We should see if we can get in on their webinar. I’m going to shoot them an email.
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
Email doesn’t work for everything and it’s nice to be proactive when we have the opportunity to do so. I think we should give a little thought before the first of the year to our communication processes.
At the moment, what I’d like to see the most is a tool for real-time group communication. The situation here is to have a chat tool that works like IM but can be many to many. You could have this with Skype obviously, but Skype takes up a lot of resources. It would be nice for this chat tool to also have presence indicators so you know when people are online and not online. Based on this, I think the needs are:
- Real-time communication
- Presence indicators
- Multiple people can be in the same room
We have a couple of other potential tools that include Laconia and Friendfeed but both depend on buy-in from the team to be worthwhile. Laconica is really cool in that it’s installed on our own server, integrates with both desktop and iPhone clients, and has nice features. We can aggregate team updates to the blog on a daily or weekly basis if we’d like. The character limit is both a blessing and a curse, however, and buy-in is again a limitation of its effectiveness although it looks like Andrew, Will, and Lauren have been using it in the past week.
Thoughts? I think this blog is working out really well for when I want to lay out longer thoughts but don’t necessarily want to make it a 20 minute conference call discussion. Email still works for direct conversation, and it’s nice to move all conversation that doesn’t absolutely need to be done via email to other time-delayed means. Also, are there other needs I haven’t identified? Thanks
The wiki is lacking. It’s a tool that CoPress touts as a way of connecting the community, yet we don’t do enough to actually utilize our community in the wiki process. I think a huge part of how we can illicit more community engagement is by making it easier for visitors to see what’s new and what needs to be done on the wiki. A recognition system is also an important way of acknowledging people who volunteer time to make our wiki a stronger resource (hat tip to Will who helped me earlier in the week to set up user info boxes, which will help people take ownership of their pages).
A few problems with the structure:
- We have a lot of great information buried in pages we can’t find.
- The community isn’t contributing as much as it should.
- When someone from the community does contribute, those changes are lost because of a static landing page
How the landing page can be better
I envision replacing the three columns of Get Started, Get Developing and Get Involved:
- Recent Activity: Live activity stream of recent pages
- Top contributors: A list of people on the team and in the community who deserve to be recognized (creates incentive for people to contribute)
- Pages that need work: An ongoing list of pages that we or the community deems important, and a list of pages that need to be started.
- Suggested pages: A list of popular and/or CoPress staff picks for important pages like WordPress and How to Launch Your Site
Any other suggestions are welcome. I’ll be mocking this up Saturday evening.
We’ve started putting some of the documentation related to hosting and support on the wiki. This will be a repository of information related to configuring new sites, solving common problems, and so on. As a note, please do not to add documentation which could compromise the security of our operations or the privacy of our clients. This documentation should detail how to do different things, but not reveal specific settings.
I worked on documentation today for configuring WordPress sites on Slicehost including enabling email notifications and automatic plugin upgrades.
You can now use all of the libraries developed as a part of the WordPress software in your own free or commercial software. I don’t know how long this has been out but it’s pretty darn significant. Matt first mentioned it at WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco (that same month of August that CoPress started) and they’ve been using it as a foundation for projects like bbPress and SupportPress. I believe SupportPress is their in-house ticketing system that they’re using for VIP clients.
From a Google Group I joined recently:
If you plan on using bayesian categorization, i would suggest ruinning the raw text through a Shannon Information theory-like filter to identify the most relevant words in a text. With even a mild cut on the relevancy you can reduce the index size while increasing the overall quality of the matches…. and all this would be language-independent.
Regarding the tagging as trusted or not trusted: having trusted editors is always good, but then you risk not being able to scale, and to be attacked for enforcing a left/right/religious/atheist/whatever point of view. What I would love to see is a system that correlates info,a and then lets users understand it. For example: I have A, B, C, D, and E submitting reports. A, B and C tell me that the sun is yellow and the grass is green, D tells me that the sun is red and the grass is blue, E tells me that the sun is red and grass is yellow. The system will cluster A, B, C, and give me a value that determines the cluster veracity as a function of the veracity of the 3 people submitting the reports, while it shows that D agrees mildly with them while E doesn’t on any point. As as user, I can see a computed veracity that will point me to the most likely truthful reports, but if I know for a fact that the grass in that region is yellow, as E states, then maybe I will trust E more than the others. This system would offer several advantages: besides lowering the challenge of identifying experts on the field in a short time, it would show who departs more often from the truth, and allow users to choose their “side” of the truth, while being aware of other points of view.
No specific thoughts on how this applies to the Connection Engine yet… I just wanted to record it to reference at a later point.
Tonight I researched information on creating Wordpress theme frameworks. The Wordpress Codex actually has some really great information with links to example frameworks as well as some handy tutorials for creating a framework. There’s also this post which is a summary of 20 different frameworks; it provides a good overview of some of the options out there.
Justin Tadlock has written an interesting post about why he created a Wordpress framework. The post covers some of the basics about what some fundamental aspects to a framework should be as well as what the benefits are. It’s definitely worth a read and makes it seem as though we are definitely headed down the right track here.
The frameworks
In terms of code to look at for ideas, one of the more well known frameworks is Thematic. This is a framework created by Ian Stewart that has actually been developed into a business model as well.
Elliot Jay Stocks has also written a framework of his own called Starkers. It takes the premise that a framework ought to provide nothing more than a code base, not even any visual styles. Interesting concept and Stocks is a stellar designer so it might be a good basis for inspiration and ideas.
Carrington is also another framework. This one is interesting because they have also built in a mobile interface for the sites. This could provide an interesting basis for developing mobile versions of client sites we create.
Tutorials and Miscellaneous
There’s also this tutorial which is part of a series that covers how to create and structure your own framework. Some good background information.
Secondly, I researched some information on creating a Wordpress child theme. Since this is how we’ll be handling client-specfic themes we will want a solid understanding of how to accomplish this. First, there is this tutorial which takes the Basic2Col framework as a starting point and walks you through how to build a child theme off of it.
Finally, this post looks at why child themes are the future of Wordpress. It also includes a solid list of example frameworks and articles about frameworks and what they can do for development.
That’s a quick highlight of some of the most popular frameworks and posts to give a quick introduction to creating our own.
Two things we didnt cover tonight that we need to figure out in the next couple of days. First, we should institute time tracking for at least all hosting requests, but preferably all project-related work. With this information, well be able to see what type of work is taking the most time and price it accordingly. Im open to whether we upgrade Basecamp to track this information, use another tool, or everyone does it on their own. I’d think that a group tool would be most effective though.
Secondly, we need to have an on-call calendar so that we can rapidly respond if something goes down, even if it means calling the most knowledgeable person. I think we should split up days of the week as well as holidays.
AreMySitesUp? hasn’t been all that reliable for us and I’m ready to start moving over to another service. The one I’m seriously considering is Pingdom which offers a nice set of services with their free, one site account. I think the way we’re going to go about this is to sign up a new account for each client because this will also allow us to give the client access, and ownership if they’d like, of the account. The question I have right now, however, is whether I should sign up with an email address that will email both us and them with downtime reports, or whether we should just be recipients of the data.
My reason for is one of transparency so that they can be clued into the process of how we respond to site issues, etc. but my reason against would be whether they actually want to know that information or not.
In the interest of trying to develop their capacity to do this on their own, however, I think it’s pretty important to be tuned into as much of the process as possible. Thoughts?
Recent Comments