This past weekend while attending WordCamp Utah, I was having lunch with a few of the other attendees who were both attending their first WordCamp events. I mentioned that Utah was roughly my 15th event over the past 2 years. One of them asked me, “Don’t they get repetitive?”, to which I answered, “Yes, but I still learn something new at every event I attend!” WordCamp Utah would be no different.

A quick bit of back story
I recently started a micro-photo-blog project over at VegasGeek.com using WooThemes and a couple plugins that make it simple to run the entire site from my phone. I snap the photo and send it as an email. A plugin called Postie checks a hidden email account once an hour and any new emails it receives it posts them to the site. Based on the way the theme works, the image gets saved as a custom field on each post. For visitors to the website, this isn’t a problem at all. But, for people who sign up via RSS, the image isn’t being attached. This has been driving me crazy!

WordCamp to the rescue
Saturday morning I sat in on Jake Spurlock‘s session where he was talking about the WordPress loop. During his session he mentioned a WordPress function called is_feed(). The lightbulb went on over my head and I knew I had the basis for my solution.

On Sunday as we waited at the airport for our plane back to Vegas, I cranked out a simple plugin to solve my problem. And here it is:

<?php
add_filter( 'the_content', 'jh_add_image');

function jh_add_image( $content) {
	global $post;

	if (is_feed()) {
		$img = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'image' );
		$content = '<img src="'.$img[0].'"><br />'.$content;
	}
	return $content;
}
?>

Download Code Here

Note: You don’t have to install this as a plugin, but could instead include this code in your theme’s functions.php file.

This is just one of the many reasons why I continue going to WordCamp events.

I’m just getting back to my desk after spending the better part of 3 days in Salt Lake City to attend and present at WordCamp Utah. I had an absolute blast! Here’s a bit about the weekend.

The Stay
I can not say enough good things about the Chase Suite Hotel. When we arrived at the airport, we called and asked if they had a shuttle. We hadn’t requested the shuttle ahead of time and yet they showed up in about 20 minutes to pick us up. We mentioned we were planning on going out to dinner and our driver said, “just let us know when you are ready.” Sure enough, 30 minutes later they gave us a ride to dinner. The rooms are very reasonably priced, they have a full kitchen, complementary breakfast and free internet access. They rocked!

OK, speaking of dinner, Todd and I hit up The Pie for an awesome pizza. Todd ordered us a Cheese Pull-A-Part and a Mountain of Meat pizza. They serve the pull-a-part with their home made ranch dressing. Seriously, it was the best ranch I’ve ever tasted. If you’ve never been to The Pie before, you have to stop in as you pass through Salt Lake.

WordCamp Utah
We spent all day Saturday at WordCamp. It took place on the U of U campus in the Skaggs Biology building. Excellent venue! The main room had power outlets under each seat, and for probably the first time at any WordCamp I’ve ever attended, the free wifi worked the entire time. Those two things alone make this a successful WordCamp in my opinion. But wait, there’s more!

During lunch I was chatting with somebody who was attending their first WordCamp event. I mentioned that it was roughly my 15th. He asked, “Don’t they get repetitive?” I said, “Sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t learn something new at every event I go to!” This one was no different. I picked up a couple tips in the first two sessions I went to in the morning. (I’ll be doing a follow-up post to talk about a plugin I wrote at the airport based on something I learned in Jake Suprlock’s presentation.) Plus, every WordCamp has something unique to offer. Just after lunch we were treated to a session with Tom from BlendTec, the company who makes the blender used in the WillItBlend.com videos. Tom is a very entertaining guy with some great stories to share on how they used social media to raise their online sales by 700%.

My Presentation
Right after Tom blended up a WordPress mug, it was time for me to give my presentation on beginning plugin development. While I’ve given a similar presentation several times in the past, this one was completely different. Normally I would just use a browser and text editor to show a live demo of how to build a plugin. But for this one, I used Keynote to create slides and did it more like a “normal” presentation. I have to say, I really enjoyed giving the presentation this way. I found that being able to maintain eye contact with the audience rather that staring at my screen made it easier to engage the crowd. This led to the audience asking a bunch of questions which turns it into more of a conversation than just a presentation. Based on the feedback I received after the presentation, I’d say the audience appreciated that as well. You can check out the slides from my presentation on slideshare.net.

