Although Chris and I had no real issues with the first design, he quickly learned how fast things change, so it wasn’t long before we had issues to be addressed and worked out. As Chris began the journey of running his own company, he realized that his personal choices really had no impact on the business or perhaps even a negative one at that. This is a great lesson for any startup, leave personal feelings, tastes and emotions at the door because they don’t really matter. As you can see the Mops & Buckets redesign is a much softer, friendlier and overall cleaner website(not that it wasn’t in the first go around) and already helping increase conversions and keeping Chris and his team plenty busy to start the new year.

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A Tool To Increase Resolution of your Mac Products

Over the holidays I found myself wanting more and more to chill out with my Macbook Pro on my lap in the living room. I love my Chromebook, but I wanted to do some work on some stuff that I just can’t do at the moment. This was the only option if I was gonna work and watch more than basic television and hang out with my daughter and wife. In my office I hook my mbp to an external monitor so I can have more real-estate to work on. It had been almost two months since I worked on something without the dual monitor setup and I was itching for more screen space(since multiple windows is not an option I care for).

A quick couple of google searches and I stumbled upon SwitchResX. Not sure if I was off my google game or what, but it wasn’t as easy as it should have been to find this, or at least a week ago I remember having issues when searching for a product.

Regardless I was pleased to come across this tool and found it actually does the trick. A regular mbp non-retina has a resolution of 1440 x 910 and you can increase that up to 1920×1080. I’m not sure if this is something that’ll I’ll wind up purchasing(after the ten day trial), although it’s at a pretty reasonable price point so I’m on the fence. I’m fairly certain if I start working on just the mbp more and away from an external monitor that this will be the way to go for sure to get a little more space. The obvious downside is that everything does become significantly smaller which can be rough on the eyes for long periods of time.

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My first impressions of the Google ChromeBook are mostly positive  It’s super light weight and I’m pretty sure it’s lighter than my iPad 3, but I didn’t put them on the scales, so this is not scientific. It’s been less than a week since I got it, and I quickly realized it’s really not meant to replace my Mac Book Pro or iPad 3. It’s an inexpensive machine mostly to blog and do causal web surfing or emails on my couch(others my use it more regularly). It’s thin and light weight, but the keyboard being attached to the screen is something I forgot how much I love. Nothing against the iPad, but pretty sure anyone who’s used one or owns one, you know typing can be a nightmare at time, frustrating to say the least!

I love my iPad 3, but responding to emails or typing more than a few characters or a URL is a pain without a real keyboard. The one I bought to go with my iPad is ok, but its super tiny and really just meant for emergencies or traveling. If your interested in the ChromeBook it’s really  inexpensive and if you enjoy using Google Chrome and all the apps that come with the browser, then I would recommend checking this out. If you think it’s going to replace your iPad or MBP, keep dreaming lol!

A couple minor things I found a little annoying with the ChromeBook are mostly based on using multiple gmail accounts with the device. If I’m not mistaken, when logged under my personal gmail, I can’t even access the other emails I have using gmail. Not a major crisis, but you can imagine how this quickly grows as a problem. Each account has different gmail bookmarks tab for the browser, you have to log out of one account and log into another when checking emails. The same goes for apps, preferences so on and so forth. Again, not a huge deal, but it’s certainly convinced me to start consolidating emails, which in truth may actually be a good thing, just not something I really want to be forced into at the moment. This doesn’t really make it a bad product at all, and I see how it can be both great and affordable for many. It’s just for me personally I find these things to be small annoyances, but I still give it a huge thumbs up!

I plan on updating this post with new and interesting things as I discover them in the coming weeks. I know for a fact for those interested, you can definitely put this bad boy into developer mode, which not only sounds cool, it’s really pretty cool if that’s your thing and I’m looking forward to that soon. For now all I can say is if you realize the ChromeBook won’t necessarily replace your regular laptop or offer the touch control of an iPod or  iPad, then this might be the device for you. I’m pretty stoked about it and I’m curious to hear others thoughts as well.

