Ben is a recovering pharisee, a web guy, a passable guitar player (as long as you're not near Nashville), and the type of guy you'd want on your team in a game of Mad Gab.
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When you take your almost 4-year-old and your 6-year-old on a biking trip, here are three lessons I’ve learned: Observe proper mud puddle technique.
Avoid gravel paths, unless point 2 applies.
Repeat after me: “Incline first. Then long, slow decline back to the car.”
Muddy puddles are mandatory.
Our goal for the year is to bike the distance from Cary to Greenwood, SC in 3-6 mile chunks as a part of our home school curriculum. It’s recess, science (hello, fun insects), and geography all rolled into one!
School started on July 25th (3.5 weeks ago), and so far we have logged a total of 31.7 miles worth of the Town of Cary’s greenways. Our best day was 6.9 miles in and around North Cary Park (love the Black Creek Greenway!)
Shout out to Cycling Spoken Here in Cary for keeping our bikes in tip-top shape for the journey. And no, they didn’t pay me to say that (though I wouldn’t object).
Google Maps tells me that it’s 101 miles door to door from our house to our nearest grandparents. So, that’s the first goal. I’m calling it Operation: Over The River.
We’re about a third of the way to our first goal!
Once we “arrive” at the first set of grandparents’ house, we’ll set our sites on the other ones. The Total milage to get to Greenwood (by way of Winston-Salem) is 289 miles.
Think we can make it by the end of the school year in June 2015?
Post your encouragements to Benjamin and Theodore in the comments, and I’ll make sure to let them know how many of you are cheering them on! Also, stay tuned for video updates and milestones!
Jeff Goins famously said to become a writer the first thing you need to do is call yourself a writer.
Not an aspiring writer, not someone who wants to become a writer, but simply a writer. That transition dramatically increases your chances of actually becoming a published writer.
A few months ago I began calling myself a WordPress developer, and today I am officially a published WordPress developer. I wrote a plugin that has been accepted into the official WordPress plugin repository at WordPress.org!
I was caught in the act of the happy-dance when it went live, by a stranger walking past my office window (standup desk = more aggressive happy-dance. I’m not sorry).
Here’s some details:
The plugin spawned from a client need in my work with Socialexis. The client runs a blog that has tons of great content that was written as far back as 2010 and 2011, but remains perfectly relevant today. In the web marketing world they refer to this type of content as “evergreen.”
The only issue with this great content is that their WordPress theme aggressively features the date. It’s the first thing a reader’s eye is drawn to when reading top to bottom, left to right.
This works great when the date is, say, yesterday. A reader sees a recent date and thinks “Oh, this content is applicable to me!”
But the same “feature” works in reverse when the date is, say, 19 months ago. Despite the fact that the content is just as relevant, the date filters the content into the “old news” category for the reader. Engagement goes down, conversion goes down, sad trombones play.
How can we gain the benefit of the prominent date on recent posts without the negative hit on engagement and conversion for older posts?
The plugin magically whisks away the date on any post older than 2 weeks, while keeping it on newer posts.
The secret sauce is a special CSS stylesheet that is loaded on those older posts, hiding the date field.
Published authors throw big parties to announce their new book, and have book signings. The best way I can “sign your copy” would be for you to install and activate my shiny new plugin, rate it 5 stars (or tell me how I can make it 5 stars), and tell a friend or two.
Also, don’t be afraid of the donate button (bottom right under my jumpy avatar) if you find it useful!
When it comes to flexible work, allow me to recommend a career path: you should aim to be an elementary school gym teacher.
“But wait,” you might say: “Don’t you have to go to the school every day if you are a gym teacher? Doesn’t that make it not flexible? Flexible jobs have drinks with umbrellas on a tropical beach, always with an Apple laptop somehow featured in the selfie. I’ve seen the blog posts!”
And you’d be correct. I’m not describing the job, though—I’m describing the new selfie.
I have a very small class some days.
The introduction “I’m a homeschool dad” makes some folks turn their head like a labrador in a whistle factory, but it’s OK.
With the removal of Theodore’s training wheels two weeks behind us, it was time to step it up a notch. We packed the bikes into the back of the van and headed northwest to the new American Tobacco Trail bridge over I-40.
As they rolled over the bridge the first time, we officially tallied our 70th mile since the journey began at the end of July.
You’ll note Benjamin’s flawless use of the Lightning McQueen-esque “Ka-chow!”