Overall it was a terrific weekend. Congrats to Joseph Scott and his team of volunteers for organizing an excellent event! I’m already looking forward to next year’s event.

Yesterday on Twitter, my friend Kri posted the following:

One of my favorite morning rituals. A new, interesting topic, every day.

I’ve watched several of the Ted videos in the past, but I find that I often spend twice as long deciding which video to watch. There are 700+ available online, so how on earth should I decide which one to watch?

So I did what I always do in situations like this, I programmed a solution; The Daily Ted.

It’s super basic, as it should be. Click the link and it will take you to the page and you already know which column and row to click on. Don’t think, just click and enjoy. If you enjoyed the vid, come back and leave a link on The Daily Ted page.

Honestly, I built this for myself and for my purpose it is just fine. But, since I can’t leave well enough alone, I’ll likely end up taking this a little further and update the script to actually embed the video on the page to make it handy for others, too. Until then, just click and enjoy.

I have been on the hunt for an iPad app for reading the 100+ RSS feeds I’m currently following. With so many feeds to deal with it’s important that I find one that meets a few critical features:

• It must pull in my feeds from my Google Reader account where I manage them all
• It MUST sync back the items I have read on the iPad
• I want to be able to share the stories (perferably back through Google Reader)
• It should have an intuitive & comfy interface

So far I’ve tried 5 different readers on the iPad. Some are free, others cost a couple bucks. The price of the app isn’t considered during these reviews.

Here is how each stacked up to my feature requirements above and my personal review of each.

Google Reader

Note: I almost didn’t include this in the list because the Google app isn’t a native app. When you click on Reader it simply opens up Safari and takes you to a mobile version of your Google reader account. But, since I AM able to read my feeds using it, I decided to keep it on the list.

Pulling feeds:
Obviously it is able to pull my feeds from my Google Reader account. If it couldn’t, I’m sure some programmers at Google would be looking for new employment.

Syncing read items:
The sync is virtually instant. When I click on an article on the iPad, I can hit refresh on my desktop browser and the unread message count is updated. The fact that it happens so quickly isn’t really that important, but I thought it was at least worth noting

Share Stories:
If you are familiar with how the share/like/share with note/email functionality works on the desktop version of Google reader, well, this one is virtually identical. Sharing is a simple index finger tap away.

Interface:
The interface is pretty basic. It has the standard Google Reader obtions to view all, starred or shared item, people you follow, recommended items plus all the folders you created yourself. Tapping one of your folders brings up a list of all the feeds in the folder. Tapping the folder name again shows you a list of all unread items from all feeds in that folder listed chronologically.

My review of Google Reader:
Based on how well it does everything above, you’d think I really like it, but I don’t. Yes, it handles all the Google-centric functionality just fine, but from a user experience standpoint, it feels very sterile. I’m a bit of a Google fanboy, so I really want to like it. I think a lot of it stems from it being a browser based service rather than a standalone app. That’s probably just me being weird, I know.

If you are simply looking for a no-frills way to read your feeeds, this is going to do the trick nicely. If you want a little sexy to go with the muscle, keep looking.

River of News

Pulling feeds:
During the inital app setup, you give it your Google login information and it retreives your unread articles from your feeds. It keeps them nicely sorted in the folders you create in Google Reader.

Syncing read items:
This one stumped me for a while. It didn’t seem like there was any way at all to sync the feeds. No matter how many articles I would read, it would never update my Goofle account. A little more digging and I found that in the settings there is an option to toggle “Mark items as read while scrolling.” I turned that on and from that point forward it worked like a charm.

Share Stories:
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to share back to Google Reader, but you can share to Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Tumblr and a couple others.

Interface:
The interface is pretty simple, but I definitely like the 2 column, list/content format.

My review of River of News:
This app is pretty decent. Like I said, I like the 2 column layout, but I’d like to be able to see the title and brief intro (maybe on the left after I select a feed) instead of having to scroll through the entire articles on the right. The main reason being, if I’ve activated the setting to mark items as read, I don’t seem to be able to easily mark an item as unread if I want to save it for later reading.

Pulse News

Pulling feeds:
You have the ability to provide the app your Google account info, but that doesn’t mean you are ready to start reading all your feeds. You have to scroll through your list and individually select which feeds you want to add to the app.

Syncing read items:
Yes, it syncs the items you read in the app back to your Google account.

