I figured banana.shockeymonkey.com deserved a public funeral for all the good stuff it brought to the community. Banana was the server that was used as the primary development/test platform for Shockey Monkey from 03/2006 to 08/2006 and it really made this wonderful project possible.
The server ran continuously without reboot since 03/2006 and was about as rock-solid of a platform for a standalone server as one can imagine. It was shut down finally around 9 PM earlier tonight.
So I’m sitting around this morning finishing up some bugfixes for ExchangeDefender v3.1 and I took a moment to look at yesterdays stats. So far so good for a Monday. Attachment filtering breakdown. Whooa, Microsoft Excel (.xls) in #2 spot? What the…
“Oh yeah. We’ve been seeing a huge spike in the number of forged Excel files doing the same stock pattern spam that we were dealing with a few weeks ago with pdf’s and greeting cards.”
Fun. Another attachment that can’t be trusted anymore.
So a little while back I wrote a thanksgiving post explaining how I would never have made it to where I am at today if there weren’t some incredible people along the way kicking my ass to do bigger and better things.
Around that same time I had decided that I would use this large vladville.com megaphone I have to give back and help better someone else… though there is a secret here, that other person has to be hungry, looking to better themselves too. So I figured if there was just one thing, one thing I could offer once a week, to pass some of my skills.. vladville would be a success.
So this first step, related to the AJAX post made the other day, gives you a 10,000 ft view of HTML, Javascript, SQL, WordPress templates and internals as well as some very basic PHP. It is a simple article, one that you can easilly cut and paste and achieve identical results. That is by all means a huge lie, because learning comes with experimentation and trying new things, coming up with new problems and solutions. But at the very least this will give you a starting point and it is step #1 in a five step program to AJAXify your WordPress installation and provide Facebook-style status updates.
Lord knows I hate Apple users. For decades Apple has been known for its delusions about being better while holding on to less than 5% of PC market share so now that they actually have significant share of a certain market they had to find a better way to insult potential customers: Charge people to come into the Apple store! One of the readers of Brian’s story said: “Five dollars to just walk into the store? It’s like they want to be elite snobs or something.” to which Vince Sciopiano, the VP of Apple Stores, said “That’s exactly the case.”
While I can fully appreciate the need to control the massive flow of people into Apple stores, pocket-qualification for mass consumer electronics is just a bad idea. How do I put this in a more plain terms.
“The very reason people pile into your store to look at overpriced yet shiny garbage is because the store is packed with teenagers to begin with. Your products (hint, 5% share) are not what draws people in, people in the stores draw people in to see what everyone is playing with.”
Consider your average camera store or electronics shop. Notice how it’s always empty, with one or two sharply dressed immigrants just waiting to pounce on you the second your foot crosses the alarm beam? They also cater to the elite crowd with deep pockets, in much the same way that a squad of aging women hunts you with perfume as you enter Dillards. Yet those stores are empty, or in Dillards case have more people passing through them from the parking lot than anything else.
Think thats by chance? Yesterday I was at my local Best Buy which just put in a huge Apple display and demo station. Guess what – EMPTY. Why? Because there was 1 table, with everything Apple makes, surrounded by 5 Apple dweebs. 0 teenagers. 0 audience. 0 sales. But hey, $5 entrance is better than the $0 you’re getting at Best Buy so go ahead, charge the customer into the ground while they are still loyal to you for some reason.
Moral of the story is: If you’re a dick to your customers while you’ve got the leg up, they will abandon you the second there is a reasonable alternative. Treat customers like gold and they will be your fans forever.
Break out your finest overalls and roll out your moonshine barrel: The Greater South is BACK!
Ok, not really, but Microsoft has reorganized its territories and the new Greater Southeast District now covers Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, NC and SC. This is important because if you live in these states there are a few people that can really help out your Microsoft business relationship and they provide a ton of services that you should be counting on.
First time hearing about Tom, Jessica or Steve? Microsoft has a very strict privacy policy so you have to track these folks down and ask to be put on their lists. The effort is well worth it, you can get it through partner resource desk: 1–800–426–9400, option 1, extension 81792.
Got an email overnight as the resident PowerShell guru (I guess night shift has no Google access?) about a server of ours that keeps on expiring passwords even though neither the domain nor the domain controller nor any aspect of the system has a password expiration policy in place.
