EP:014 – The Cotton Club Podcast
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This evening I recorded another episode of The Cotton Club Podcast with Keith Crawford, Steven Trotter, and Mitch Canter. It was awesome to have Mitch on the show w/ us this evening because he is an authority on all things wordpress in my opinion. Keith and I first met Mitch at Wordcamp Fayetteville earlier this year and have followed his streams on Twitter and Facebook since then.
The topic for this evenings show was the GPL debate going on between Thesis and Wordpress or Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenwig, however you want to look at it. We covered how the whole controversy got started and what in the world it’s all about. There have been tons of spirited debates recently on this topic so I thought it was appropriate we address it here on the show. Also, we had Mitch give us a run down of his favorite Wordpress Plugins and then we played a speed round of which plugin to use w/ Mitch. Some of the plugins Mitch covered included: Gravity Forms, Kieran’s Calendar, PowerPress, Sexy Bookmarks, and WP-Touch.
Also, as usual we discussed our favorite iPhone apps of the week. Some of the apps discussed in this episode included: DISQUS, Get Glue, iTweetReply, Boxcar, and LED Flashlight Ultimate.
EP:012 – The Cotton Club Podcast
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Well I think we figured out in this episode of The Cotton Club Podcast exactly how important a reliable internet connection is to producing a show like this. My guests Keith Crawford, Brant Collins, Robert Blake, Craig McCoy, Arlton Lowry, and Steven Trotter were all gracious despite the fact we were disconnected 4 times thanks to my connection dropping out. I promise to work on this and get it all squared away in the very near future so please bear with us through this episode, I did my best editing work to splice together all of the audio, hopefully you won’t be able to tell but I bet you do…
Even though we had some tough connection issues we still managed to cover some pretty cool topics in this episode including the release of the new iPhone and the IOS4.0 operating system. We also touched on the rollout of Wordpress 3.0. Another discussion was carried over from my recent blog post on social media taboo where we each weighed in with our thoughts. If you run a business and want to leverage social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, or Foursquare in your marketing you should definitely give this episode a listen. Our guests Arlton Lowry and Steven Trotter also discussed the co-working trends that have started up in Jonesboro and Conway and as usual we wrapped up the show discussing our favorite iPhone apps. Again, please forgive our sloppiness in this episode, we are working to get everything resolved with our connection so we are up and running again soon without interruptions.
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.
#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.
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?
Wordcamp Fayetteville #WCFay
I don’t know how this one slipped by me but there is a Wordcamp coming to Fayetteville at the Fayetteville Town Center on May 29th and 30th. I was talking to Brent Passmore tonight on Twitter and he filled me in and I immediately registered online. If you are a wordpress guru in the Central Arkansas area you should definitely think about heading up for the conference. I think registration is like $30 if you signup before May 1st and after that date it goes up to $40. Definitely worth the haul if you are into Wordpress.
There will also be an ‘unconference’ day Sunday at The New Design School. If you are heading that direction be sure to give me a heads up so we can try to hook up and head down to Dixon Street the night before…There are two tracks for the conference, one for developers and the other for bloggers, here’s a little more information:
You can attend any session you want during the seven 45-minute blocks, but you might want to decide which track better serves your educational and developmental goal for the conference.
- Blogger track: We want to teach people who’ve never blogged before, up to intermediate level, how to use this free tool known as WordPress to their advantage. Whether you’re a citizen journalist, a small business owner, educator or nonprofit executive, we can help you learn to get your message out into the Interwebs.
- Developer track: This is for advanced WordPress users, theme designers, plugin creators or those who just like to get dirty with WordPress code. We are our own best resource so lets teach one another.
Projects: Crawford for Congress
Another one of my recent projects has been a political website for Republican First Congressional District Candidate Rick Crawford. We were retained by the Crawford Campaign to redesign their existing website and to incorporate some new functionality to their base Wordpress installation. Given the amount of plugins that are available today for Wordpress it’s a very good choice for political candidates who might need to quickly deploy new content or applications during the campaign.
In addition to the overall website design and layout, my partners and I are also helping to manage the campaign’s social media presence. Be sure to click the link below to visit the new Crawford For Congress website.
