Mister Nifty

I took this photo at the gas pump this morning. It didn’t set right with me. This was an sticker advertisement for a fuel supplement and the designer appended the default social icon trio to the bottom of the ad. I stared at this while my gas was pumping (sans the fuel supplement) and tried to figure out why this irked me so much.

Frankly, I don’t mind social icons on websites that much as they serve the function of directing a user to a certain URL. Placing social icons on print collateral seems to be counter-intuitive to me. The default web behavior is to click on the icon and find pure social awesomeness (or not) beyond the home page.  The printed icons in question are commonly used on websites everywhere. There was a dissonance in my brain where Mr. Subconscious was saying “Click click clickety click those bad boys” the Mr. Conscious was retorting “Idiot, this is a print ad.”

The cardinal sin of this ad is they have required the user to go on a clueless scavenger hunt. They are technically saying, “We’re somewhere in the adjacent galaxies of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, now come find us. We hope you remember the name of our product for your search.” This creative director had a misfire on one of their cylinders when approving this ad. It is tantamount to telling the customer, “We have a store in the United States. We’re not going to tell you where it is, but we’re going to represent its location with this awesome Google Maps icon that tells you we are super duper tech savvy.”

The bottom line for me is placing social media icons on print media is simply ineffective without…usernames. Icons without context never get searched. People will remember a simple user name like SaveMoneyOnGas, but probably won’t remember to search “Super Mileage Booster Fuel Supplement Twitter Feed.” The point of all of this is what we do on the web doesn’t always translate to other forms of media. You have to adjust for the user experience by supplying enough information in each media form. These days, it’s extremely probable that your print media won’t make it to the user’s office space, therefore rendering your cute, cuddly icons useless.

Don’t be one of “those” that just drag and drop the cliche’ social media icon trio into everything you do without thinking about its user experience ramifications. My personal thought is that people who overuse social media icons for the sake of proving their techno guru-ness are trying to compensate for not being tech savvy at all. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

If you’re a WordPress freak like I am, don’t miss Wordcamp St. Louis this year. The company I work for is putting on this venue to help others learn and become more acquainted with WordPress. You will also be able to rub shoulders with influential WP guys and network with designers and developers. It’s a one-day event of awesomeness that goes from 8am to 5pm at Maryville University. If you register early, the cost is just $20.00. Late bloomers will have to pay $30.00. I will be there taking photos and helping out as a gopher here and there.

Go get your register on at 2011.stlouis.wordcamp.org

Several people have asked me how I moved Mister Nifty over to Rackspace Cloud Servers. It’s not as easy as a shared hosting environment because you have to build your own server. In the following screencasts, I will show you how easy it is to create a server, a database, and install WordPress in under 15 minutes. The tutorial does not include server security or DNS mapping for your domain, but it’s enough to get your feet wet with web servers.

The first thing you need to do is open an account with Rackspace Cloud Servers. A server running 512MB with 10GB of space will run you about $20-$25/month. You pay for the bandwidth you use. So, if you have a low traffic site, your costs will stay low.

Next, watch the following screencasts to setup your server:

• Create the server, setup the LAMP server (Linux/Apache/MYSQL/PHP) and install phpmyadmin (database management software)
• Navigate to the web directory, link phpmyadmin to the web directory, create a database with username and password for WordPress
• Install and configure WordPress

In under 15 minutes you can have a full-blown WordPress site running on your brand new server!

To map your domains you will need to check out this tutorial about virtual hosts if you wish to use more than one domain on your server. You will also need to add your DNS to Rackspace by selecting your server and clicking the DNS tab. Your configuration should look something like this: http://d.pr/DC4x You will need to change out the IP for your own server IP. Finally, you will need to point the @ record of your domain’s DNS to the IP of your server. This can be done where you purchased your domain name.

Again, this tutorial is meant to be a beginners guide to building a server. There are many distributions of Linux. I’ve selected Ubuntu because it’s what I’m familiar with. If you have any questions or suggestions please place them in the comments below.

If you’re a WordPress developer or a shade tree coder looking to integrate options for your theme into the Worpdress administration panel, look no further. The company I work for just made our options framework available to the public for free under GPL2. This means you can download the framework, drop it in your theme, hook it in and start making some awesome options. Here’s some of the features we’ve built into the framework:

• Image uploading
• Typography Engine – works with Google Webfonts and font-face fonts
• Layout Engine – register new layouts for your users to choose from
• SEO – helps get your site get more visible
• Style Engine – similar to the layout engine, but for changes only to color/images etc…
• Multiple input types – text, textarea, dropdown selects, page dropdowns, category dropdowns, multiple selects, multiple text inputs (user can dynamically add more), checkboxes

This is just some of the awesomeness built right in. You can take it and make it your own with your own branding. You can always follow us online for updates as well when we release more awesome features. The next release will have automatic updating for a one-click solution to get the latest package.

If you have any questions drop me a line. I’ll help steer you in the right direction.

Get the Theme Framework here.