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Click Here to See My Favorite Part of WordCamp Raleigh

This year was my first opportunity to attend WordCamp Raleigh, and I’m pleased to say I had a blast. For me, it was the first time of many WordCamps where I actually stayed at the Hotel where the even was being held. I’m not sure if that’s why the experience was more enjoyable than others in the past, or if it’s because I actually put some more effort into reaching out and meeting new people and putting faces to Twitter Handles. Either way it was a blast and I’m glad I ended this year’s rounds of WordCamps on a high note! Many thanks to Michael Torbert and Semper Fi Web Designs for running a great two day event.

Some of the Sessions I went to and Highlights

Using AJAX in Your Plugins (The Right Way)-Thomas Griffin

Thomas Gave some really great advice for using AJAX in your plugins, which even as he mentioned can be an intimidating path to go down. He very methodically and gracefully showed how it’s really not so bad, and that once you break it down in to smaller manageable pieces, it’s relatively straight forward. I probably could of used another cup of coffee or a 5 hour energy to follow it 100% at the time(I hate mornings), but thankfully he posted his awesome slides to review later on which you can find here.

Building a Career With WordPress-Jayvie Canono

It was a tough call at this time slot, but I went this route given that I’m in the process of a transitional career move to full time Freelance. I felt listening to Jayvie’s talk was probably more beneficial for me and the immediate future, but I can’t wait to watch Andy Stratton’s presentation on WordPress.tv soon. So Jayvie admitted early on that this was the first time he’d given the talk and that he was a little nervous, but within the first minute he mentioned 5 weeks prior he’d finally quit his job to go full time Freelance. I was immediately hooked in and thought he did a really great job of sharing his experiences from preparing to go to full-time Freelance. Here are some highlights:

• Have an area of specialization, it’s impossible to do it all
• Build a network of people you trust to help you with areas that are not your specialty
• Be Prepared for the ups and downs that can come along with Freelance Careers
• 50% of your time will be spend doing sales/networking, if you don’t like that it’s going to be hard to be successful
• Build on your educational foundation, become strong at what’s natural and learn new things by doing them
• Pointed to Leonard Reads “I, Pencil” essay and how it represents a lot of what we do
• He also encouraged getting involved with Local Meetup Groups, Attend WordCamps and begin to get your name out there
• Jayvie also pointed out some tools of the trade and very importantly spoke to not repeating yourself, build a library(or libraries) of assets to increase productivity

Overall it was a great talk and he had tons to share. I think my favorite two points though of this talk were, Set Boundaries(with Clients) and Try to Maintain a consistent schedule. Whatever that schedule may be based on personal tastes, it’s important to have a structure that jives with your best hours of the day. It’ll lead to better work, faster work and long term probably more work!

Lunchtime

Again a first for me a WordCamp was a sit down lunch, hosted by the hotel. Nothing out of this world, but I liked the idea of being forced to sit down at a table where I knew no one(for the record I usually hate this). It forced me to interact a bit and meet some new people, which was pretty cool. Typically WordCamp lunches come in a box and you kinda just find a spot to throw your bag and a place to navigate your food from your box into your mouth! *Should be noted I don’t mind this by any means, it was just a nice change of pace, and it’s just something I wanted to point out because it was a nice touch.*

Freelance Like a Rockstar-Drew Poland

Make no bones about it, this guy is a fan of WordPress and a fan of making money. He says things exactly how they should be and his no bullshit work hard attitude came out in this presentation. I was laughing the entire time, because he was determined to get the room to interact, like it or not. If he wasn’t busting someones balls in the room, he was telling you just like it is and just how it needs to go if you want to Freelance because you enjoy your Freedom. A majority of the points were dead on, respect your work(no matter what level your at), find a niche and put a premium on that and become an authority. Drew also spoke about having a plan, having goals, using your local resources to help you get started. Although not how he started out, he recommended having a plan and some savings, rather than just Freelancing out of necessity. If you’ve ever been to a bid site for work, you probably already know why he recommended very strongly to stay away from such sites. More often than not your competing with people who can live off of $8/day and the clients are only looking based on prices 99.99% of the time, “so stay the hell away from them” at his recommendation and frankly mine as well.