Jumping off the corporate ladder (from the bottom rung!) has meant some relatively major sacrifices in the short term, as we’ve fought to make the ends meet. It’s a fight that’s not even over, if I’m honest.
If you’d like to help us in this flexible work venture, there are 3 things you can do:
Hire us or refer us to your friends for web development, plugin design, WordPress optimization, or digital strategy.
Sign up for web hosting through Blue Host (for smaller sites) or Media Temple (for higher traffic needs). (If you use those links, we get paid a small commission for referring you, but it doesn’t cost you any more than it normally would.)
Tell all of your church leader friends about our site Church Web Help, and challenge them to join.
Here’s the bottom line when it comes to work: who do you do it for? For me, I do it for my wife, my kids, and ultimately my God.
And at least for this season of life, I’m pretty sure God’s calling me to be an elementary school gym teacher.
Because I swim in digital marketing waters, it was tough to miss the announcement and hype surrounding the flavor-of-the-moment new social network Ello.
I’m sure the joke has been made before. But I simply had to. Original image wikimedia commons.The service bills itself as “ad free.” In stark contrast to the popular networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, the users are not the product being sold.
It’s an intriguing premise, and frankly the reason I’m now on the network (though I won’t be forsaking my other networks any time soon).
Here’s the short version: I genuinely hope that Ello takes off, and “regular users” hop in and give it some time to mature.
Over-eager marketers and hype-slingers are quick to try and pick the “Facebook killer.” Like comparing a 2006 Steve Jobs keynote speech to a sweaty teenager’s valedictorian address, it’s not a fair fight. Nobody is killing Facebook right now.
Of the not-good chances, Ello’s got the best to dethrone Facebook, because they are attacking the most sound-bytable public-facing link in the Facebook chain: the greedy businessman angle.
The average user (think: your aunt who likes everything you post on Facebook within minutes but still has an AOL email address) is unaware of, or at least unconcerned with, the revenue being generated by Facebook. They just happily post about their vacation, the grandkids, what the preacher said, and the latest political cartoon. If enough of those average users start to realize (or be bothered by the fact that) they are the product being bought and sold, that’s the moment Facebook is in trouble.
Ello is using its pocket-knife to whittle away at that taproot, highlighting and calling into question the ethical underpinning of the big social networks, and then holding themselves up as the “we can look ourselves in the mirror” developers trying to restore order to the universe.
It’s great storytelling. Unfortunately for right now, the only ones sitting crosslegged in front of the storytellers are marketers and/or web geeks like myself.
More fundamentally, it’s a story that resonates loudest with progressives. The conservatives in the crowd aren’t as susceptible to the greedy businessman angle (regardless of whether it’s true or not) because they are predisposed to consider business (even big business) to be a morally good thing.
So the task of the storyteller is to know his audience.
Ello team, how are you going to reach those Facebook users who are aware that they are being marketed to based on what they post, and are generally OK with that fact? I’ve got to think that’s a majority of folks.
In the meantime, you’ve got a lot of developing to do to make the network more user friendly, and squash the bugs that come with overnight explosions in user-base. And that’s not even mentioning figuring out how you are going to pay for this thing, long-term.
How many hours this week have you spent becoming someone you’d like to be?
Me? I’ve spent about 5 hours this week becoming a more proficient web developer.
Now, I had to cram my other responsibilities in there, to be sure. But I intentionally set aside time to code, test, cuss at broken code, and recode some code for which there is no immediate payoff. Nobody is paying me to write this code. In the end, this particular code is functionally not very consequential. It isn’t fancy, or anything others haven’t done before. It’s just a simple, incremental change to my smart little WordPress plugin.
It probably won’t even ever be released, because I’ve learned while making it that I don’t really like it.
That’s right. I spent 5 hours this week doing something that I am probably not going to use.
But in the larger scheme of things, this code is foundational. It’s helping me to learn something that I didn’t know last week. In particular, I learned about the $wp_filesystem method of safely and securely saving files within a WordPress plugin or theme. (I know, stop the presses… thrilling stuff.)
But more than just learning something, this week I consciously became something different, something incrementally better.
That same itch to improve and learn is driving me to attend WordCamp Raleigh this weekend. I can’t wait to meet others in the area who are neck-deep in WordPress development.
Are you a developer attending WordCamp Raleigh? Hit me up, I’d love to meet you!
