I attended the uHeart Digital Media event at the University of Toledo yesterday even though, as a programmer by trade, I am not exactly the target demographic they were probably trying to reach. There was plenty of talk throughout the day about social media and marketing concepts which, while somewhat useful to my everyday work life, are mostly the kinds of things my clients handle internally or through other providers.

With that caveat in mind, I did enjoy most of the day and I wanted to write down coherent thoughts before it was too late and everything skipped my mind. Also, this post might be worth revisiting next year in case UT puts on the event again and I can compare and contrast any changes.

Complaints

My biggest gripes were with a few speakers in particular but since everything you write about someone on the Internet is indexed I’m not going to mention any of them by name. Instead here’s a few minor things I wish would have been done differently:

• There were at least two sessions where I personally knew local people in the room who had more experience and knowledge about the discussion topic than the speaker did. I wish some of them had been approached about presenting.
• This probably shows my bias against marketing people in general, who I feel all talk this way for a living, but there was a lot of generic and vague discussion in some of the sessions. I wish there would have been more practical advice and examples, like Mike Bott gave (more on this later), in some of the talks instead of buzzwords and generalities.
• Last, and defnitely least, is that the sheets of paper for grading each speaker have to go if they do this again. That whole process should just be handled with a form on a website somewhere that I can fill out at my leisure. You could have whipped that up in the time it took them to ask for and collect hard copies after each session.

Compliments

I thought, just from a logistical standpoint, that the University did a very nice job of putting the whole day together. Check-in was easy, everything and anything you needed was close by and the facilities for each speaker were nice. Since I moved to Toledo a few years ago most of my time on campus has been directly related to which basketball or football game was being played that day so it was nice to see a bit more of what’s available aside from Savage Arena, the Glass Bowl and the parking lots in between.

As for the speakers, I enjoyed Fulter Hong and Ben Bator’s opening talks. Hong’s Q & A portion included some technical answers about analytics and PPC campaigns that I wish he would have had more time to go in depth about. I would imagine, given the crowd in attendance, I would be in the minority who would find that interesting though. David Hunke promised to give a presentation, and not a speech, during the lunchtime session and then proceeded to give a speech anyway but I still thought it was well done.

Of all the talks I attended, I would say that Mike Bott’s was by far the best. He gave lots of practical and useful advice that, to a marketing person, was probably basic stuff but I found it interesting and legitimately useful even to my business as a programming gun for hire. He was also one of only a few sessions I went to that seemed to use and get the most out of the time he was allotted.

I didn’t attend the Pitch and Pour event but my experience from 8:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon was well worth my time.

TL;DR Summary

4/5. Would go again.

When I was in college, writing command line programs in C++ for my classes, the version control system they taught us was CVS. After I graduated and started working in the real world I continued to use CVS at my first job until they made the switch to SVN. And pretty much ever since then I’ve stuck with SVN for my large client projects.

Last weekend I decided to dump SVN in favor of what all of the cool kids are now using: git.

To be honest, I was already using Xcode’s built-in git support before making this move but, aside from iOS projects, my web application work was using SVN. I’m almost 100% of the time a solo developer so my source control needs are pretty simple and it didn’t take much to get the basics of git under my belt. In the end, the transition wasn’t as painful as I anticipated.

One of the added bonuses of switching to git is that I can finally make some legitimate use of my Github account nearly two years after I first created it. I made my account back in August of 2010 and never used it as more than a fancy bookmarking service for interesting iOS components and whatnot.

I don’t have any public repos at the moment but three of my largest projects are now privately hosted on Github. I’m hoping to transition some of my WordPress plugin work over to git and into public repos on Github soon but there is more to figure out with how I can tie that back into WordPress.org’s plugin directory (which relies heavily on SVN).

So after a few weeks with git and Github I’m pretty happy with how my workflow is moving along. Again, I’m not a huge source control guy and my needs are very basic but so far git has proven to be worth the switch.

I’ve long wanted to do a new front end demo for my content management system that really does a great job of focusing on the features available for sports teams. One of the big wishes I had was to build the demo site around the concept of a fictional sports franchise with their own custom branding. This would help me avoid having to co-opt an existing team’s logo and color scheme for the purposes of a demo.

I started browsing Dribbble for people to pitch my project too. There are a ton of great logo designers on Dribbble that focus almost exclusively on sports (so many I should write a separate post profiling my favorites) but I ended up choosing a few and asking for quotes on my fictional team logo project. I ended up going with CJ Zilligen and he came up with the mark you see at the top of this post.

CJ didn’t have much to work with from me. I gave him a few naming ideas and told him to do whichever one he thought would be the most fun and to use any colors he preferred. He basically had it right on the mark from his first version and I happily approved. Now I can get started on the front end demo using my brand new fake team’s logo and color scheme. I’ll update this post when that demo is ready for public viewing.

