cmurray.org

I am relatively new to Facebook and Twitter, but have been blogging on and off for several years. Very recently, however, I’ve seen how spending time to tweet and comment and read others communications has helped my business.

I follow Abbie Lundberg, a friend and former Editor-in-Chief of CIO magazine, who recently started her own business. By following Abbie’s tweets I became aware of and registered for a couple of online courses in Social Media, learned of some new sites about business and strategy, and kept up with the adventures and discoveries she’s had while getting her business off the ground (many of which I can relate to from the past couple years). I follow Abbie’s tweets and her comments on FaceBook.

I also follow Chris Koch, also from CIO, who now writes for ITSMA. Chris offers very thought-provoking and engaging marketing research and commentary and usually provides sources that are valuable reads. I like how he ends most of his posts with “What do you think”? I can find his announcements of newly published posts on FaceBook.

Yet another former CIO colleague, Meredith Levinson, recently contacted me to help her author-husband design and develop a new web site to highlight and build community around his work. I doubt that Meredith would have thought of me if it were not for my visibility (and hers) on FaceBook.

In my own case, I recently sent out a tweet mentioning that I am now putting up sites on cloud computing platforms. I need to write something more about this experience soon, but just sending that out brought followers to my Twitter stream and also a couple of inquiries for more information and my insights. That’s powerful stuff!

What I have found, of necessity, is that I need some simple and efficient way to manage this activity. And with the tools at hand (WordPress, FaceBook, and Twitter) I have found that. I have my “channel” set now so that if I Tweet something, it ends up not only on Twitter, but also (and most importantly, automatically) on FaceBook and the sidebar of my blog. Equally, if I write a new blog post, it shows up as a new status item on FaceBook and as a new Tweet. This is where the power lies: the ability to create items of interest and distribute them efficiently, and in the best case, cheaply.

Sure, once in a while I tweet about the dog getting loose or running through a FastLane, but for me these platforms are not just about keeping in touch; they are about keeping people connected and informed.

David Churbuck recently tweeted a quote from Mark Cahill to the affect that “Personal Branding is an artificial edifice that is antithetical to the …. authenticity expected in Social Media Marketing.” This generated a very passionate discussion, mostly because of the definition of Personal Branding. Mark was referring to the bad kind (people who hire others to blog and tweet for them); but several commentors were quick to point out that for many of us (especially those with our owns businesses) social media is a perfect place to inform and communicate with an audience of supporters and potential clients.

That’s why I’m here: to promote the work I do, to encourage people to engage my services, and to learn from my highly respected friends and colleagues. I also like to see where Al Sacco is drinking this weekend.

Pixelpipe runs on an iPhone and provides an interface for uploading images and video to dozens of social media and other channel sites simultaneously. For instance, I can fire up Pixelpipe on my phone, scroll through and flag/tag my images, then hit one button that uploads all the images to Picasa, Facebook, and Twitter,  all remarkably fast.

Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their media and sharing their life.

Okay, I don’t have a Kindle. But I noticed just today that I can download Kindle books from Amazon and read them on my iPhone.

First, I download the iPhone app that Kindle provides. Then I go to Amazon and find a bunch of free books, just to try it out. I download “The Cook’s Illustrated How-to-Cook Library: An Illustrated Step-by-step guide to Foolproof Cooking.” I didn’t find a lot of free stuff worth downloading, but again, I’m just trying it out.

Sure enough, the download works and the title appears in the iPhone app. I am very pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to read. The screen is clear and sharp, very crisp text and illustrations (thankfully, I do know the proper way to carve out an avocado). A simple flick of the screen turns the page, a tap retreives the menu items.

For what it is, I can easily see reading a book on this thing. I’m sure there’s all sorts of reasons why the Kindle is better, but I already have the iPhone and the app is free. Bravo!

This last week saw the release of the new ITSMA website (www.itsma.com). To the casual visitor, the site remains largely unchanged: a few style alterations here and there. But it’s the backend that got the major overhaul. Until a few months ago, ITSMA was a site comprising thousands of static pages and some fairly complex e-commerce functions. And as you might have guessed, it now lives within WordPress.

