I guess I was too young when the 80′s ended to fully embrace and appreciate this word, but it fully describes how I feel about myself right now.  I have always hated it when web developers have crappy sites, or incomplete sites, and especially when they put up stupid cliches like “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”.

This site has been completely barren of content for the better part of the last 8 months, because toward the end of last year, I was migrating hosts and didn’t properly backup before hitting the fateful “terminate instance” button.  Lost 50+ blog posts which were generating hundreds of hits a day, lost all of my portfolio, about pages, everything.

I found an old backup which had 20 or so of my posts, and put those back.  I’ve restored the screen shots of my portfolio, but still need to write the descriptions for each of the projects featured.  I’ve redesigned the site and got that up.  I’m going to be working on re-writing some of my more popular blog posts which were lost, and posting some new stuff.

Sorry for being a dink.

The WordPress theme is from http://graphpaperpress.com/.  We are big, big fans of WordPress for a lot of simple to moderately complex sites (like this one you’re on right now).  WordPress allows a lot of flexibility and customizability, and a well developed CMS backend.

What are the upsides of developing with WordPress?

1. Quick development.  With WordPress you’re building your site on top of a solid base that takes care of a lot of the basic stuff, which means less testing is necessary, and less new code is necessary.
2. Less expensive.  This ties into number 1– as it takes less time for us to develop your site on top of WordPress, you pay less.
3. Easily extensible.  Because WordPress has such a large user base, there are thousands of extensions available.

In the end, developing most “simpler” sites in WordPress changes from inventing the wheel to refining it.  Our workflow generally consists of putting together the elements needed to create your site, then going through and modifying things to fit your business and your needs.  Because we have a strong understanding of XHTML, CSS, and PHP, we’re able to tweak existing elements to fit the needs of your company.

So, What are the downsides of developing with WordPress?

1. Limited customization.  With WordPress, you can only go so far, and if your site is going to have advanced features, WordPress isn’t going to be the right solution.  What do I mean by advanced features?  Well… do you want customers to be able to log in?  Interact with the site?  Buy from you online?  Do you want to be able to aggregate information from other sources?  Do you want to interface with other services via API?  If you answered yes to any of these, then WordPress probably isn’t the right solution for you.
2. Security.  WordPress is not completely secure.  That said, it’s not like the computer geek at your local high school could easily break in, but if you had a dedicated hacker looking to get at your information, your site could be compromised.
3. Client Overconfidence. Now this one is a little bit of a tricky area… but I’ve seen a few occasions where the WordPress admin interface is so easy to use that the client will try adding features on their own, which has, more often than not, resulted in the whole site breaking.  Similarly, clients will automatically assume that they’re supposed to install every WordPress update, when, oftentimes, this ends up removing any or all of the customizations we’ve made to the site.

So, when is WordPress the right choice?  If you’re a small business looking for an attractive, simple website that you can update on your own, and you’ve got a moderate level of tech saavy, WordPress deserves a close look, and, at Hotchkiss Consulting, we’re happy to help you figure out the solution that’s best for your business.

So, in accordance with my plan to switch client communication from phone to email, I have decided that, instead of a Cell Phone, I will carry a Peek with me.  While it has been a rocky road so far, I trust that the people at Peek have some good updates coming down the pipeline, so I’m going to stick it out for a couple months and see how I like it.

The thing about the Peek is that it’s eMail only.  And I really do mean only.  No calculator, no games, no web browser, and no calendar.  For me, that just won’t do– I am an avid fan of Remember the Milk.  I keep it in my OS X dashboard and on my desktop email screen (I use GFYD, Google For Your Domain).  Having my RTM to go is a must.

Currently, RTM offers a couple email-based options.  You can email in new tasks, you can receive a list of your tasks for the day every morning via email, and you can receive an email reminder before a task is due.  This is a good start, but there are some problems:

1) With the daily schedule emails, you can only see what’s going on that day, you can’t see your entire schedule.  This information is crucial for setting appointments.

2) Reminder emails don’t have the task name in the subject line, meaning you have to open the email to see what you’re supposed to do.

3) You can’t do anything with the tasks– no marking them completed or postponing, you have to do this from the computer.

So, I wrote my own email interface, and will go over it and include my source files so you, too, can build your own (if you’ve got some PHP know-how).  If there’s enough interest, I will build a standalone, hosted solution for everyone of every skill level.

Now, you’ll note that I didn’t mention any problems with the task submission, that’s because it works pretty well already… the only issue I ran into there is that the Peek gives an alert every time you try to submit a new task because your RTM task submission email address contains a “+” sign.  So I simply added an email address to one of my domains that forwards to my RTM address.  Problem solved.

Issues with my RTM email interface:

1) I use the time estimate field to store my flag as to whether or not a notification has been sent.  This isn’t a field that I, personally, use.

2) I have built this to use only one list, my inbox.  If you want to use more lists, go for it, this script should give you a good starting point.