I was a long time Delicious user. I started my account when the domain name was ludicrous and it was run by one guy out of his basement or something. Eventually, after the site’s acquisition by Yahoo, I slowly stopped using the service and relied on local bookmarks inside of Safari instead. For a long time that was a fine solution but things have changed.

The time has come to centralize all of my links now that I’m on the road more and trying to juggle work on two machines. So in order to get back on track I signed up for an account at Pinboard. Pinboard is like what Delicious used to be before it was “ruined” by executive knuckleheads in the Valley. You have to pay real currency to create an account with Pinboard and this monetary capture device is what keeps the spammers and dirtbags out of your hair.

Thanks to an API there are a lot of cool third-party apps for iOS, Android and even Windows Phone that let you send links right to your Pinboard account from your mobile device. There are also a series of desktop applications that interact directly with Pinboard to let you quickly manage and view your bookmarks but I decided to skip over those choices and go straight for a handy Pinboard Safari Extension that easily installed on my iMac and Macbook Air.

Pinboard has some cool features that I don’t particular see a need for right now but I appreciate nonetheless. You can register your Twitter account with Pinboard and it will create a searchable archive of all your clever witticisms and bookmark any links you include in your stream. That’s nice but I really only use Twitter as a means to make obscure references to athletes I despise so it’s not totally useful to me.

You can also filter links as “toread” in order to manage a personal reading list of long form articles and stories. I’m an avid and loyal Instapaper user so I don’t quite see the benefit of this yet. Maybe if the two services can somehow come together in an unholy bookmark matrimony and sync across one another I’ll take a second look.

I’m only a few weeks into my Pinboard use but I’m glad I got back into the bookmarking game. My basic account was $9.77 to create and that was a one-time fee. For $25.00 you can create an account that will build a fully indexed and searchable archive of every link you have bookmarked. The price of the basic account increases as more people sign up so hurry now before you have to pay something astronomical like $10.00.

Mike Monteiro’s short book about successfully running a design business, Design Is a Job, was released by A Book Apart a few weeks back. I bought the ebook version so I could get started reading it right away and finished it over the course of two days. It’s a purposefully short book that I think most readers would recommend to anyone in the “web industry.”

The whole book is written with a slant towards web design but Monteiro constantly reminds you that the lessons can be applied to most client service businesses. A lot of the topics discussed are general in nature: lawyers, contracts, client relations, project management, etc. If you’ve been doing freelance work for any length of time some of these points of discussion will seem like old hat but he has an interesting take on most things so you might come away with new opinions and ideas.

My big wish, when I was done, is that there was more discussion about running a business as a solo developer. Design is a Job has a strong emphasis on doing work as an agency or small firm. Monteiro is the co-founder of Mule Design which, at the time of this post, has 11 employees. A business of that size, as small as it might be, does things in a much different way then I do as an individual. There still isn’t a good guide or book out there that addresses life as a one man army.

The title of this post is a direct, word-for-word, quote from a review written by one of the users of my US Golf Courses app for the iPhone. In case the name of the app isn’t clear, here’s what it does in a nutshell:

The US Golf Courses app gives you quick and easy access to information for over 13,500 golf courses in the United States. Each listing comes with detailed information about course conditions and contact information. You can get driving directions or call the clubhouse with the push of a button.

I thought now, hot on the heels of that eloquent review, would be a good time to recap the last year of the app’s existence. Since I released US Golf Courses on March 8, 2011 I have published one update and released a free version of the app that is supported by ads. The free version of US Golf Courses was cleverly entitled US Golf Courses Lite.

I’m going to now assault you with stats, graphs and information about my experience.

The Reviews

Here’s a table showing the average review scores for each version of the app:

• The 1.0 Version of Lite was never reviewed and was replaced with the 1.1 update shortly after its initial release.
• The reviewers of the paid 1.0 release were harsh and many complained of a crashing bug I was never able to replicate but still did my best to fix in 1.1. The amount of 1 Star reviews has dropped since 1.1 but that might also be related to the drop in downloads (more on that later).
• In general, Lite has reviewed much better than the paid version. It’s surprising to me how much more vitriol comes out of people when they have one of their hard-earned dollars on the line.

The Downloads

I’m not going to share specific numbers with you because I’m gutless but just know that the y-axis on this chart is relative so the lines aren’t skewed in any way.

There is probably no big surprise there. Lite crushes the paid version in downloads. Again, I’m not going to tell you by how much but know that the number of downloads of Lite can be measured in the thousands.

