I want to express some gratitude for some of the people and events that made this past year special.

My beautiful little girls are of course my greatest blessing. Mia turned seven this year and Sophia turned two. (My wife and I, well, yes, we had birthdays too.) They truly fill my life with a lot of joyful mayhem.

I also am blessed with a wife who truly supports me in everything I do. I’d be a mere fraction of the man I am without her.

I am grateful to have finally finished my BS degree in Information Technology and was even more blessed to have my family surrounding me at the graduation.

I am extremely grateful to my clients for giving me the opportunity to do good work for them, but also for the chance they’ve given me to start this business, which is something I have wanted to do for a very long time.

I mostly want to wish everyone a healthy, prosperous, and joyous new year. I hope you all find what you want in your life.

I wrote recently how I was using a wiki to manage my time, projects, and deliverables. But some fundamental truths about this practice become apparent to me after a couple of months. Here are a few things I’ve found.

Don’t become enamored of your own writings. It’s real easy to fill out a page of things you intend to do in the coming weeks. It’s even easier to feel proud of yourself for doing so. It’s nice to see that page in all it’s wiki goodness neatly displaying those goals you intend to achieve; neat line items surrounded by a familiar wrapper and compelling navigation. But the whole point of using this wiki is to keep track of events on a daily basis. You need to be willing to delete, rewrite, add, change; really mess with the thing on a daily basis to make it truly reflective of your reality. This is not a book, not a narrative. You are capturing those things that you must be aware of constantly to drive and prioritize your business.

Set the wiki as your default home page. Make it the first thing you see each morning (that is, if you’re like me and the first thing you do is grab coffee and fire up your computer). Doing this forces you to immediately consider the day ahead, the week ahead, and get your head wrapped around what needs doing. I set mine to my This Week page so I get an overview of what I have done and what I have left to do for the week. After this, I check out the People to Ping page to see if there’s anyone needing attention there. Next, I recheck my Client Whiteboard to make sure I am on track with current projects. All the while I am doing this, I am editing the pages. Deleting, rewriting, notating, making sure they reflect reality as much as possible.

Keep it simple. For me, about five pages is enough to capture what I need (including one page for internal projects and another of feeds for reading). Some folks will need more, some less. (You could do it all on one page with breaks and headers, but that makes for a lot of scrolling.) By using only a handful of pages, you keep your thoughts clear and to the point and in context. It also makes for a very simple and easily navigable left hand menu.

I cannot imagine my worklife without this tool; it is how I manage everything and keep myself organized. But in order for it to truly add value, you have to give it the proper attention.

Of necessity, I was recently forced to migrate to a new computer. My laptop has become flaky, shutting itself down without notice at random intervals throughout the day. I have my jacked-up alienware box that I use for my home studio and decided to dual purpose that for music and work. At the same time, I have shut down my server here at home and moved my website, development environment, and email to a hosted service. Lots of changes this week, and not the fun kind.

This all went exceptionally well, with the exception of my blowing out an extra 250GB hard drive by plugging the wrong power source into it–the smoke coming from the back was a dead giveaway. But what makes this a more interesting experiment is that rather than digging through boxes in the attic to find my old MS Office and Photoshop discs, I have downloaded and installed as replacements the open-source tools OpenOffice and GIMP.

OpenOffice is an office productivity suite that mirrors the offerings of MS Office. Included in the bundle are sisters to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and several other applications. Each of these applications can save and open native MS documents. I am delighted to report that so far these tools work seamlessly with MS products. I have found no limitations (although I am admittedly not a MS power user), and at the cost of no dollars I am now a believer. (I should note here also that I did try Google Docs for an hour or so, but had to forget about it when it refused to accept formatting I had done in Word–these things need to play nice with the rest of the world).

GIMP was even more of a surprise. I remember using GIMP on a linux machine years ago, and abandoning it quickly because it was so different from my beloved Photoshop. I found the learning curve too steep. But having used GIMP for a few hours the other day I can say the product has definitely matured to the point where I can use it for everything I need. The interface also has become more intuitive. I’m not sure if GIMP is to the point where it can be used by Photoshop professionals, but for what most of us need it is definitely all there.

I’m not ready to take the jump to a Linux desktop, but these open-source tools fill a huge gap in my working toolset, and remarkably, they’re free. (As with any open-source offerings, they do gratefully accept donations, both monetary and development contributions).

This should be a ongoing series. There are so many companies who still do not get basic customer service. Today’s example is brought to you by VistaPrint.

I’ve used VistaPrint only a few times: to order business cards for both my wife and I, to have some cheap brochures printed up, and to take advantage of a couple of freebies like branded refrigerator magnets. But since I started to use them the volume of email offers they send me (daily) has reached spamming proportions. I get sometimes two email ads from them a day, offering 24-hour savings on everything from cards to coffee mugs, shirts, hats, banners. Everything I pretty much don’t need.