Drew also spoke about the importance of contracts and getting those solidly in your favor as a designer/developer. Be weary of scrope creep and stick to the plan, SCOPE OUT EVERYTHING! A Couple Other Point Drew made that I wanted to quickly highlight were:

• Reduced # of Hours when giving a discout, Don’t Discount your Rate
• Under Promise and Over Deliver-Any Stratton
• It’s Business, Don’t Make it Personal
• Be weary of slow poke clients, as it can be a sign of things to come
• Trust your gut, if you instincts are telling you somethings wrong, it’s probably true
• Map out projects and over estimate the amount of time they may take, you don’t want to let too much work overlap and swamp yourself
• Get yourself to a place where it’s not Feast of Famine and you’ll be happier and more prodcutive
• Be Prepared and always Thinking Forward. Have goals, right them down and go after them.

It was a seriously awesome talk, and a pleasure meeting Drew. Got a chance to Hang out with him, Jayvie, Andy Stratton, and Michael Torbert back at the Hotel Bar after the after party and talk about some pretty cool stuff moving forward.

As the afternoon Moved on the focus for me Turned From Freelance to Version Control

Using Git with WordPress-Glenn Ansley

Glenn talked quite about about the importance of version control. It’s important for a lot of reasons(yourself, team environments, collaborative work etc), and something I’ve definitely been slacking on for some time, but now I’m 100% committed to doing work in version controlled environments. I’ll probably write another post about that moving forward and sharing my experiences and setups. He went pretty in depth, nothing really over the top, some a bit beyond my needs for what I do, but an excellent talk non-the-less. Here are some of the notes from Glenn on Github.

Typography: Internet: Butter Southern Cooking-Jonathan Stephens

Johnathan spoke about Typography, the history and it’s importance online. Let’s be honest, reading something that is visually easy to read it much more appealing than using a boring plain font size 12px on a 27″ IMac. That happens for lots of reasons, better line-height, color choice, font size, font family etc. He spoke about the importance of Typography online being just as important, if not more important now than in print. It shouldn’t be an afterthought, and I have to agree, it’s something I’ve been working on getting better with this year myself and continue to struggle and improve upon it. He pointed to a bunch of cool resources as well and you can check out his slides Here!

Contributing to WordPress Core – a Getting Started Primer-Dave Martin(@lessbloat)

Presentation Slides are Here

Out of all the talks throughout the day I was most stoked for this one. I’ve been using WordPress for quite some time now and I’m by no means consider myself to be a hardcore dev, but I’m working hard to transitioning from a Designer Who Can Code, to a Coder That Can Design(Shout out to @Jtsternberg wise words). I love WordPress that’s certainly no secret, and I want to give back. That’s another big focus of mine for next year to give back and help more, just get more involved overall. This year was a big improvement for me, but I think Sky’s the limit moving forward.

Anyways Dave’s talk was awesome, however I was shocked by how few people were in the room(granted the day was winding down). Dave’s talk really broke it down into very simple, clear ways to get setup and how to begin the process, and navigating through trac. I know you can read all about getting setup on various blogs and the Codex, but I always felt I was missing a step or just struggling to get the setup right and the process down. Looking back, I’m sure if I just focused on doing things in small pieces, it wouldn’t have been so overwhelming. I was able to finally meet Otto(@Otto42) in person, which I hadn’t ever previously. For me that was definitely cool and we chatted about the recent changes to the plugin review system, and I happen to think they’re an excellent step moving forward.

For me though, I got more than I could have ever expected out of the talk. After Dave finished, some guys were sitting around working on a ticket, and I casually asked a question about something and if I needed it to run trunk. Turns out, much like I thought, I wasn’t really set up to run trunk on my local server the way I wanted to, in order to properly test patches and help contribute. Dave asked what I was trying to do and immediately turned around and offered to help me get set up, which I thought was really awesome of him, considering I had some missing pieces. He spent about 30 min of his time talking with me about things while we waited for the slower connection to download everything I needed in order to get setup(needed to download xcode) and then helped me get set up. He ran through a couple pointers with me and finally I am officially set up correctly to test patches and hopefully help out moving forward. I’m definitely not a Wizard when it comes to code, but now I can at least make an attempt to help contribute to the WordPress core. I’m pretty excited to fumble through it, make some mistakes, learn and contribute! Thanks again to Dave, I can’t express my appreciation for all the help, great guy!