The Dollar, Dollar Bills

Ok, this is the good part you’ve all been waiting for. How many Happy Meals is the Lite version buying me? With those kind of lopsided download numbers you would think the revenue chart would surely be similar, right? Wrong!

I can tell you US Golf Courses Lite, with thousands and thousands of downloads, has not even earned what I bill for one hour of my time. Lite is a total financial disaster.

The Conclusion

There are two courses of action. The obvious is to just kill the Lite version from the store right now. Strike it from the record and act as if it never even existed to try and stop it from cannibalizing any more sales of the paid version.

Another option, which I’m trying to investigate more when I can, is to stop using the current ad service running in the Lite version and replace it with ads I sell myself. There’s a chance that the ads currently being served are just plain garbage most of the time and not worth clicking on. If I can find more appealing options that target golfers better I can probably make a few more quarters every year from Lite.

If I make a move one way or the other I will make mention of it here in a future post. Thanks for reading.

I pushed out a small update to my WP Word Count plugin for WordPress this afternoon. It adds the often requested ability to view the word counts for every page and post of a blog at once and not just the top ten as was previously available.

With this release I anticipate the all-time download count for the plugin to hit close to 5,000. I don’t have any real figures for the number of installations the plugin has received but my best guess is that almost 1,000 WordPress blogs are running WP Word Count at the moment.

WP Word Count has been, by far, my most successful plugin… if you define success as something a handful of people seem to use.

When I started seriously freelancing in 2004, after quitting my first job in a huff over paycuts, I worked on an old Dell laptop that I sat on an even older milk crate. I was living in a house with some friends and space was tight and I had to make do. The milk crate desk only lasted a few more months before I took a full-time job with one of the clients I had picked up.

Fast forward to today and I’m working out of a custom home office (obligatory photos below) that I put a lot of time into fussing over to make just right. I spend a disturbing amount of my life in this room so it’s important that I like every minute I’m down here in the basement toiling away on a project.

Working Alone Isn’t for Everyone

I’m an only child who is used to the sound of silence and I have a nice home office. For the social creatures out there who are tired of working out of their homes a solution is on the horizon for you. Some local chaps in Toledo are putting together a coworking location that they are calling Seed. They are currently running a Kickstarter campaign right now to help raise some funds to get furniture so people don’t have to sit on the ground (or, God forbid, use milk crates).

I’m not great at math but it looks like they might have some trouble reaching their goal in the time remaining. I doubt I can drive extra funds their way when you consider this blog has a readership that is about equal to the number of people writing it. But if you have a few bucks sitting around and can toss it their way it would be a nice showing of solidarity between you and the other monitor jockeys around the Toledo web scene.

Actually, What *IS* the Toledo Web Scene?

I’ve worked for clients up here for over eight years, and have lived here for at least three now, and I still don’t have any idea. I’m sure my cluelessness is mostly my fault for not going to the meetups, greetups, code mashes and nerd bashes they have here.

Since I donated to the Kickstarter campaign I’ve been nosing around a bit at people’s Twitter accounts, blogs and company web sites. I’ve seen a lot of interesting people and work and also a fair share of things that didn’t exactly knock my socks off.

My basic conclusion is that the majority of web professionals in Toledo are similar to myself in that we hustle for client work. There seems to be very few people or companies that are working on web applications or software solutions as products. That’s a shame because not only are we all fighting over the same client base (locally, that is) but there isn’t much in the way of innovation.

If I’m right about the local web population then I wonder what kind of crowds a coworking facility like Seed will attract when they open up. Will it be hardcore Ruby hackers and freelance graphic designers or just a bunch of social media “experts” drinking coffee and trying to look busy? I’m sure it will be interesting either way and I wish them the best of luck with Seed.

Office Photos

I promised gratuitous office photography so here you go:

As you can tell I like the Cleveland Cavaliers a lot. A lot. I try to make some room in my life for the Indians as well when I can. The office is approximately 170 square feet, the couch hardly ever gets sat on, the whiteboard is 3′ by 4′ and the TV, not pictured, is a 35″ Samsung LCD.

I’m also a Mac geek (huge surprise there, right?). My computer setup is a 24″ iMac attached to a 24″ Dell monitor. There’s a Mac mini under the iMac that I run as a local web server but it doesn’t see a ton of use anymore as I moved a lot of my hard working programs over to EC2. I have a 13″ Macbook Air that I use on the road one day a week and outside when the weather permits.

As avid fans of collegiate women’s basketball, it was a no brainer that the Shelly Beach and I would be attending the opening round of the NCAA Tournament in Bowling Green.

We bought tickets for the two games on Sunday (Ohio State vs. Florida and Baylor vs. UCSB) and the followup game on Tuesday between the winners. Our seats were six rows up and almost directly behind the basket; almost identical to the ones we had on our first visit to the Stroh Center earlier in the year to watch the Toledo men play BGSU.

