve actually been writing about this stuff all year. So it was fun and interesting to take a look back at everything that’s happened this year on the web, and try to pick out the top 15 stories. Below are my selections, along with plenty of links to further reading material to keep you busy. It’s a lengthy post, but it was a long and action packed year.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading this year-end recap as much as I did creating it. Let us know if any big stories were left off the list that you think should have been included by leaving a note in the comments at the end of this post. These are presented in no particular order (but numbered for readability).

1. The US Presidential Campaign

The Internet played a huge role in the presidential election in the United States in 2008. No only did more people than ever turn to the web for election information, the Internet also allowed candidates to raise incredible amounts of money from small donors and build powerful grassroots networks that were never before possible. US President-Elect Barack Obama in particular was able to build a campaign on the back of this emerging political long tail and energize people who were not easily reachable using previous methods of organizing and fundraising.

The second episode of the new SitePoint Podcast was dedicated to the effect of the Internet on electoral politics.

2. Yahoo! Turns Down Microsoft

On February 1, 2008 Microsoft made a $44.6 billion takeover offer of Yahoo!. A couple of week’s later Yahoo! would reject that offer — a move that might go down in the annals of company history as their second worst decision (the first being not buying Google in 2002 for $5 billion) and ultimately led to CEO Jerry Yang stepping down in November. Yahoo! tried to sign an advertising deal with Google a few months later that would have outsourced their search ad sales to the more popular search engine, but that went south when the US Department of Justice got interested in the potential antitrust implications.

Rumors still run rampant about Microsoft potentially coming to the table again, purchasing just a piece of Yahoo!, or offering their own search advertising deal, but one thing is for sure: Yahoo!’s market cap is now less than half of what Microsoft offered to spend to acquire the company.

3. Apple’s iPhone App Store is a Huge Success

iPhone debuted the App Store for their iPhone device in July of 2008 and it has been an undeniable success. Analysts predict that next year the App Store will be a $1.2 billion business for Apple, and we reported in August that many developers are doing quite well writing software for the phone platform full-time.

The iPhone platform now has over 10,000 applications, but we’ve wondered how many of them are worth your time and money. More importantly, we’ve wondered if the Apple model for the App Store is really good for consumers. Closed platforms like Apple’s, in which one company is the ultimate gatekeeper, are ultimately a bad thing for the web.

Regardless, iPhone users should not miss our list of 5 awesome iPhone productivity apps.

4. Google Delivers Android

Not content to let Apple have all the mobile fun, at end of last year Google launched Android, their open source mobile phone operating system. In September of this year, the first Android phone arrived, in the form of the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC.

The phone hasn’t been quite the iPhone killer that pundits hoped for, but it is certainly one of the most compelling phones on the market, and because Android is open source, more “Google phones” from other handset manufacturers are sure to follow.

5. Google Releases Chrome Web Browser

The mobile web isn’t the only place Google was getting “Googley” this year. The Mountain View, California-based search giant surprised everyone in September by releasing their own web browser. Called Chrome, the open source web browser is based on the WebKit rendering engine and left beta earlier this month. Though still very rough around the edges, Chrome has already garnered as much as 1% of the browser market worldwide in just 3 months, a number that we expect to rise as important planned features — such as extensions — are added.

Chrome is specifically designed with web applications in mind, and as we’ve discussed, it is an important part of Google’s 3-pronged Web OS strategy. Along with Gears (offline data store) and Native Client (local CPU resources for web apps), Chrome gives Google a compelling platform for the delivery of web applications.

However, Chrome might be coming at the expense of Firefox, which Google has long supported. At the very least, the release of Chrome has complicated Google’s formerly warm relationship with Mozilla.

6. Microsoft Plans to Bring Office Online — Finally

Starting sometime in 2009, Microsoft will finally begin to offer a web-based version of Office. That’s a huge departure from their previous attitude toward web applications, and a somewhat surprising development considering what a cash cow the Office line of products has been for Microsoft. It is, however, in line with the new future that Microsoft has been talking up in which both the client and the cloud play complimentary roles.

“I contend it makes no sense to try to push [lots of data and processing] up the wire [to the cloud, just] so that it can come back and talk to you,” Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told Technology Review in September. “And so, ultimately, that leads us back to what I call this composite platform, where you’ve got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.”

In Microsoft’s vision of the future of software, web services and web-based applications rely on local client software to get more intensive processes done. That’s a future that isn’t all that different from the one that Adobe is also working toward.

7. Economic Recession

In December, the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research officially admitted that the US has been in a recession since December 2007. The effects of that recession have been felt worldwide, including in the tech industry where over 110,000 jobs have been lost since October.