EP:001 – The Cotton Club Podcast
I finally got around to recording my first installment of The Cotton Club Podcast this evening. My guest co-host for the show this evening was Keith Crawford, you may know him as @tsudo on Twitter. This initial podcast was just a test run to see how things work so that when Keith and I get ready to launch another sideline project called The Social Radar in the very near future we can hit the ground running.
Please keep in mind that this is my first go at podcasting, the quality and content should get better over time. Despite the fact that I have invested in an awesome setup from software to microphones, the audio of me talking didn’t turn out very well at all. You can hear Keith great, and that’s probably a good thing since he is a lot cooler to listen to. 
The topics we covered on Episode 001 of The Cotton Club were as follows:
- Geosocial Applications (Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt)
- iPhone Applications (Dragon Dictate, Where R U?, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mytown)
- Social Media Predictions for 2010 (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed)
- Methods for Archiving Thoughts for Blog Posts (Friendfeed, Wordpress, etc.)
- Crazy Story of The Week from Hell
- NASCAR Withdrawels
- Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting – January 26th (Nick Brewer presenting on PODSCMS for Wordpress)
Thanks for tuning into my first show, I promise it’s going to get better over time, so please bear with me. If you want to subscribe to The Cotton Club Podcast, you can do so on iTunes.
Production Note: The audio at the beginning of the recording isn’t very loud, a few minutes into the recording I finally managed to get it adjusted to where you could hear me a little bit better. Please bear w/ me, this is a work in progress.
#RefreshCA Jan. 26th: Nick Brewer on Pods CMS for WP
We are going to be having our first Central Arkansas Refresh meeting of the new year on Tuesday, January 26th at the Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock. The #RefreshCA group is a group of web developers, bloggers, IT people, and agency personnel that gathers on the last Tuesday of each month to discuss topics of interest within our industry.
This month Nick Brewer from CJRW is going to be presenting on Pods CMS for Wordpress. For those of you not familiar w/ Pods CMS, it’s a CMS framework that sits on top of Wordpress, allowing you to add and display your own content types. Here’s a brief description:
As it is defined, Pods is a content management plugin for WordPress. Many people may wonder why a plugin is needed to make WordPress a content management system, doesn’t it do that already? Absolutely, but out of the box, WordPress specifically caters to a few types of content; Posts, Pages, Media, Comments, and Links. WordPress does a ton more (such as categories, tags, users, etc.), but as far as the average user is concerned, those are the major content types you’re able to work with. Themes bring all that managed content together to share with the world, and plugins build on top of that even more.
Many plugins exist to provide you with a new type of content to manage, most often a specific type of content aimed at achieving a specific goal. That’s awesome, and helps tons of people to make that change they’re looking to update on their site. Pods, however, thinks about things in a different way.
Pods provides a platform on which to build your own content types to manage, all the while providing some really advanced functionality having to do with that content. From the User Guide, a Pod is a group of input fields. You can add and arrange any number of the various available input fields to any number of Pods, essentially creating your own custom CMS for each website you build in WordPress.
The meeting should get started around 6pm and is open to the public. We meet in the basement area of the saucer, just walk into the bar area and then take the stairway down to the basement. For more information about the Central Arkansas Refresh Group, please visit our website: http://refreshcentralarkansas.org or join our group on Facebook. You may also follow the group on Twitter at @RefreshCA.
For directions to the Flying Saucer, see the map below:
View Larger Map
Some Personal, Business, & Development Goals for 2010
The other day I was looking over my personal goals that I had set going into 2009. I feel really good about what I was able to accomplish in 2009 but unfortunately there are still a few things that I am going to carry over into 2010.
This is not to say that 2009 was a bad year, in fact I would say that 2009 was probably one of the best years I have had in a long time, especially in terms of business and personal development.
Personal Goals for 2010
I have set some pretty high goals for myself personally going into 2010 as compared to what I set for 2009. I have learned that I respond well when I put pressure on myself. Hopefully by setting the bar high I will be able to motivate myself to another level personally.
- Private Pilots License: One of the goals that I had for myself coming into 2009 was to get my pilots license. While I did manage to get a few lessons in I didn’t really devote a lot of time to accomplishing this goal. I am going to try to put forth a little more effort this year to get my license. I have checked into some classes offered by UCA for private pilot certification.