Ohio State Let Down

The OSU game was kind of a drag. They didn’t look as if they really cared about winning or losing until there was less than three minutes remaining in the game and by that point the scoring margin was wide enough that defeat was inevitable.

I was convinced, with the score of the OSU/Florida game being what it was, that most of the fans in the crowd would disperse like Ohio State t-shirt wearing rats fleeing a sinking ship. With about ten minutes to go in the second half, the Baylor team came out to watch a bit of the game from the stands. I changed my tune the instant that Brittney Griner came out to thunderous applause just for taking a seat in the bleachers with her teammates. No one was going anywhere.

Brittney Griner and More Cowbell

Unfortunately, neutral fans cheering for tall girls would be disappointed in the second game of the afternoon. The layup line before the game was fun as Brittney Griner dunked each time to rounds of blue-haired applause. The game itself was a different story. It was a slaughter and we left halfway through the second half when it became clear that Griner and the rest of the starters probably weren’t going to see any more action.

There weren’t many Griner highlights in her 20 odd minutes of play aside from some nice blocks. The most entertaining part of the game was probably the UC Santa Barbara band and their weird chants. Oh, and the fact that they all wear cheap looking Gaucho costumes in honor of the school’s mascot.

We learned after the fact that part of the UCSB band was comprised of Bowling Green Pep Band members as Santa Barbara didn’t have the desire or the means to fly their entire pep band from California to the wastelands of northwest Ohio. Although sources indicated the UCSB cowbell player, who played that cowbell with a ferocious intensity, was actually an honest Gaucho who flew over 2,300 miles to bang on a farm implement for two hours. College athletics, everybody!

On Tuesday Nights in BG, Things Start to Get Real

We had the same seats from Sunday for the Tuesday night Baylor vs. Florida game. The Baylor girls wore warmups that said “NCAA CHAMPIONS 2005″ on the back. I can’t decide if that was charming or not. There was some pre-teen kid sitting in front of us wearing a home white Brittney Griner jersey. He sat in front of us on Sunday and cheered for Ohio State but now he had sworn his allegiance to a female giant from the west. I had no problem deciding this was, in fact, not charming at all.

Florida came out looking like the same Ohio State team they had beaten a few days earlier: totally disinterested in putting forth any effort to win. The score wasn’t as lopsided as the Baylor vs. UCSB game but it wasn’t very close as the teams went into the break.

Shortly after the second half started this happened right in front of us:

At the time of this dunk (only the third ever in NCAA Women’s Tournament history) it wasn’t clear from our angle how neat this was. I was actually 100% unimpressed at the time, to be honest. We couldn’t get a good grip on just how far away from the rim Griner was when she made her move. So kudos to you, Brittney Griner. Nice dunk.

We stayed for the entire game this time in case there was any more hot basketball dunking action. And because the Baylor coach refused to bench her starters until the final minute despite their commanding lead. Also, the Florida coach was really intense about calling timeouts and conserving clock even though any kind of comeback at that point was highly unlikely and would have probably gone down as one of the greatest achievements in sports history.

In summation, we had a good time in Bowling Green watching ladies basketball and I would do it again if the Stroh Center were to host opening round games in the future.

The second entry in my “learn to make iPhone Apps” book club series is iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2nd Edition) by Joe Conway and Aaron Hillegass.

This title might sound vaguely familiar to loyal readers of this site as my last programming book I reviewed was Big Nerd Ranch’s Objective-C Programming. Where that book was more about getting your feet wet with Object-C this iOS Programming book is all about jumping in and making functional apps right away.

This book is going to become my go to response when anyone asks me for a good book to learn about making iPhone and iPad Apps. There’s a lot of hand holding throughout the code examples but that’s a learning style I tend to prefer. You write all of the code, by hand, yourself and don’t spend time examining pre-built projects line-by-line without getting your hands dirty.

Most of the basics are covered throughout the book so you should be able to make any kind of standard UIKit application you want by the end. If there is one complaint I have about this book is that it doesn’t touch on UI customization at all. The example apps you make aren’t very robust or pretty to look at. One of the first things I wanted to learn when I originally started writing iPhone Apps was how to built custom UITableViewCells and I’m guessing most people want to know that as well. You can find out how to do this on your own after some searching but a definitive approach from the book certainly be helpful.

I really don’t have many critiques about this book other than the minor quibble that the examples apps aren’t very pretty. I learned a lot and it’s already proving to be a nice reference as I start working on my latest app.

WARNING: If you’re interested in buying this book, I strongly suggest you wait until the third edition is released. The second edition of the book is built around an older version of XCode and the code samples don’t support some of the newer features available like ARC.