It’s safe to say that with this and a couple of other recent projects, we have pushed the limits of what WP is meant to do. But in doing this, we’ve not only demonstrated that at it’s core WP is a fully capable CMS, we’ve also learned some very cool things as well (especially regarding the use of custom fields).

One complexity of this project was the amount of data required to migrate. While most of the pages were static HTML, much of the data actually was duplicated in a database, which we exported to spreadsheets to organize and then import into the MySQL database in WP. (When migrating data into WP, you’re not only pulling in the article content, you’re breaking apart the metadata and spreading that across related tables.) This activity was further complicated by the large number of categories and tags to be applied to each article, and also by the number of authors involved.

Another complexity was migrating the existing design templates to the new platform. If you’ve visitied the ITSMA site, you can see that it is an extremely tight and well-designed site (designed and built by the infinitely talented Maria Lindberg). Tearing those templates apart and rebuilding them with WP functionality inside them was an exhaustive chore.

You may have noticed my recent ranting on using WP on a Windows platform. That was inspired by this site. This is the only site currently in our roster that runs on IIS. So many complications and issues that generally are not a problem when running in a Linux environment. Then again, we’ve learned a lot and solved a lot of problems for next time.

In terms of e-commerce, we essentially have two platforms running here: content lives within the WP system, but we’ve left in place the Windows-based purchasing system (this was an extremely costly system to ITSMA and not something we wanted to rebuild, at least not in Phase I).

I have to thank my old CIO.com colleague Chris Koch for bringing me in on this project. I was excited to work with him again, and to see if WP could handle this heavy load (and it does, beautifully). I’m very grateful to the entire ITSMA team (Maria especially) for their support and patience in what turned out to be a project larger in scope than any of us expected.

In the world of development and integration, you invariably come across projects that require some form of integration with or connection to an e-commerce solution. You may need to sell product on your site, or you may need to process batches of credit cards and checks for services. In any event, the first step is to find a reliable and reputable third-party vendor. There’s lots of them out there: Sage, USAPay, PaySimple, First Data, TeleCheck. All have names that make it sound like they know what they’re doing.

After some reading and phone interviewing, we (my client and I) decide on First Data. They have a stable platform, lots of sample code in different languages to get your connectivity started, and they just are beginning a joint service with TeleCheck to offer batch check processing (ACH).

We laid out our requirements to First Data in several meetings and conference calls: our in-house system manages tuition and billing charges, monthly it sends this batch to the vendor to process all the charges against parents’ cards and accounts, and then we receive back into our system the status of all charges for reconciliation (Approved, Denied, Declined, etc.). It seemed like the perfect solution; all automated and tight.

This was the service and functionality that was sold to us. Shortly after the implementation phase began, however, we discovered that they have no such capability for returning to our system the status of the processed charges. You can imagine our reaction. (This was the differentiator between them and their competition. Sage, for example, is very clear that they cannot support this.) We’d already put in place all the hooks for passing our data to them, so we were in deep at this point. A week of calls and emails followed with the result only that our sales person was new and didn’t understand what we planned on doing, even after all the meetings and descriptions and specs. The short of it is that they lack the capacity to fulfill the promise and have no intention of satisfying our expectations.

For the short-term I wrote a script that takes a downloaded report and pipes it into our system so that we can have monthly reconciliation tracked. It works, but it is not automated and not ideal. Strike one.

The second incident comes from the sample code they make available to customers to connect to their system. While the code is sound in that it does indeed provide hooks for connecting, it is flawed in structure so as to let test transactions through as real transactions. How did we find this out? By sending thousands of dollars worth of tests through only to find they actually got processed. A true nightmare. Fortunately, we were able to clear out the check transactions quickly because they take several days to process, but the credit cards went through instantly. Fun. Days spent on the phone with banks reversing charges and calling parents to clear the situation. Strike two.