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My Thoughts on WordPress during 2012 and some Highlights!

As the year winds down, fall is already in your backyard(or quickly approaching) and the Holiday season right around the corner, I figured no better time than now to go over some highlights and my Thoughts on WordPress thus far in 2012. It’s been a fantastic year for me personally. I got married, went to Iceland, I improved tremendously in my work and have had the privilege of meeting and working with some of the best people in the WordPress Community. Although I couldn’t possibly cover all the great things that have happened with WordPress this year, I want to attempt to highlight some(and probably forget a few) of why WordPress is so awesome, without writing an entire book!

1. The Community and The People of The Community

There is no secret and no shortage of people praising the community and their Thoughts on the WordPress Community for the support given(often for free) by those that work and build the WordPress platform. Personally I can probably thank at least a couple hundred people for answering my own questions over time. As a result I too, try when I can to offer others on various sites such as the WordPress.org forums, sites like Quora or Stack Exchange or even on twitter to answer questions of those seeking advice or tips to questions. On any platform at anytime, Designers/Developers will be faced to deal with an issue that may result in early aging or loss of hair. WordPress has grown so strong in a relatively short time, because we all strive to help on another from those grueling moments! You could write a book, or a list so long your trackpad or mouse might run of batteries before you reach the bottom of how many people will help you out. There are lists of the most read WordPress blogs and people willing to donate their time to your individual issue of the moment. That’s how strong, powerful and helpful the WordPress Community can be at any given moment.

2. Making it Easier for Clients

This year is not so different than any other, except this year I noticed a stronger focus on the people that hire us to solve problems and create solutions. Without clients, we’re almost nothing. Doesn’t matter if you deal with clients in the traditional sense, or offer a service/service/product for other designers and developers. Customer service is on the rise and in an economy still not completely stabilized, it’s absolutely crucial.  Customer service should be a top priority for anyone offering a service or work for a fee, but it often gets ignored. WordPress continues to grows as a platform and community because so many people delivering great products and services offer fantastic Customer service. Whether that’s over the phone, email or a support forum, there is a commitment to doing so, perhaps for if no other reason you’ll be called out! It’s maybe not the perfect system, but motivational in it’s own right!

3. Twitter

Everyday I hear people discuss their fears about twitter whether is people I work with or clients. I always try and share my thoughts on WordPress with those who are fearful of Twitter. I can say hands down, that Twitter has changed not only the way we communicate, but the way we can find out information. Breaking news more than anything is an excellent example. When something goes either right or wrong, you can usually find out about it on Twitter before most news websites can even fill out the Title of their WordPress Blog Post. So while you may not feel comfortable stepping into the Twittersphere, I assure you it’s an interesting place filled with great information. Thanks to twitter, I’ve probably learned and heard about things in the design/development world over the last year, that may have otherwise taken almost half a decade to learn or come across completely on my own. Just my recommendation, “You don’t have to love it, but I’d certainly be paying attention to it at the very least!”

If your still uncertain of how great the power of twitter can be, take this for example. The night before my wedding @WPBeginner asked the question of how many plugins does anyone one person run on their WordPress site at any given time. I saw @Pippinsplugins response and made a joke when I saw his response(because he’s one of the best plugin developers). It was an awesome list, and I was truly interested in his response, which is why I asked. Just to prove how great the best people in the WordPress community can be no matter what level they’re at, I felt inspired and thrilled at the same time when I saw what my response to him initiated. Check it out here!

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My Parents and I after the ceremony before the reception!

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It’s very important to keep your WordPress version and plugins up to date. Many of the top plugin Developers know this and are keeping up there plugins up to date, but before you do anything, always make sure to keep a backup of your site in it’s current situation, just in case. For more information you can follow me at @imbigwill

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Be on the lookout for a new site and series I’m launching about Web Development and The State of the Web in 2012. Things are changing faster and faster and it’s becoming harder and harder for Clients and Developers to know where and how to focus, even for those in the business that do it everyday!

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