That’s some depressing stuff, and it’s putting a damper on my holiday spirit, so we’ll not spend much time on it. But if you were one of the unfortunate people who lost their job or have found yourself a few clients short as a result of the economic crisis, be sure to check out our 10 essential tips for landing your next job, as well as our list of 20 places to find your next web dev job. Also don’t miss our 12 killer ways to make extra income on the web.

We definitely wish you luck in finding a new job in 2009!

8. OpenID Gains Traction — Sort Of; So Does Facebook Connect

OpenID won some huge partners over the past year. Most impressively, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are all now OpenID providers. Unfortunately, that’s as far as their integration of the single sign-on standard has gone — none of them have taken the plunge to become relying parties. Further, they have each implemented OpenID in their own way creating a single sign-on war (they each want to be the de facto identity provider for the web), that is ultimately bad for consumers in our opinion.

Perhaps worse news for OpenID: according to Yahoo! research most people still have no idea what it is. And, Facebook might just eat OpenID’s lunch.

Facebook Connect, which was announced in July, is a single sign-on solution that on some level competes with OpenID. What gives is an advantage is that Facebook Connect comes with your social graph data.

“Because Facebook Connect is not just a registration system, but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users (according to Facebook), this program will crush competing registration systems,” wrote CNET’s Rafe Needleman about Facebook’s system. “Sites will adopt Facebook Connect for two reasons. First, their users are already actively using it; millions of users have OpenID log-ins and don’t even know it. And second, because it’s not just a registration system, it’s that marketing channel. Self-interest (on the part of site owners) wins over philosophy. Facebook gets that. That’s why it wins.”

9. The Price of Music is Now … Free?

Radiohead’s name-your-own price release of their album In Rainbows last fall set the stage for the price of music to start a decent toward zero in 2009. The success of Radiohead’s gimmick encouraged other bands to follow suit. REM streamed their new album for free on iLike, and Pennywise put their album on MySpace, as did Oasis.

But the most famous free release from 2008 was from Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor — who had previously experimented with alternative album release schemes with Saul Williams, a slam poet whose album he produced — put out not one, but two new albums for free on the web.

By selling value-adds, such as signed copies and deluxe DVD editions of the albums, Reznor was able to still make a considerable amount of money by self-publishing his music online and giving it away for free. Likely, he also garnered some new fans to support NIN’s 2008 tour due to the all the attention and awareness that the word “free” commands. Though Reznor had a lot of help from major labels in building his group of core fans, his success at giving away a free album was on some level a confirmation of Kevin Kelly’s theory of “true fans,” which states that artists can make a living from a small group of die-hard fans.

10. Professional Video Content Fights Back

According to comScore, Hulu — a joint venture between Fox and NBC that offers professionally created content — cracked the list of the top 10 video sites on the web in July in the tenth spot at 88 million views. A few months later in October? Hulu is now sixth and streaming 235 million videos in the US each month.

Think that worries Google? You betcha. YouTube is still way out in front, dominating the online video market with almost 40% of all video views at over 5.3 billion, but the average length of the videos that users are watching is up from 2.7 minutes per video in July to 3 minutes in October. The likely reason: Hulu.

Clearly, people are responding to professionally created content. People are becoming so used to getting their TV content on demand, via web sites like Hulu and DVRs, that we think on demand will be television’s future. Not wanting to be left behind as long-form, professional content shifts to a web distribution model, YouTube began supporting full-length video content in October.

Remember, YouTube initially rose to its dominant position on the back of professional content (like viral Saturday Night Live clips such as “D*ck in a Box”) that were uploaded to the site. Everything old is new again.

11. Firefox Hits 20% Market Share

In June, the popular Firefox web browser released its third version with the goal of setting a world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. They definitely met that goal with a super impressive 8 million downloads over the first day of release.

More impressively, though, Firefox hit 20% browser market share for the first time over a couple of weeks in October, and has since stayed there. Unfortunately, once extensions arrive for Google’s Chrome, Firefox might start to see those numbers slip. And their relationship with Google is already starting to turn, as we noted earlier in this round up.

12. DRM Almost Dies … Almost

DRM is still here, but it’s a lot closer to dead at the end of 2008 than it was at the end of the 2007. In January, the final hold out among the major labels from Amazon’s DRM-free music store, Sony-BMG, gave in and decided to start selling music on the service without the burden of DRM. That said, Apple’s iTunes, which controls about 70% of the digital music market, still only has DRM-free tracks from one major label (EMI).

That’s less encouraging, since it has now been more than a year and a half since Steve Jobs wrote in a treatise on digital rights management: “If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.”

However, Apple is apparently in talks with the other three major labels about offering DRM-free tracks via iTunes. Those talks may or may not come to anything, but clearly, the labels are open to selling DRM-free music, since they all now do it via companies like Amazon, MySpace, and Napster. What remains to be seen is what the labels want more: the ability to frustrate Apple (whom they don’t want controlling their digital sales channel) or pleasing their customers.

