Conversion to WordPress

As you can see, over the Memorial Day weekend, I finally managed to get my website converted to WordPress. Other than the content (all the old stuff is still here) everything has changed and I welcome your feedback.

Despite the fact that it took a while the process was really relatively easy, thanks largely to careful planning. If you have ever pondered the transition to WordPress for your own blog or website I highly recommend it. The platform is incredibly extensible and customizable. The available support is phenominal, even the documentation on the website is surprisingly good. Anyone who knows developers knows how much they despise documentation.
I also had the privilage of working on a couple of other client sites over the weekend via my company BlackBox Technologies. Wendistry was the first conversion and came out beautifully. My personal blog, scottismy.name also got converted (actually migrated, it had been on WP for a while) and two other client sites which have not gone live so I can’t disclose their names but be looking for reviews in the near futue (I’ll be sure to plug BlackBox again so you’ll know who they are).

It was a long and tough weekend of heads down coding and implementing but sometimes it feels good to get your hands that dirty, and all of the planning and preparation are done so that when the time comes, as it did this weekend, we can simply execute our plan.

Hattip to: Jon at 3nhanced for how to create the cool WP logo.
Enjoy the new site and let me know what you think.

BlackBox Technologies

BlackBox Technologies (BlackBox) is a web-presence service provider and trusted IT advisor to individuals and small-to-medium businesses.

By leveraging a common framework and suite of tools, BlackBox is able to customize its services for each client while maintaining scalability, flexibility and reliability.

Based in Frisco, Texas, BlackBox was started in 2008 by three veteran IT professionals who collectively possess more than 30 years of professional and consultancy experience. The partners recognized the need for reliable IT and advisory services to enable the success of start-ups, individuals and small businesses. After years of watching businesses struggle with web presence execution, our three heroes said, “Enough!” BlackBox’s goal is to offer services in clear, easy-to-understand terms so that our clients can cut through the confusion and make informed, educated decisions.

DZX Medical

DZX Medical is dedicated to building stronger relationships between patients, doctors, medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies through creative use of marketing and technologies.

Our goal is to set a higher standard of patient care by strengthening those relationships through improved education, open communication, marketing channels and informed consent.

TLA Dictionary

TLA Dictionary was a simple idea to start a wiki that would serve as a repository and quick reference for all of the Three Letter Acronym’s that are used today. Every business has it’s own “TLA” language so TLADictionary.com is meant to be a collaborative “Rosetta-Stone” and quick reference of TLA’a that anyone can update, modify or contribute to.

Woopra Review

While taking part in the Dallas WordCamp a couple of weeks ago we were introduced to Woopra but one of the company founders John Pozadzides and given an opportunity to take part in the beta trial of the hosted, real-time website analytics program.

The first reaction to Woopra by almost everyone is WOW! Visually the application is very engaging and includes features such as a world map that shows a ping wherever someone is hitting your website from in real time and a stock-type ticker at the bottom with scrolling statistics among a myriad of other things. You can drill down into your statistics any number of ways, tag visitors (i.e. if you know who they are you can always know when they come to visit) and even start a real time chat with them (could be creepy or fun depending on how you look at it and use it).

For any stats geeks out there Woopra will be a must. You can sign up now and as soon as they have openings in the Beta trial they’ll let you in. Otherwise, you’ll have to want until general availability. Some noise has been made about the usefulness of “real-time” statistics but I can easily imagine situations where real time stats could be very useful such as during a campaign or product launch, or for monitoring sudden bandwidth issues and requesting real-time increase of bandwidth from your host. If you have ever observed the “Digg effect” on your website you know what I am talking about. I’d also like to say, it’s just cool…

Cali Lewis, host of GeekBrief.tv had an opportunity to interview John P. at WordCamp and provide a more in depth demo of the platform which will include API’s for expansion.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

One thing I would personally like to see built in (hint hint if you read this John) would be real time threshold notices so that if my traffic suddenly spikes while I’m not watching the screen I get an SMS message, that way I can call up my webhost and increase bandwidth on the fly preventing a site crash (or crash of anyone else’s if on a shared server).

This would make a nice integration point between Woopra and Layered Technology’s ability to throttle bandwidth on the fly and leverage their gridLayer computing system.

I’ll hold off on a full review until the product is out of Beta and generally available.

Some other good posts on Woopra:
TechCrunch Review
DownloadSquad Review
Lorelle Review
CrunchBase Review

Wendistry

Wendistry identifies and grows the most memorable, engaging, and powerful brands for small business.

Building a company is a demanding journey full of twists and turns, dead ends, and lost compasses.

Wendistry leads business owners and entrepreneurial executives through the demanding “where do we want to be?” decisions.

Whether you are just filing your DBA, or have been in business for years and are just realizing the need for an accurate market position…

Getting more from Google Mail

I’m a huge fan of most Google applications and am consistently turning my web development clients on to the benefits of using GMail for managing e-mail, typically via their own domain and Google Apps. A while back I stumbled upon this post on the official GMail blog explaining how use “multiple” addresses while only needing one e-mail address.

Let’s assume your e-mail address is : scottellis@yourdomain.com

You can insert a period “.” anywhere in the name and Google will ignore it so you could give someone the address “scott.ellis@yourdomain.com” and email would still just come to scottellis@yourdomain.com. Alternatively, if you were weird you could do something like s.co.tt.ell.is@yourdomain.com and the effect would be the same.

More interesting and useful is adding a plus “+” after your email address. You can append anything to your e-mail address and still receive it at the regular e-mail address making it easier to flag, label or otherwise filter certain e-mails. For example, you could use “scottellis+airlines@yourdomain.com” and use that address for any e-mail you get from various airlines. It would still come to scottellis@yourdomain.com but you could then filter on that address. I would probably do the specif airlines like scottellis+aa@yourdomain.com but you get the idea.

Read the original post here…

Site Changes with VSEllis.com

I haven’t been so much a lazy blogger lately but rather a very busy one. I have been working on revamping my site from the ground up. Old content will get ported over but the look and feel will change dramatically. I’m also going to make an effort to inject a bit more of my personality into the site. The overriding concept will be the same but more clearly defined and I’ll begin talking a great deal more about technology and reviewing relevant products and services while continuing to pontificate ideas and how to make them work. If I’m successful, we’ll learn to tie all of those things together in a way that allows our ideas to go from fleeting thoughts through execution to sustainable if not heavily automated businesses and projects.

Stay tuned, I’m planning to launch over the weekend so things will be a little haphazard until Monday but it should be fun.