But today they lost my business. They send me an email (fancy, designed like a newsletter) with photos of my business cards. The ad states that these items still are in my account cart, but if I do not place an order by December 15, they will be removed from said cart. What reason–other than strong-arming a sale–could they possibly have for needing to clear out my cart? Are they running low on disk space? Database is getting too full? Need more room for higher-end customers? I tell you, I can’t believe they have resorted to threatening me to make a sale. Here’s the copy from the email:

We wanted to let you know that the items currently in your VistaPrint account portfolio (shown below), have not been ordered and will expire on Dec 15, 2007. Once the items have expired, you will be unable to recover them.

Well, what goes around, eh? Not that I am a volume consumer of their products, but now I am not at all a consumer of their products. I wonder how many others were equally turned off by this tactic. Do you suppose it worked on lots of others and they just racked up lots of sales? No, I don’t either.

At any given time I have a dozen or more customers and prospects to manage deliverables for. Add to this that I have struggled for years to find a good way to keep things like this organized. About a month ago I installed MediaWiki on my site to help manage my workload. I have a Client Whiteboard, a Partner Whiteboard, a People to Ping page, a page for my own internal projects (business infrastructure), a listing of Articles to Read, and a simple page called This Week which simply lays out what I hope to accomplish in the week ahead. This has been huge for me. Each morning this is the first place I go to get a handle on the day’s and week’s work.

Throughout the week I find lots of articles I want to read, both industry news and development ideas. Or course, I manage these by tagging them in deli.cio.us. But it occurred to me this morning that it would be infinitely more manageable if I were able to pull the feeds from deli.cio.us into my Articles to Read wiki page. I did some Googling and found a plugin called SimplePie. And it could not be simpler to install and use. You just drop the plugin into your wiki’s extension folder, add an include line into your LocalSettings file, and then use the following syntax on your wiki page to display the feed (you also can pass parameters within that tag to control display options like number of articles and text styles):

<feed>http://del.icio.us/rss/webdevteam</feed>

Done. I have been advocating using social media tools to customers of Intranets. Using things like deli.cio.us, Flickr, FaceBook, and even blogging tools, users of an Intranet can collect and share all sorts of information without having to own and manage the systems that provide them. For one company, I set up a group deli.cio.us account and gave everyone access. We displayed the feed on their group homepage. Within a week, everyone had contributed articles relevant to their work and their home page became far more valuable.

I’ve been spending time lately culling through a variety of plugins for WordPress to offer clients who want to beef up their CMS capabilities. I came across three recently that I find particularly useful.

The first is Flickr Photo Gallery. The toolbar integrates nicely with the image upload component in the writing window of WordPress. Once configured, rather than just selecting from images I have uploaded to my blog site, I can also select images from my photos on Flickr. I can add individual photos or whole albums. Once on a published page, I can view them in their own window with navigation, or go right over to Flickr and use their viewing tools. This is a great solution for companies who want to display images (say a recent event they sponsored) without the overhead of managing their own image library application.

The second is Viper’s Video Quicktags. I’m not sure why, but I found it very difficult to embed a YouTube video into my blog. I found lots of sites offering code that required cutting and pasting into the code view of the editing window. None of these worked for me. Finally, I stumbled on this plugin, which like the Flickr plugin, offers a solution nicely integrated into my editing toolbar. And it could not be simpler: press the icon and a window prompt pops up requesting the URL of the video. Press OK and the code is inserted to your posting. It works with all the major sites like YouTube, Google Video, IFilm, and more. And like the Flickr tool above, this also provides a business solution of linking to content without having to own and manage the content system itself.

There is one other plugin that I think is truly invaluable. The All in One SEO Pack. This form below the editing window ensures that every post I make has the required metadata to keep the search engines a-calling. There are also lots of other options in the admin interface. This is a must have, while the others are just good to have.

Many months ago (perhaps even two years ago) I installed the WordPress multi-user package on my development host. Within minutes, I abandoned it. I can’t recall now what the issue was, but I do remember thinking to myself that if it is this broken just trying to get the thing up and running, it isn’t yet ready for prime time (or my debugging time, either).

But yesterday, imagine my surprise when after downloading, unpacking, and installing I found myself tricking out a fresh instance of WordPress Mu (the Mu is actually a symbol rather than letters on their site). I went out and found some very nice themes; one three-column setup that I am particularly enamored with, and began customizing and exploring the new features.

Why am I bothering with this? Because WordPress in an of itself is a simple but powerful content management system. It can be tailored for almost any kind of site (newspapers, universities, any kind of blog), and makes it very easy for writers and editors to publish and own their own content. It also integrates well with other open-source tools, like vBulletin. And now, having this multi-user version, we can literally host hundreds of blogs using the same WordPress instance. Imagine a company with several brands or locations that wants to have their sites all look and behave similarly but also wants each to manage their own content. This kind of flexibility (and centralization) is a huge step in providing that kind of control. I’ll be spending a lot of time with this system in the coming months.

I think always of economy in my work. Not what I get paid or how many hours I work. But rather, what needs to be done to solve a problem or create a better solution, and how that solution can be reused and modified to solve other problems. Simplicity in all thoughts and all things.

