Monthly Archive for November, 2009

November 29, 2009: Skype fail

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Daniel
on November 30, 2009
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No audio recording this week. We gave up on using Skype after 10 minutes of pain and decided to daisy chain cell phones together instead. Joining me on the call were Greg, Will, Sam, Andrew, Albert, and Lauren for a bit.

Andrew started things off by discussing our hosting outreach efforts. Rather than randomly emailing people, we’ve decided to start focusing our efforts on who we think are the most likely candidates for a upgrade to WordPress. Related to Managed Hosting, Albert finally got rsync to start backing up sites on WebFaction which means that I will no longer have to do backups by hand. It was just another line to the backup script we already have running.

We had a bit of discussion about the theme design services that we offer because we actually have our first client that hopes to relaunch by the beginning of next term. There are a couple of concerns we have with trying to do a theme design over winter break. Most importantly, we’ll need regular and prompt feedback on the iterations of the design to launch on time. This may prove difficult over the holidays. Our goal is going to be to have the first iteration of the design done in the next three weeks, and then have a “working” theme ready for launch (in five weeks). Refinements to the design will be made in the couple of weeks after launch. If this timeline works out over the holidays, then five to six weeks in general will be a good amount of time for doing a normal theme design.

Albert brought up the Knight News Challenge as a potential source of funding for some of the project ideas we have. I intend to start working on an informal application for the Edit Flow Project. We’ve already done a significant amount of development on it, and intend to continue working on it, but the funding could potentially be for the functionality idea we have to make the pitching process open if the news organization so desires.

We’ve started using Highrise for contract management amongst the hosting and business teams with mostly good results. The contact and company management functionality is really cool, it helps us keep all of that information in one place, and the deals functionality works alright for our needs. It’s mostly useful for keeping track of the potential deals we have on the table. The tasks functionality, unfortunately, isn’t of any use because we’re already using Basecamp for that, but it would be very slick if Highrise integrated with Basecamp. Also, if we reliably bcc all of our email conversations into Highrise, it will be really useful months from now when we run into the question of “when did we talk to that client last?”

Greg and I recorded an epic College Media Lab last night with Sean Blanda and Christopher Wink about News Inkubator. Look for it on Wednesday.

November 15, 2009: Taking a bit longer

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Andrew
on November 15, 2009
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Like most Sunday nights we had our team conference call tonight. Unlike the past few calls this one stretched to just under the 1 hour mark. We covered a lot though and joining me on the call were Sam, Will, Daniel, Lauren, Greg, and Albert.

First up was hosting matters. We spent a good while talking about the issues we’re running into with upgrading plugins through the Wordpress Dashboard. While we’re not positive we can fix the issue we’ve opened a ticket with Liquid Web and will be continuing to work on resolving the issue. We also talked about modifying our approach in reaching out to perspective clients. We’ll be making some adjustments toward that end in the coming weeks and into next year.

Next on the slate was a quick discussion of doing a complete overhaul of the hosting page content. Will’s going to be setting up some methods of tracking site activity through Google Analytics and we’ll base an reorganization off of what comes out of that. We’ll probably work significantly on this over Winter break.

Lauren also talked about continuing our efforts at revitalizing the wiki. For the foreseeable future we’ll be picking 3 pages every week that need content added to them and we’ll be working on those throughout the week. The goal will be to follow through with the plan that Megan and Kevin drew up over the summer for reorganizing the content. Hopefully our work will make the wiki even more of a resource for those looking for information.

Looking forward to this week we’ll be having posts on the blog about the recent WordCamp NYC, the most recent edition of College Media Lab and more so stay tuned for those updates.

 
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Reorganizing the forum page

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Lauren
on November 15, 2009
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Now that the forum is more active and we’ve ditched the “Weekly Forum Topic,” how do you all feel about restructuring the categories? Or at least breaking the WordPress topic into sub-topics? I went through the recent threads and came up with the following categories (based on what people have been posting):

Strategy

Workflow

WordPress Plugins

Continue reading ‘Reorganizing the forum page’

New contest: Create our phone intro

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Daniel
on November 12, 2009
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I put together a new intro for our phone number this morning and, as Greg commented, I sound like a robot. The cool thing about Phone.com, however, is that you can create your own recording, upload, and shazam. Therefore, I formally declare a contest to one-up me and come up with a better introduction. For the time being, we’re going to have the first option go to support and then the second option to be general inquiries. You’re welcome to use music, singing monkeys, etc. Let the games begin!

 
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November 8, 2009: NCMC09 recap

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Daniel
on November 9, 2009
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Another Sunday night, another team conference call. We skipped the week prior because some of the team was still traveling back from ACP/CMA. Joining me on the call were Greg, Miles, Sam, Andrew, and Lauren.