Looked at from that perspective, we’re less confident that DRM will die completely in 2009. Oh, but we’re so close!

13. Reading is Back! We Hope

The stats on reading don’t look good. Our attention spans are rapidly approaching zero, and that’s bad news for books. Or is it? Starting at the end of last year a curious thing happened: eBooks suddenly became cool. The reason? The November 2007 launch of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader.

Amazon is projected to sell a billion dollars worth of Kindles by 2010. But the real eBook success story of 2008 might be the iPhone. As we reported in October, the iPhone and its cadre of eBook applications, is actually the most popular eBook reader. eBooks are so hot, that even Nintendo wants in on the action, and Sony is planning a huge marketing blitz in airports, train stations, and bookstores in an attempt to capitalize on Kindle shortages.

2008 might be remembered as the year that reading became cool again and books started going digital in earnest.

14. Yahoo! Gets Really Open

When it comes to Yahoo!, 2008 will be remembered in one of two ways: either as the year that the company put the final few nails in its coffin by rejecting Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer, or as the year that it began to claw its way back to the top by opening itself up to third-party developers.

First, Yahoo! launched SearchMonkey, a platform that allows developers and site owners to use structured data to enhance search results. Then came the Build Your Own Search Service, which opened up Yahoo!’s search infrastructure and allowed developers to create their own search mashups (including powerful custom site search applications).

Most recently, Yahoo! announced a brand new development platform on top of its super popular email application and MyYahoo! start page. Yahoo! is enacting its extremely ambitious plan to rewire their entire network of sites from the inside out to be more open and provide more hooks for developers. Incidentally, that’s close to what I advised that they should do a year and a half ago.

15. Everyone Has their Heads in the Cloud

The buzzword of 2008 was without a doubt, cloud computing. Early in 2008, the aggregate bandwidth of all companies using Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure services surpassed that of Amazon’s own sites. Amazon is a top 10 property worldwide, which means that a lot of sites are now putting their faith in Amazon’s back end services.

As is the theme of everything else on the web, if you have success, Google will eventually decide that they too want a piece of the action. 2008 saw Google become interested in offering developers cloud-based infrastructure services. In April they launched App Engine, their own cloud-based infrastructure service. According to venture capitalist Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, App Engine is the only true cloud computing platform. For now, App Engine only supports the Python language for development, but Google plans to add support for another runtime in 2009.

Microsoft is also getting in on the cloud computing buzz, preparing a Software as a Service release of Office (as we noted earlier in this round up) and talking up their client + cloud future. However, for all the talk of the cloud, desktop apps will remain important. Why? Because the cloud will go down. That’s why companies like Yahoo!, Adobe, Microsoft, and perhaps even Google think that the future of Rich Internet Applications will very much involve the desktop.

SitePoint » The Top 15 Web Tech Stories of 2008

Filed Under: E-Commerce, Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Hosting, Wireless Tagged With: Business, Facebook, MySpace™, Twitter, YouTube™

A Few Personal Goals for 2009

January 2, 2009 By Cotton Rohrscheib 8 Comments

Gosh, it’s going to take forever for me to get used to putting 2009 instead of 2008, seems like I just got used to putting 2008 on checks and things the other day. In lieu of a New Years Resolution this year, I have a few personal goals for 2009 that I want to achieve instead. I figure that if set several goals for things that I want to achieve as instead of locking myself into one thing like I have in the past I will have a lot better chance for success, even if on a smaller scale.

By the way, my resolution this past year was to lose weight and get into shape, and I am happy to report that I somehow managed to do just that for the first time in my life! Over the past few months I have managed to drop about 20-25 pounds, and most importantly corrected some bad lifestyle and dietary habits that I had accumulated over the years which should help me long term in my overall quest for wellness. (I am still losing weight so hopefully it will continue). If anyone is interested in my diet just drop me a note and I would be more than happy to share it with you.

Here are some of my goals for 2009, in no particular order:

