Check out this quick video learn more:

The flip side of that coin is that both cultures look down on people who don’t create things themselves. A person who can’t change their own oil—or install a copy of Windows XP—is seen as laughably feeble. The rich guy who brings his Plymouth Prowler to a hot rod drive-in night is given as much respect as your wanna-be geek friend who actually bought an Alienware desktop.

You don’t buy your ride. You don’t buy your gaming rig. You build it yourself.

Overall I like this culture. Taking pride in your work and the knowledge and skills that you strived to attain to be able to do that work is probably one of the best approaches to life and finding happiness, but even this ethos has its limits and its downsides.

As I think more and more about how to best serve ReadyMadeWeb’s clients, I think it’s important to recognize how this sort of DIY culture can start running against the best interests of clients. It’s not always best to build something from scratch because you’ve got the skills to do so. A client doesn’t care if a website we build uses custom code to reduce memory use by 25%, especially if that added efficiency adds nothing to their bottom line—or worse yet—increases their bill.

Unfortunately, a lot of programmers just don’t apply that sort of thinking to their work.  That’s a huge disservice to clients, because the web today provides a ton of solutions for common problems.  When clients ask for a site that can deliver thousands of HD video downloads, serve as platform for their podcast, or integrate Facebook into their blog, we don’t start with a blank sheet of paper, a clean chalkboard, or any other metaphor that implies building such a thing from scratch.  Instead, we survey the tools that already do those things and present clients with a range of options.  Often that means only meeting 90% of the client’s wish list, but it also means 10% (or often much less) of the cost of creating our own solution.

Like hot rods, custom programming usually needs to be serviced by its creator.  For a hot rodder, that means the added joy of wrenching on their passion project for many weekends to come.  For a client looking for a low-cost website, custom code means paying more up front for the privilege of paying more every time their custom code breaks as APIs change and platforms deprecate features.

This is why Joe & Jane citizen own Toyotas, Hondas, and occasionally Ford or Chevys.  They don’t change the oil, they don’t know how much horsepower their engine produces, they probably don’t even know how many cylinders are in the damned thing, but they know that when they put their foot on the gas it goes forward and they have a reasonably good idea about how much it’s going to take to keep their very plain vanilla car rolling down the highway for the next several years.

So, as much as it doesn’t score us a lot of macho programming points to grab an off-the-shelf plugin to solve a client’s problem, it’s what’s best for them, and ultimately that’s what counts in our business.  We save the hot rodding for weekends in the garage, from 9 to 5 we’ve got a business to run.

Check it out:

For more on Brooks’ book, visit http://arthurbrooks.aei.org/

Sadly, there are still lots of themes containing a timthumb.php, img.php, or other script that hasn’t been updated.  Even more unfortunate, some of these vulnerable themes are even be offered for sale today. That’s why Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner is one of ReadyMadeWeb’s standard tools when taking on new clients who have existing WordPress sites.  It’s still a bit disturbing to us when we encounter clients who have this very serious security fault just waiting to be exploited on their sites.

If you’re a regular WordPress user without a lot of technical knowledge, you can protect yourself using Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner, which can be installed and run with just a few clicks.   It will scan your site for any TimThumb code, even if it’s been incorporated into a theme or plugin, and replace it for you with a single click.

Readers concerned about security, and that should be everyone, should also check out our old post on WP-Security Scan.

Test your own sites by entering a URL at responsinator.com or grabbing their handy bookmarklet to quickly see any site as it might appear on a mobile device.

The risk paid off as CK made over $1 million selling the video, most of which he gave to his staff and a handful of charities. He’s been so wildly successful, that Fast Company’s Austin Carr has suggested that he make his website available as a kit for fellow comics to peddle their own videos online.

Comedians have “repurposed” CK’s work before, but just as in those cases, they’d be better off creating something themselves when it comes to online sales. A site that does what louisck.net does—enable visitors to buy a digital download—isn’t that hard to make. In fact, it can be assembled for a few hundred dollars. Here’s how:

Start with WordPress

WordPress is flexible enough to be used for nearly any small business website and a comedian’s site is no different. Not only can WordPress serve as a means to sell a video, but it can serve as a comedian’s blog, a schedule of standup dates using a plugin like Modern Tribe’s Events Calendar, or host a podcast using a plugin like Podcasting Plugin by TSG. To see WordPress serving up comedy in all forms, check out Nerdist.com, the hub of Chris Hardwick’s ever-expanding comedy empire.

Add WP e-Commerce

If you head over to GetShopped.org you can download WP e-Commerce for free. For zero dollars American (or zero Yen, Euros, or even Moldovan leu) you can install this little bit of code in minutes and have an online store capable of receiving payments via PayPal or Google Checkout—or pay $40 to get over a dozen other payment options including taking credit cards directly via gateways like Authorize.net. WP e-Commerce also supports selling digital goods (like a video of a standup special) out of the box. Free stuff like this is why the WordPress community is so awesome.