——-Update for those who’ve read the article already———-

I have been contacted by several people saying this issue is my fault because my wp-config WordPress files are hard-coded with the MT database servers. When MT changes my DB settings, I have to change my config files. This is not true at all. I use the MT server variable which Media Temple controls. When they change this variable, it puts my sites back online.

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First, I apologize for Mister Nifty being down erratically the past three weeks. The issue has arisen with my web host, Media Temple. MN gets a fair amount of traffic, but nothing substantial in comparison to other major tech blogs. We get 5,000-7,000 unique hits per month. I have several other sites that get minimal traffic on my shared hosting plan as well. I really don’t need anything more than a shared hosting plan for the traffic and data storage I use. I’ve had several other web hosts in the past with the same configuration and I never had issues with keeping my sites in a shared environment.

The past three weeks have been an absolute nightmare for me. The Saturday before Easter the director of an orphanage that I host called me frantically that their site was down and this was the day of their big launch fundraiser. We had setup a Paypal donation solution for donors to give. This was rendered useless because their site was down. We had to copy/paste a Paypal button link every time someone wanted to donate. That evening I contacted support and they ‘fixed’ the issue.

They said my sites were bursting (unusually large traffic to the databases) and they moved me to a dedicated database environment so my account didn’t affect others in the shared pool. I totally understand and I really didn’t mind them doing this. The only thing I had issue with is all of my sites run on WordPress, a database-driven platform. Once they migrated me to the dedicated environment, they failed to hook all the databases back up again leaving every last one of my sites with horrid database connection errors. I was pleased that the sites were up again on Saturday evening.

On Easter Sunday, I was at church preparing for our service and I start getting a barrage of text messages from churches freaking out that their sites were down and they couldn’t pull up their embedded streaming players. Since I was at church, I couldn’t take care of this issue until after service. I contacted support after holding for over an hour, they fixed the same exact issue as the night before. Needless to say, every site I had was down on Easter Sunday. Hundreds of people who view webcasts didn’t get to see the services on Easter Sunday of all days. This was just insult to injury as the issue had been ‘fixed’ the night previous.

Over the next two-three weeks, I’ve experienced this same iteration no less than ten times with MediaTemple. I’ve spent about 6-7 hours talking to techs and emailing support. I’ve talked with their Twitter support, fielded calls from senior techs and the issue still remains. I woke up to another automated email this morning telling me that they moved my databases again. I visited MN only to find a database error as Media Temple did not hook the databases back up again after they migrated.

You can imagine how frustrating this has been as I have to stop what I’m doing and call Media Temple or wait for ticket support to get back with me. I will say that their Twitter support is very quick and responsive. I’m pretty upset that the MT techs keep pointing the finger at me for taking up too many database resources and won’t look at their own issue of hooking databases back up when migrating a customer. Every single tech except a senior tech named TJ has pointed the finger at me and inferred that this was my fault. This can’t be my fault that the DB’s aren’t hooked up properly when I had nothing to do with the migration. I asked to speak to an executive but was denied by one tech who said it was impossible to connect me to someone of the executive level. I’m hoping someone from MT reads this and kicks this up to a supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor’s executive supervisor.

Needless to say, I’ve lost trust with six people whose sites I host and they are finding other solutions because of MT’s persistent issues. It’s disheartening, but I have to move on. I’m switching hosts so that Mister Nifty can bring you all the goodness you enjoy on a consistent basis. I hope you will look elsewhere as Media Temple when shopping web hosting. If you have any good hosting suggestions for others, please post a comment below. Thanks for your patience and again I apologize for the downtime.

I read this article today, and it was an adequate reminder to make sure my home WiFi was secured. An estimated 32% of Americans steal WiFi access from their neighbors. You might not think it’s a big deal to have an open network, but it is a huge liability for you. In the case of child pornography, someone could park in front of your house and download thousands of images and be on their way in mere moments, leaving you with the IP footprint of their activity. There are also hacker types that piggy back on free wifi to do their hacking the identity of someone else.

If you have an open router at your church or if you don’t have a content filter setup on the router level, the potential for something like this to happen is very likely. A couple of years ago, someone from our private school downloaded a bootleg movie. Two weeks later, our administrator received a letter from our ISP saying that we potentially could be sued by the movie house and our ISP contract dropped. The movie house then followed up with a royalty bill for several thousand dollars.  Our network was secure, but we weren’t filtering properly. After this incident, we setup opendns.com to filter out all types of content and it took care of the problem.

There are two main steps to making your network safe:

1. Security – Setup a secure network password. I use a random password generator for my router. I also use MAC filtering to only allow computers I trust on my network.  Also, make sure your router’s browser access password is changed from the default settings. I use a random password for this as well and store it on a hard copy in a secure location.
2. Filtering – It’s good to have a content filter on your local machine, but this has no effect on the rest of the computers on the network. I use OpenDNS because it integrates right into my router settings. This gives me control to block any sort of content I choose for everyone who is logged into my router.

If you don’t have either of these in place, please take a strong warning from me that you need to do it immediately! You potentially could be adding liability to your family, work place, or church. You can do this for free. If you have any questions, shoot me an email or leave a comment below.