Turns out there is a very cool PowerShell cmdlet collection by Specops Software that allows for password policy management. Check it out.
When you do professional development for living the complexity of what you have created can get to you. On such days its best to get outside, away from computers.. but if you live in Florida and outside looks like a scene from Coming Global Superstorm: The Day After Tomorrow you look for the stupidest project you can possibly work on, that nobody can hold you accountable for.
For me, that project is Vladville. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on Facebook playing the game “Which of my high school friends aren’t dead” and I’ve sort of fallen in love with the AJAX implementation of Facebook status update. It’s just very slick, very easy to use and effortless. So, in yet another effort involving sinking an enormous amount of talent and time into the toilet of productivity, I’ve implemented the same process for Vladville. And I’ve done one better, I’ve tracked the changes and I will be writing a post on how to do this yourself, in an effort to familiarize you with some WordPress internals.
Hey, if you’re going to lose, lose big. Right?
Step 1: Include jQuery
If you look at my blog, on the upper right hand side there is a box that says “Whats on Vlad’s Mind” and until today that was a hardcoded block of HTML in my Wordpress theme. There are a few steps here.
First step is to actually download, include and enable jQuery and jQuery inline edit plugins. These are simple Javascript libraries that enable pretty AJAX client side effects to work.
Second step is to actually alter the wp_users table that WordPress uses to store user data and add an extra database field for status. This will hold our current status. I’ve gone an extra step to create another database table to hold the archive of status changes so they can be syndicated through other services. Lose really big. If you’ve done this properly the little tooltip will show up over the container that contains your current status text.
Step 2: Enable Inline Edit
In order to make updates effortless, I’m relying on jQuery Inline Edit plugin as well as WordPress authentication. It checks if I am logged into this session, if I am, double clicking on the container described above will update the container with the div contents in an editable textarea that I can change on the fly.
Step 3: Change text, Update
More than meets the eye here, thats for sure, but simple enough – type in new text and hit update.
Step 4: AJAX Update
After clicking Update Status button the browser uses AJAX (well, AJAH) to make the call to the backend and update my status. This takes and validates the input, sanitizes it and updates my account in the wp_users table with the new status. It sends that sanitized text back and…
Step 5: New Content Inline
The new content is passed back to the browser that updates the original container with the new update. Each further load of the page includes the status field from my account.
Additional Steps: No stop loss..
I’ve taken a few more extra steps that I intend to expand upon in the detailed writeup, one of the major ones being an explanation of why I’m tying in my status via users table and why I’ve made a separate tracking table.
In a nutshell, the status tracking table is used as a logging table that I can also use to syndicate my status. You can take a look at an XML feed here that shows you last five status updates. This is cool because you can export that data and reuse it elsewhere, such as Facebook. Instead of logging in and updating my status there I can just use the RSS syndication to send my content from Vladville up the stream to Facebook. Or more importantly, SharePoint.
The wp_users part is pretty interesting. Right now I am only checking if $user_id == 1, meaning I just want to enable inline edits if I am the one logged in. Everyone else gets a plain text looking thing. However, lets say I wanted to create a little shoutboard. What if instead of comments I also gave my visitors the ability to update their own status or write something on my board? Same principle, tie the update to the user_id of the currently authenticated user and then update the status field on the backend in the database for everyone else to see, logged in or not.
That, in a nutshell, is the power of Web 2.0, syndicated content and AJAX. It’s also a heck of a way to learn how others write code (WordPress internals) and at the same time experiment a little for a fun Saturday evening.
And hey, chicks dig it.
(I thought long and hard, which is rare, on whether I should post this on Vladville or not as its quite personal.)
I spoke to many successful and quite impressive people in both my business (Vladfire) and elsewhere about the way they define success.
Earlier tonight I had wrapped up a fairly long and exhausting week (DFWVF) and I went to the living room to find my wife soundly asleep on the couch at 8 PM. So I dragged her to bed and went back to doing what I was doing before. By 10:30 PM I was bored out of my mind and I went back to the bedroom.
Vlad: Hump.
Katie: What.
Vlad: You’re wearing a plain white tank top, the international sign for “Please hump me.”
Katie: What do you want?