Personal Ministry: It has been my belief that God gave me certain talents and abilities in order to make a good living, but the main reason for this gifting is to further his kingdom, which I have strived to do over the past few years by working closely w/ several evangelists and ministry centers. I plan to take this to a new level this next year by incorporating some cutting edge technology into my online ministry projects. Stay tuned…
Business Networking: I have honestly taken the last few years off in terms of business networking, I used to meet at least 10 new contacts a month during the startup years of Powersite but since getting the business off the ground and later co-founding Pleth, I just haven’t done a lot of that anymore, this is going to change as I find myself craving new and exciting projects for the coming year. Also, Pleth just opened a satellite office this past year in Jonesboro, I hope to make it over there a lot more this next year to re-connect with some old friends and make new ones within the industry. I am also looking forward to meeting with new clients in Northeast Arkansas to share some ideas and continue to work on awesome projects from that part of the state. I am also going to make it a goal to finally get out and meet new people in the Conway area. I have managed to stay busy this past year on client projects and haven’t devoted a lot of energy toward establishing my presence here yet, I hope to change that this next year by becoming more visible in the business community.
Expand our Print Business: This past year my partners and I added print and graphic design to our list of service offerings. Since that time we have been awarded numerous bids on print jobs and design projects. I hope to do a better job of marketing our services in that realm and providing our clients with more comprehensive marketing solutions.
WordCamp: I would love to attend a WordCamp somewhere in the United States this year and network with other WordPress Developers out there and build some relationships within the community.
Ministry & Non-Profit Service Offerings: Focus on adding Ministry & Non-Profit Web Solutions to Pleth’s portfolio of service offerings. We have had great success this year in packaging some key modules for podcasting, blogging, video, and content delivery for Church’s and since this is an area I am passionate about I would like to turn this into not only a valuable service to further the kingdom but will also turn into a profitable product offering for our company as well.
Social Networking Integration: Explore further the possibilities of social networking integration into applications we develop for our clients. This past year I was successful in obtaining Facebook Developer status, w/ the help of a few fellow developers from the community, to launch some Facebook Connect applications on a few websites. I see this as an emerging technology that should be absorbed and not ignored.
Powersite Real Estate CMS: I want to Devote some time to finally release my Powersite Real Estate CMS to the masses both as a packaged download w/ installer and as a PHPR template download.
CSS & XHTML: Devote some time to getting a better grasp of CSS and XHTML. This past year I made some great strides toward teaching an old dog (myself) some new tricks and ways of doing things. I am by no means a master but should be able to get a lot better grasp on it over the next 12 months.
Java scripting: I also want to familiarize myself with some of the emerging JavaScript technologies out there like scriptaculous, jquery, etc. I have seen a lot of new uses for JavaScript over the past 12 months and I see this continuing.
Podcasting: I have been giving a lot of thought towards adding a podcast on my personal blog to discuss my favorite topics, PHP Development, Facebook Connect, and WordPress. Podcasting is an awesome commitment, guys like Mitch Keeler just make it look easy but I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into producing a weekly or even monthly show.
E-Commerce: My partners and I share the same goal on this one, we are looking to further enhance our e-commerce and security offerings this next year. Stay tuned to the Pleth website for news and updates regarding this venture.
Email Solutions: Over the past few years we have really built our premium email solution into one of the top saas (software as a service) solutions on the market, but we aren’t going to rest on our laurels, staying on top of the industry isn’t easy, we are going to be adding lot’s of new features to our already successful product this next year, stay tuned.
Online Properties: My business partner Greg Smart and I were discussing an online property that his mom manages that has sustained profitability this past year through a bad economy and has seen increased readership and ad sales. We (Pleth) own several online properties that to date haven’t really been a primary focus for us because we spend so much time developing projects for our clients, but this next year I want to expand this into a profitable business model for us. I get a lot of inspiration for doing this by watching how our friends at Demand Media have been able to be successful w/ their online brands. Just to give you a preview as to what my first online project will be, think NASCAR…
Increase My Blog Traffic and Readership: I have seen a lot of traffic to my blog this past year and I hope to see that continue over the next couple of months. I am hoping to leverage some of the social networks (facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) to do just that. Stay tuned, and if you are a reader of The Cotton Club, please be sure to share my blog w/ your friends.
Learning to Fly: This was one of my 2009 resolutions and I only managed to sneak in 2 classes, I hope to devote some time toward ground school this year and hopefully get up in the air on my own in the next 2 years. With some of our friends moving out of state, multiple offices, and a long list of clients who are pretty spread out, this is something I really, really, want to make happen.
Health & Wellness: I want to continue on my trek toward getting back into size 32 jeans. This past year I went from a size 38 to 33, so I only have a little bit further to go toward this goal. I am going to implement a wide ranged workout routine that help me to continue burning fat and building lean muscle, this routine consists of everything from walking, cycling, running, boxing, and possibly some weight training. I know it’s a stretch too, but I would love to be able to get myself into shape to compete in the Little Rock Marathon, or comparable 5k this next year. I have historically gotten into great shape quick but fell back out just as quick. I know it’s going to take an increased level of determination on my part but hopefully I can make this happen. Out of all of my goals set above, this is the one that I probably wouldn’t wager on.

Best of luck in 2009, and I hope that all of you have a prosperous, healthy 2009 and achieve everything you set your sights on. If there is anything that my business partners and I can assist you or your business in this next year, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line, we would love the opportunity to work with you!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: Business, Family, Friends, Goals