3) Even with my source code, this is a pretty technical process to get this up and running on your server.  I’m providing this to help those of you who have a basic understanding of PHP and REST/JSON data structure save a little bit of time.  If there is sufficient interest, I will consider building a service to do this for you– if you are interested, please post a comment letting me know.

4) These instructions assume that you already have an API Key and Shared Secret and a frob and token with read/write access to your user account.  If there are a lot of questions about this, I can post a separate how-to.

You are welcome to use this information for personal projects and distribute it with proper accreditation.

This interface uses 3 scripts, I will go through each in a separate blog post:

1) Schedule

This script sends me my full schedule at 7am, noon, and 5pm (It is triggered by crontab).   Here’s what one of those emails might look like:

Past Due:
-------------------------
Wed, Mar 4 2:00pm - call leanne smith re: PSD files
Thu, Mar 5 6:00pm - Send Back Candles

Upcoming:
-------------------------
Fri, Mar 6 10:00am - Change netflix plan
Fri, Mar 6 10:00am - Pay Care Credit Bill
Fri, Mar 6 10:00am - Pay Sallie Mae
Fri, Mar 6 12:00pm - call kennebec re contract
Sat, Mar 7 10:00am - Haircut!
Sat, Mar 7 11:00am - Go see an unlikely weapon at noon
Wed, Mar 11 8:30am - Dog Grooming @ Happy Paws
Wed, Mar 11 4:00pm - Meet with B. Peterson @ 430
Thu, Mar 12 5:15pm - Take out the Trash

Future:
-------------------------
Wed, Mar 18 3:45pm - Meeting w/ J. Doe at 4:30
Fri, Mar 20 8:15am - Dentist Appt
Sat, Jun 6 1:00am - Call Barbara to set up meeting on the 10th

     March 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

     April 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30

      May 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                1  2
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31

     June 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30

You can see, also, that at the emails I’ve tacked on the next 4 months worth of calendars so I can see what’s coming up!

2) Reminders

To replace the reminder emails, I have a script that runs every 5 minutes to check to see if I have any tasks coming up within the next 30 minutes.  It then generates an email in which the subject is the name of my task followed by the Task ID, Task Series ID, and List ID (all of which are period delimitted).  This allows my next script to work its magic as well as putting my task info right there in the subject line so I can see what’s going on.

3) Modifications

This script checks a secret gmail account every 5 minutes, reads my messages and processes them based on the Process Code I send in.  The process code is the first letter in an email– if it’s “C” then this script tells RTM that the task is Completed.  If it’s “P”, the script tells RTM that the task is Postponed.  It figures out what the task is by parsing the numbers at the end of the subject line.

So… that’s what we’ve got!  Scripts are on their way and should be up today, please let me know what you think, and feel free to leave any questions in the comments field below.

I, instead, use a 3-number quote, where I quote the minimum time it will take (no way I’m getting it done faster than this), the maximum time it will take (no way it will take longer than this, and even if it does, I won’t bill you for more than this), and then the projected time (I usually end up coming in within 10% of this number)

The gap between the minimum, maximum, and projected varies based on what the job is.  For example, for coding a straight HTML page, there aren’t many surprises that are going to come up, so my quote might be:

Minimum: 2 Hours
Maximum: 4 Hours
Projected: 3 Hours

On the other hand, if the job is building a shopping cart and integrating it with a CC processor I haven’t used before, there gets to be a whole lot more that could go wrong.  This quote might end up being:

Minimum: 10 Hours
Maximum: 60 Hours
Projected: 25 Hours

By quoting out projects this way, I find I can get a much more realistic proposal together for a customer, so they can look at it and instead of just seeing “This is going to cost $6,700″ even though the final bill they get actually turns out to be $3,500, they see “This is going to be somewhere between $2,500 and $7,000, but it will probably be in the mid-$3k range.”

I hear time and time again that “Customers are Stupid, don’t give them too much information,” but I just don’t think that’s true.  Customers want you to tell it to them straight.  Customers understand that building a web site isn’t like aligning your tires– it’s impossible for me to tell you exactly what the total cost will be.  If I have to do a set cost, then I, like everyone else, will estimate high rather than low.

I also think that you need to always be proactive about letting customers know where their accounts stand.  If you bill monthly, send a weekly note with the number of hours you’ve billed that week.  The last thing that anyone wants is an angry client who received a bill that was more than they expected.

Lastly, use a contract and be clear on your terms.  Both you and the client need to be on the same page as to when you will bill them, when they need to pay, and the payment methods accepted.  Before I started accepting Credit Card payments, I had a customer on the other side of the country call me the day that payment was due, and say “Alright, I’m calling in to pay off my account, are you ready?”  That was the very day I started accepting credit cards.

It all comes down to communication.  Be clear and honest with your clients as to all of the details, and you’ll have smooth sailing down the road.