Vlad: I’m bored out of my mind. Entertain me!
So she put her clothes on and took me out at 11 PM. We drove about two miles to Downtown Disney and went to Ghirardelli’s for a bannana split. Now I am not sure where exactly success in this is. In that it took me nearly 5 years since moving to Orlando to finally do what I moved here to do, that I can go somewhere at 11 PM and not have a care in the world about having to be anywhere tomorrow, that I can eat a banana split way past any normal persons bedtime and not have a heart attack…
But tonight, in however small way, I was very very happy.
And I get to enjoy it until Katie finds this blog post and kills me.
I said riff-raff and…
Vladville: 18 blog comments. Andy’s Blog: 10 comments. Susan’s blog: 4 comments. Four other blog posts on the topic elsewhere. I don’t need to tell you how much email today’s post generated from friends, fellow entrepreneurs and random bystanders.
I’m going to let you in on a big secret, that I think most the audience gets: Sometimes saying controversial things gets people talking. For more, it starts a thinking process. Who am I, where do I fit, how do I go from here to there. Over the past year we’ve seen an incredible growth in the number of SMB blogs and IT folks who are getting into blogging.
Everything I do in public is meant to strike up some sort of a response or a conversation. Thats why it’s written in such a way. Want to be bored to death – go read the ownwebnow.com/blog corporate blog. Go ahead, I’ll wait three seconds for you to get bored to tears and come back to Vladville. To the blog written without a spell check, podcasts done over Skype and many videos where you’re left to wonder where the other hand is and why the camera is shaking so much??? (pause to let you consider that for a moment and.. there you go, eeeeewww)
The point is, it’s all about the conversation. It’s all about people putting up their thoughts and their responses for the public to see, enjoy and respond to. And whether you like it or not, agree with the points or not… guess what, you’re talking. It’s like a book written by hundreds of people. There you go folks, thats the big secret. Gotcha.
P.S. Every time someone gets offended by one of my posts they wonder how this is going to negatively reflect on my business. This is also why most corporations do not allow blogging or make people dance as far away from the company identification as possible – they fear that negative sentiments somehow reflect negatively on the brand – and in that they write dry and boring text that provokes no emotion and eventually gets no audience. And thats where the fail, because they don’t comprehend that Web 2.0 is about connectivity, exposure and the sense of communty – not a huge “we like you, give us money” sign surrounded by banners, dripping in unsincerity. That I think would be a bigger insult than anything I could ever come up with.
One of the cool things about friends is that when you say something stupid enough they will never let you live it down. Such is the case with Andy Goodman, who is probably well on his way to print tshirts with the riffraff logo on them. Susan, I’m sure, is not far behind with the buttons, business cards and anything else VistaPrint has on sale. I’m going to be hearing that stuff for a long time to come.
But its interesting to see what those that aren’t in the friend squad are seeing in this. Susan and I often talk about the SMB community, and the real part of the community that actually shares knowledge and feedback, not the one that pretends to do it to sell crap. What we always get into a fight over is the riff-raff, the newbies, the people that for whatever reason choose not to play in the game.
Susan’s point is that because she was once on the outside, she wants to help those that are still on the outside get it. She, for better or worse, tries to see the good in people and believes everyone is in this for the same reasons she is and just needs to be shown the way. People come to Susan and say – HELP – and she does. Sometimes directly, sometimes with a 2×4.
I on the other hand have spent enough years dealing with partners directly and see the world in a very different light. Because of the global reach and what we do I get to talk to all sorts of partners, all kinds of people, at all stages of their business. Young and old, starting up or retiring, growing or pacing or selling or slowing – I’m a whore, I’ll sell software to anyone. I group “the community” into three groups: “I get it”, “She looks good, from a distance” and “Screw it”.
“I get it” goes to conferences, blogs, video blogs, goes to user groups, shows up at TS2 events, communicates feedback not just of their own, recommends solutions, true IT business.
“She looks good, from a distance” is your run of the mill businessman who is far too serious for this “we’re stronger together” nonsense. S/he looks at the community as a good medium to sell into, leverage, possibly get some exposure but always conscious of the returns and making sure they are far greater than the input.