Brace for Impact with Amazon’s S3 and Cloudfront

If you expect CK-levels of traffic, you’ll need to beef up your hardware. But even the most beastly web server is going to offer poor performance when a quarter million people try to download 1.37GB high-def video file like Live at the Beacon Theater. Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Solution) solves this problem by giving you all the server power you could ask for. Combine that with Amazon’s CloudFront, and you’ve got content delivery power on par with iTunes…or well…Amazon. To make things drop-dead simple, WP e-Commerce has an Amazon S3 plugin that makes this whole thing automatic for a whopping $45.

Let’s add that up. WordPress costs nothing and neither does WP e-Commerce, so we start at $0. You’ll probably want to budget $30 to $75 for a premium theme to make the site look cool, but let’s just round up to $100. Promote your gigs with the pro version of Events Calendar for $50. Give yourself over a dozen payment options with WP e-Commerce’s Gold Cart Plugin for $40 and then plug in to Amazon’s server firepower for an additional $45. So far our development bill is at $235.

Most comedians aren’t going to do this themselves, but a web design shop (like ReadyMadeWeb) could put this together for a few thousand dollars, maybe even less given the relative simplicity of CK’s “Buy the Thing” approach. A few road gigs ought to cover that.

The real cost of something like this is in hosting, with the lion’s share going to serving up the movie itself through Amazon’s S3 and CloudFront. I punched in 220,000 downloads of 1.37GB  (that’s 300 terabytes) into the S3 calculator and it told me that serving up Live at the Beacon Theater would have run just shy of $20k. Add CloudFront—which delivers faster downloads—and you double the bill to almost $40k. That’s a big hosting bill, but at $1 million in revenue, this method of distribution costs only 4% of gross.  I’m guessing that’s a little less than HBO’s typical cut.

So CK doesn’t need to get into the web software business as Carr suggests. The kit is already available, and it’s stupid cheap.

SideKick

Make navigating the backend of WordPress more management with this little plugin by Dimas Begunoff. Sidekick allows you to collapse any element that may have sub-items, like pages and menu items.  This is especially for a site with many layers of pages or menu items.  It make those areas of the WordPress backend useful, rather than a visually confusing mess.  Dimas is asking $15 for the plugin, which I’ve easily already made back by not wasting hours of time fighting the WordPress admin area. I recommend you suppor Dimas’s efforts—it’s only a ten and a fiver!

Relevanssi

If the WordPress search functionality has left you wanting, Relevanssi is for you.

Some may say, “What about Google Custom Search?” To me, jumping to Google as a solution seems like giving up. It’s not only abandoning a lot of the styling of your site, it’s also abandoning the structure of your site’s data.

Relevanssi uses your site’s data in a way that you can control, allowing you to select what post types and custom fields should be indexed, and allowing you to choose weights for different elements. Results will also be delivered by relevancy, rather than by date—sometimes the best result in two years old, not last week’s post.  There are a whole slew of other options, which are all awesome, so be sure to check it out and upgrade your WordPress site today.

More WordPress Plugins

• If you can’t install NGINX, APC, and Memcached on your server, try W3 Total Cache to speed up your site.
• If you can install APC, make sure to drop this APC Object Cache Backend PHP file  into your wp-content folder.
• The best social sharing tools come from AddThis, which can be installed as a plugin or as a service.
• If you take a lot of photos, you can’t miss out on NextGen Gallery, the best image handling plugin for WordPress.

Additional Free and Low-Cost Services

• Expand your font choices with Adobe Typekit and Google Web Fonts.
• Turn your RSS feed into a beautiful HTML newsletter with MailChimp.  Send up to 12,000 emails a month for free, for life.  I mentioned this before, but it’s too good of a deal not to mention again.
• Use HootSuite to turn your RSS feed into tweets.
• You’re probably already using Google Analytics to measure your traffic, but if you want to learn more about your audience, install Quantcast.  You’ll get demographic data like age, sex, income, educational attainment, numer of children, etc.

If you have any questions about these plugins or services, please email me at cord@readymadeweb.com to get free advice.  ReadyMadeWeb only charges when we touch code or push pixels—never for consultation.

Below you’ll find my presentation for BlogCon 2011 that outlines how to optimize a standard WordPress install along with a series of links to setup elements, plugins, services, theme stores, hosting software, and additional resources.

Basic Setup

• Change your Permalink Structure to include the date and title of posts.
• Add Updates Services under Settings, Writing.
• Make sure Privacy Settings are not set to block you from search engines.
• Check your Discussion Settings.
• Update your Blog Title, Tagline, and Time Zone under Settings, General.

Must-Have Plugins

• Get an API Key and Active Akismet under Plugins, Installed Plugins, Akismet.
• Install and take a long time to carefully configure Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin.
• WP-DBManager is Incredibly Important!
• Limit saved revisions with Revision Control.
• Shields up with WP Security Scan.
• Never forget to categorize again with Category Reminder.
• Backup with VaultPress, XCloner, BackupBuddy, or ManageWP.

Cool Plugins