- Business Networking: One of the things I am most proud of in 2009 was helping to organize the Central Arkansas Refresh user group. I reflected on the #Refresh group a few weeks ago and gave some insight into how it all came together. Basically social media powered the group, but the group itself and our monthly meetings allowed me to make some awesome business contacts in the Central Arkansas area. I hope to continue growing my personal network in 2010 through outlets like the #RefreshCA group as well as attending various conferences.
- Speaking: I was fortunate enough to have been asked to speak at couple of events this past year on a variety of topics, primarily interactive marketing and social media. I really enjoyed being a part of these events and I hope to continue to take advantage of these opportunities when they present themselves.
- Diversify: While my passion is, and always will be, the internet, I plan on becoming involved in a few areas outside the web in 2010 as well. I have a lot of irons in the fire right now and I am not ready to make any announcements regarding any projects or anything just yet but I can assure you this, whatever business deals I get involved in 2010, they will strictly be sideline projects. I plan on staying actively involved doing what I am doing until I retire, these side projects will just hopefully help me retire a little bit sooner.
- Run in a 5k: Another one of my goals coming into 2009 was to become more healthy but I obviously didn’t do as well in that department as I would have liked. Hopefully I can do a lot better job in 2010. In order to push myself toward this goal I am going to try to run in at least one 5k this year. I haven’t decided on where or when yet, but after the first of the year I am going to start running and try to make this happen by at least the end of the summer.
- Build my Personal Brand: In a lot of ways I have already been building my personal brand by blogging here at The Cotton Club and by staying pretty active on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but I am going to try to take things to another level in 2010 by adding some exciting new things. One of the things that I will be adding is a podcast. I haven’t worked on the specifics just yet as to how often it’s going to be released or even when the first episode will air but I can assure you that it will happen in the first quarter of 2010.
Business Goals for 2010
My partners and I had a great year in 2009 despite the economic downturn that plagued the nation. We managed to pick up some great new accounts as well as further refine the focus of our business. I would like to build upon some of the products and services that we had a lot of success with this past year. Here’s the list of business goals I have put together so far…
- Email Outsourcing / Archiving: I have blogged a lot the past few months about our premium email products and archival solutions because a lot of attention has been placed on regulatory compliance in a lot of industries. I think that we have a very competitive solution that will continue to do well for us in 2010.
- Shared & VPS Solutions: Over the years my partners and I have made a tremendous investment in our hosting infrastructure. Today, thanks to virtualization, we are able to provide VPS, or virtual private server, solutions to development firms for a very competitive rate, even on a national scale. I am going to try to make an effort to promote our hosting solutions a lot more in 2010 than I did in 2009.
- Ministry Web Solutions: This past year we launched Powersite ministry solutions to showcase our web design and development packages geared toward churches or non-profit organizations. We have had a great response so far from the Powersite launch and I hope to continue that momentum going into 2010.
- Social Media / Interactive Marketing: My partners and I had a lot of success this year steering a lot of our clients into the realm of social media. We also saw some tremendous results from our efforts. I hope to make social media an even-more integral part of what we provide for our clients in 2010.
Development Goals for 2010
I didn’t do a lot of custom application development this past year so I have come up with some goals for the upcoming year to get me back into the development mindset. Here’s what I have come up with so far…
- Develop 2 iPhone Apps: I have two ideas that I think could be profitable, I just have to finalize my project parameters and complete the markup models for each project, which I should be able to do by the first quarter of next year, then I have the rest of the year to familiarize myself with Objective C programming and knock these projects out.
- Develop 2 Wordpress Plugins: I also have two ideas for Wordpress plugins that I want to release in 2010. I already have started coding on both of these projects but haven’t had the spare time to devote to wrapping them up. I typically code on these types of projects after hours in between client projects. Hopefully I will find the time in 2010, stay tuned to this blog for info on both of these plugins.
- Develop 2 Web Applications: I also have two web applications, both geared toward the agriculture industry, that I should be able to launch in 2010. Both applications are 75% complete, I am just waiting on some regulatory guidelines to be handed down by a few more states and then I can wrap everything up. I won’t go into a lot of detail about these apps right now but will when we finally roll them out.
- Develop a MODx Project: My business partner Greg primarily works in MODx while I develop most of my projects in Wordpress. While both solutions are great for content management, they are both very different in terms of their core foundation. I would like to develop a project this next year in MODx so I can become more familiar with it’s operation and functionality.