“Screw its” is your average SPF crook, used car salesman turned Microsoft Partner, Action Pack reseller or in some cases just an IT guy who thinks he’s right and the entire world is wrong. Never going to look at the community, not interested.
Guess which ones I hang out with. But, it would be unfair of anyone who is reading this blog to assume that the “screw it” is a minority. This is why I begged Susan Bradley to come out to WWPC, so she can see what the majority of the partners out there do, so she can gain appreciation for why Microsoft is the way it is. Follow the money. Who do you think brings in more money to Microsoft, the guy thats absolutely driven to make as much of it as possible or the one thats trying to help those around him? Now, who do you think Microsoft gives more crap about – the guy that is bumping up revenue numbers or the guy that makes the product get a better reputation? Before you try to answer that one let me remind you that everything is for sale, always. Reputation, it so happens, in currently on sale as a part of our July special!
Now for the really interesting stuff..
Successful small businesses (not just IT providers) are successful because of the entreprenurial spirit and hard work. One man, ten, 20, herd of cows, doesn’t matter – they are successful because there is usually one or two people that keep on pushing the whole thing forward.
It is no secret that over 50% of businesses fail during the first 5 years.
Most of those “businesses” are established things that require things like credit lines, office space, plant and staff to succeed. The failure rate in the IT segment is far higher because there is 0 barrier to entry. More often, there is 0 cost to entry. So what kind of stuff does this bring into our profession:
riff…. raff…
Who targets riff-raff? Vendors. Why? Easy money, desperation to grow, buying solutions on optimistic advertising alone – Buy my tool and you will make it! And they do! IT provider newbie is the software vendors wet dream, a large pinata of cash just waiting to be smacked. This is also why Microsoft pushes so hard with freebies into that sector, with events, free software, free tools, action pack. Buy and sell our stuff!
This is where it gets ugly… and this is where virtually 99.9% of my friends, partners and even staff disagree with me. I want nothing to do with those guys and girls because they make horrible partners. In case you’re wondering, at OWN we sell partnerships, not neccessarily products and services. Everyone buying from us probably only sees the products and services, and they rightfully suggest that I ought to hug and love every single newbie with a wad of cash so we can take them to the cleaners.
Unfortunately, thats not what my business is built on and we don’t take advantage of people. We also know, both from personal experience and from statistical breakdowns, that most IT providers disappear about two to three years into it. Why? Job offers. They realize they can’t make as much money on their own. They realize they are working way too much for way too little. The ego gets impacted because one of their customers tells them to go for a walk. There is a number of reasons for one or the other.
I am after the folks that wake up that next day, look in the mirror and say “You know what… fuck them, I’ve made it this far and I’ll be damned if I’m going to quit here.” At that same moment they sit down, break down where they make money and where they lose money, they flip the page and find out how to make it out of their hole. That is where I work with people, that is where successful partnerships happen, that is where successful businesses are built. On survival. On perseverence. On unwillingness to quit when its the absolutely worst day of your friggin life.
This… is where the world disagrees with me. Thankfully, I care very little about the world because the world didn’t put me here, I did. And I wake up every day looking for a better way to build partnerships that make sense, help a guy with his SBS box at 4 AM on a Sunday morning when he IMs me in bed and tells me he is ready to set the box on fire, why I drop everything to help a guy who just destroyed his network. Thats the partnership and the backing I bring to the people that we work with. Thats also why I’m not IBM or Unisys with a platoon of overreaching consulting services, because I have a focus. And my focus is not pretty. If I had a $1 every time Amy told me I am supposed to hug every new partner on the oft chance that they become successful one day, if I had $1 every time Susan told me I am supposed to be supportive and motivating and encouraging of everyone because that is how people join the community and start contributing…
and…well… no, no, thats not how it works. People become successful and become contributors because they decide to. Because they want to. All they need to do is see the way. And they don’t care what I, or Susan or Amy think or say.
Doubt that? Why do you think its so hard to get anyone to do anything? Because its all about letting others make the decision on their own, it is never about telling them to – because when they ultimately do decide, they may decide in a different direction.
But I could just be making all of this stuff up…. My entire job with this blog is to open your eyes to there being more. Whether you decide to believe it or not is up to you. Think about it.
© 2005– Vladimir Mazek
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Content is provided AS-IS without warranty of any kind.