I found an article tonight on Huffington Post that buzzed me because I also am aware of this type of economy in my personal life. I hate waste. I don’t like buying things knowing they are junk. Or buying silly, stupid little geegaws and gimcracks for my kids simply because they want them, knowing these things are destined only to our next yard sale. I’m not a cheap guy; in fact, I love to spoil my girls (my god, I am truly doomed as money conduit). But I also want to send the message to them that they do not need every little thing that captures their eye.

Which is why I love this quote from the article:

Create a pile of goods, point it out to random bystanders and say, “Take what you want.” How long would the pile last? An hour, or 30 seconds?

I feel the same way about design and development of websites. People seem almost greedy about ‘web 2.0′ gadgets and widgets. Sure, you can have all you want. But which of these things delivers what you need for your business? Which brings you satisfaction that your website is serving you and your customers well? A really great website is the result of reviewing all those lovely gadgets out there and deciding which are the ones that will be useful and relevant to your business and your message.

Ask yourself: do you need that Ajax interface to deliver your message? Ajax is cool, but it can also mess with your Google exposure. Can you deliver the message without it?

Focus on content. How to structure that content in a readable way. How to make sure that content gets picked up by Google. How that content is perceived by your readers. The true economy comes from delivering your particular and unique content in ways that are attractive and pleasing but also functional and useful to your audience. Focus on your message first and your tools second.

The title of this post comes directly from an ad on Craigslist today. I kid you not, here is the text of the ad:

We are seeking a creative person to update our 8 page website. Hoping to work with a student or amateur – No Pros Please.

Website originally created in Yahoo Sitebuilder software.

Short, quick, and easy job.

People, please. You truly get what you pay for. Please do not try this at home, or more importantly, with your business. Call me.

Workflows are useful tools for routing documents that live in a repository such as SharePoint 2007. Creating them is more difficult than you may think until you have done a few of them. Below, I’ll describe the steps needed to create a simple serial workflow in SharePoint using an InfoPath form to capture the data.

The example used here is an approval workflow for an engineering document. When the document is completed and submitted to the system, a workflow is initiated and an email is sent to the first approver, Manager A. After the email is sent, the workflow goes into a wait state until the next action occurs. When Manager A receives the email and signifies his/her approval within the InfoPath form, the second step in the workflow is triggered: an email is sent to Manager B for approval and again, the workflow goes into a wait state. The third step sends email to Manager C for final approval and goes into a wait state. The final step is when the Manager C signifies approval: email is sent to the document originator and the workflow itself is stopped.

• Open SharePoint Designer 2007
• Choose Open Site and open the site where you want to create your workflow
• From the File menu, choose New -> Workflow
• Choose the Library/List to associate with the Workflow; give the workflow a name
• At the bottom of the window, choose Initiation
• Press Add and name your initiation parameter; here we use “workflowstatus”
• Choose Single line of text for the Information Type
• Press Next
• Set the Default value to “notstarted”

A separate step is created for each of the Condition/Action pairs described at the beginning of this document.

Each step needs a Condition to be met for an Action to occur; think If/Then statements in code. We use our Initiation parameter to set the serial status (workflowstatus from above). The values for the workflowstatus parameter will be notstarted when initiated, Manager A on first approval, Manager B on second approval, and Manager C on final approval. The workflow then ends.

Use the Conditions button on the interface to create the If portion of your criteria, and the Actions button to create the Then statements.

• Press the Conditions button and select Compare any data source
• You will see the template for an If statement: If value equals value
• Press on the first value link in the If statement
• A form field appears with a Formula icon next to it
• Click the Formula button
• Select from the pulldown menu Source: Workflow Data
• Select from the pulldown menu Field: Initiation: workflowstatus
• Press OK
• Press the second value link in the If statement
• Type in the form field ‘notstarted’
• Press the Actions button
• Choose Set workflow variable
• Click the link workflow variable
• Select Initiation: workflowstatus from the pulldown menu
• Click the link value
• Type into the form field ‘Manager A’
• Press the Actions menu again
• Choose from the menu Send an Email; a sample email window pops up
• Click the address book icon to fill in the To address
  • You can either hard-code an address, look one up in the directory, or pull the address from a form field in the InfoPath form.
• Type in the Subject of the mail; click the formula icon to place a field value here, such as Title
• Type your message in the Body. Press Add Lookup to Body at the bottom on the window to add form fields to your message, such as a link to the document.
• Press OK

Repeat this process for the next three steps: check if the workflowstatus parameter has changed to the next variable, check to see if the previous approval has been granted, then set the workflowstatus to the next variable, send the email to the next approver, and set the workflow into a Wait state until the next approval is received. The actual steps I used are illustrated below.

Workflows are a great way to route documents that require one or more approvals. An additional benefit is that there always is a clean audit trail illustrating the lifecycle of the document. Creating a workflow in SharePoint requires a little practice and some simple steps in logic. When creating workflows, I find it best to sit with paper and pen and draw out all the Conditions and Actions before I begin touching the interface.