First at bat was a recap of ACP/CMA, what worked well, and what we want to do better next time. Andrew remarked that, for CoPress, the conference went as well as we could’ve hoped for. It would’ve been sweet if we had a booth, though. We learned from Logan while at the conference that the booths were only $650 and included four conference registrations. Originally, we thought that vendors were required to sponsor a part of the conference and that fee ran into the thousands of dollars (i.e. outside of our budget). The informal way we were there, though, was good for networking and being on panels was a plus. Andrew also remarked that at one of the panels he was at in the audience another audience member, unprompted, asked a question about us. Lauren thinks that, for next time, we should do more branding, have rack cards, etc. I’d personally like to be more “network-y” and talk with more people. In addition, I think it would be really cool to expand our coverage of the panels and make sure we have people covering each tech-related one. Last but not least, it would be really sweet to bring the entire team to the next conference we attend.

On the organizational side of things, I spent several hours on Sunday entering line items for invoices, receipts, etc. Our ledger should be completely up to date and, thanks to Albert’s efforts, we’ll be able to do up to date reporting on our revenues and expenses.

For the blog this week, Greg is putting together a post about how the Texas Tribune can be a model for student news organizations and Lauren will be writing one about transitioning your web staff from year to year. Lauren and I will also talk about the wiki, as we hope to start developing the content again.

 
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Restoring a database from backup using Sequel Pro

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Daniel
on November 9, 2009
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Restoring a database with Sequel Pro

… is quite simple, thanks to a powerful application for the Mac called Sequel Pro. I think Will mentioned it to me first when I was migrating the database for CM Life. Anyways, for the task of restoring a database on one of the Liquid Web servers from backup, it’s a very useful tool because it lets you avoid the chore of using PHPMyAdmin. There are a couple of idiosyncrasies in regards to logging in, however. First, in the “MySQL Host” field if you try to enter “localhost,” you’ll get a prompt as to whether you want to connect via socket or SSH. Using SSH changes the setting to “127.0.0.1″ which you want to do.

Second, you’ll need two sets of credentials to properly log in. The first are for the MySQL database itself; you’ll want to use the username and password combination found in the wp-config.php file. The second set of credentials are for the server itself. Use the domain for the Liquid Web server, then the account name and password combination for the site you want to restore.

Once you’re in, restoring the database should be as simple as File -> Import.

Inside a start-up success story

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Andrew
on November 5, 2009
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From the persistence paid off file of start-up stories:

Our first big retail break was landing an account with Stew Leonard’s, the four-store Connecticut grocery chain. For months we bugged the buyer via phone. He ignored us. To get his attention, we decided to bring him breakfast one day.

We woke up at 6 a.m. and dressed in Bear Naked T-shirts. We borrowed china from Kelly’s mom, which we used to display fresh fruit, our granola, and Stew Leonard’s brand of yogurt. We were the first car in the lot at the chain’s headquarters. After we climbed the stairs to the office, the receptionist told us the buyer was on vacation. We were deflated!

But then, as we were walking away, we recognized Stew Leonard Jr. “Stew!” we yelled. “We brought you breakfast!”

He seemed impressed by our youth and enthusiasm and asked us into his office. He said he was used to brokers pitching 55 products at a time and that it was refreshing to meet young kids so eager to sell a bag of granola. After talking with us for two hours, he said he wanted to help us out. He decided to place our granola in his stores.

The full Bear Naked story is over at CNN Money, it’s full of great insight into the reality that sometimes pure enthusiasm and excitement can be enough.

Ideas for transitioning new web staff

Published
by
Andrew
on November 2, 2009
in Medium Priority
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We now have at least one school transitioning to new web staff and it’s something that we’re going to run into frequently in the future. As part of our efforts to keep knowledge from vanishing into the ether we’ll need a process of getting the new staff up to speed.

While simply having the incoming staff members fill out a survey is certainly the easy way to get a sense of their abilities I have a couple ideas as to how to make it a more engaging and active process.

  • Have the outgoing staff member write a blog post about their experience – This would cover what they learned, what they wished they had known going in, and perhaps get into the technical side of things as well. It’d provide a resource for not only that school’s incoming web staff but would be a model for others as well.
  • Talk with new web staff – This would not even have to be an orientation to Wordpress. I’m thinking it could almost be a good idea to treat it like an interview that they would go through as part of working for the news organization. We’d just talk over what they know, their past experience and projects and then discuss what they hope to learn in the next semester/year.

Those are just two ideas that I have right now. Basically I’m looking to find a way to transition new staff so that the information remains somewhere that is public and searchable (i.e. more than just a survey submitted to us). Thoughts?