The third incident stems from the fact that for all check transactions Telecheck requires a valid driver’s license for the account holder. We have been billing our parents for several years (there is an established relationship), so Telecheck was able to waive this requirement for us. Until this weekend, that is. Some technical error at Telecheck caused the system to be unavailable for several hours. When service was restored, our transactions began to fail because no driver license information was sent along with our records. Again, after several calls and emails, it appears the service department is unaware of our waived requirement and now needs to take it “under review.” This “review” has been going on for four days now, and meanwhile our transactions continue to fail.

So I ask you, is this the support you expect from your vendors? Once the promises are made and the contracts signed, they wash their hands of you? If I could, I’d pull up stakes and move on in a minute, but it ain’t that easy. I’m restraining myself and trying hard to attract the bees with honey rather than my piss and vinegar, but it’s tough. This affects my relationship with my client (though he’s been very good to me about it). I put this service right up there with overstock.com and Sprint.

The take-away? I did everything in my power to mitigate the circumstances that affected my client’s system and his ability to run his business.  This is his expectation of me. I’m confounded that First Data does not share this philosophy.

Update 4/24/2008, 9:00AM: We’re on Day 7 now.  We get nothing from First Data but emails asking us to test again (although surely they must know it still does not work), and excuses and promises. We are 7 days down and they have done nothing. You decide.

Update 4/24/2008, 2:00PM: Their brilliant engineered solution is for us to put a dummy driver’s license number and state in the required fields. It works for now, but I imagine it will break when someone changes or removes it.

Update 4/24/2008, 5:45PM: First Data decides the dummy data hack isn’t such a good idea afterall. Now they want to port us over to another “product.” Not really sure what that means yet.

Don’t. Just don’t do it. Do not run WordPress on a Windows IIS web server. Simple as that.

We released a major new site rebuild this week and had the unfortunate experience of having the system running on IIS 6.

How do I hate thee, IIS? Let me count the ways …

URL Rewrites. This is the functionality that turns a URL like this: index.php?id=564, into a pretty URL that looks like this: /running-wordpresss-on-iis-sucks/. This second method is preferred not only for search engine exposure, but also because it is easier on the eyes, easier to remember, and is immediately recognizable when sent via an email. This is simple to do when running WP on an Apache web server because you can simply set it in WP (customizing the structure of the link to use dates, titles, etc) and forget it. But IIS has no sense of URL rewriting. You can redirect a file by going into the server settings and configuring it by hand, but that is unacceptable when managing 1,000+ documents/posts/pages.

The lack of rewriting also affects paging (when the server returns multiple pages of search results and the URL needs to support a structure like this: /?search=why-does-windows-suck/page/3).

I spent many days looking for and programming my own solutions. None that I could find solved all the problems created by the missing functionality. I’ll save you the details, but I finally found one that worked:  WordPress URL Rewrite by Binary Fortress. It is a simple ISPAI .dll extension that you point your IIS server to. There is one .ini file where you can identify the root-level directory where you want to start rewritiing, and then a second section where you can list exceptions. The exceptions was critical for this project because we needed to leave in place e-commerce functions that run on IIS).

And then there’s 301 redirects. Windows IIS does not support this either. Why is this important? Because when you rebuild or redeign a site, even though the content in the system remains the same, often the permalinks are going to be different (some of them, anyway). In order to maintain your good standing with the search engines, you need to redirect those old pages to the new ones, or at least to another page that exists on the site. If search results from Google are returning pages on your site that no longer exist, your ranking suffers. Apache allows you to create a .htaccess file, which is a simple text file that the server reads to map those changes (it’s simply a line-by-line list of old pages and news pages). But IIS has nothing this simple. In IIS you need to go to each page in the file structure, right-click on it, go to it’s properties, and then set it to map to another page. Again, for a site with 1,000+ pages, a nightmare.

These may sound like trivial quibles, but this is a fundmental issue when you’re knee-deep in a redesign/rebuild. The alternative, when possible, is to run Apache on the Windows server.

If you’re going away for Easter, don’t forget to leave a note.

Don’t forget to upgrade your Google Analytics code. This report points out that nearly 40% of sites using the code are using the older version. If you are using the old code and do not upgrade, you metrics may go dark. Anyone can contact me if they need help with this.

Just because this is amazing …