Share Stories:
You aren’t able to share to Google Reader it appears, but you are able to post to Facebook, Twitter, Instapaper or send via email. Now, insert a heavy sigh. There is a heart icon on the page that lets you add the article to your “pulse.” While messing around with the app I did this a few times before figuring out what exactly it was doing. Before I knew it I had signed up for an account and now have a new “blog” of shared items. You can check it out at http://vegasgeek.pulsememe.com. Or don’t, I won’t be updating it.

Intuitive Interface:
I understand what they are going for, but for me it just misses the mark. You scroll up/down to see your feeds, you scroll left/right to see the posts in a feed. Each feed takes up a pretty sizeable chunk of screen realestate.

My review of Pulse News:
I don’t really have many good things to say about this app. I don’t like having to select which feeds I want to read in the app. I don’t like that it shows the last 10 items for each feed no matter if I’ve read them or not. If you have a bunch of feeds, it’s not real simple to find the unread post. The only visual clue is the title is written in white for unread and grey for read. I can appreciate what they are going for in this app, but it completely misses the mark for me.

NewsRack

Pulling feeds:
It sure does. Store your Google login information and it pulls your feeds and folders.

Syncing read items:
Yes, it does sync back to Google and it seems to happen instantly.

Share Stories:
This app lets you share stories to Google reader, Twitter, Delicio.us, Facebook and has an in-app send-by-email function, too.

Interface:
The interface is pretty straight forward. It uses the 2 column layout as well which I like. I also like that when you select a folder it slides in all the feeds for that folder. Clicking on a feed brings up the title and very brief intro for each post.

My review of NewsRack:
Up until recently, this had been my default RSS reading app. I like but don’t love the interface, and it has a ton of options in the setting page. But, I had been having a lot of problems with my feeds not syncing back and forth with Google. It was also requiring that I manually click the update button in order to sync my read items. These issues are what sent me in search of a new RSS reader a short while back. And of course, while working with the app doing the research for this post, it worked better than it ever has before. Ahhh, timing…

Reeder

Pulling feeds:
When you first install the app you give it your Google Reader login and it automatically pulls in your feeds and keeps them sorted in your folders.

Syncing read items:
As with Google Reader itself, the sync is basically instant. There’s a handy circle icon in the top right to mark an article as unread if you’d like to keep it for desktop viewing as well. That feature is also virtually instant.

Share Stories:
Not only can you share your articles to Google Reader (one tap on the rss icon in the top right corner), but it will also let you send the post to a number of other services like Delicio.us, Instapaper, ReadItLater and Twitter. There wasn’t the ability to share to Facebook, which I found a little odd given the rest of the services available.

Interface:
Every screen on this interface has what feels like the right amount of functionality. They have one touch buttons down the left side and across the top to perform specific actions based on the page you are on. None of it feels out of place.

My review of Reeder:
I can sum this one up pretty easily, I love this app. Love it. When it comes to reading articles, the Reeder interface has been the best of the lot. I really like the two panel layout and being able to quickly click between articles and having them displayed in the larger right hand column, still offering me a few of the list down the left.

Conclusion
While there really aren’t any losers in this list, they all serve their purpose nicely, for me there is definitely a clear cut winner. Reeder stands out as the best of the bunch. I’ll keep the others installed and will check them out again when new updates become available, but until then, Reeder is my reader of choice.

Is there an RSS reader app I should include on my list? Tell me about it in the comments. I’ll gladly check it out!

Thanks to Twitter, URL shortening services are basically a must. What bothers me is that by using them, you are giving them all your statistical data. Some of them offer you an account to log in and view some basic stats and then charge you if you want additional reporting. Bah! That drives me crazy!! I don’t want to give them my data for free and then have them charge me to view it. I want the control in my hands! So I did what I normally do when something like this rubs me the wrong way, I went looking for a solution built around WordPress. That’s when I found Pretty Link Pro.

I bought the pro version of Pretty Link and installed it over at h.awkins.com with the goal of using it as my own personal hub for URL shortening. The script has a bookmarklet that makes it dead simple to create new links. After using it for the past week, I realized that I wanted to be able to display a list of the most popular links I send out. Since all the data is stored in my database, writing a plugin for it was simple. Suck it, bit.ly!

Top Pretty Links widget
The plugin is pretty simple. Add it to your wp-content/plugins folder, activate it and then add the widget to your site from the widget menu. I’ve added a few options so you can display the click count or shorten the descriptions if you don’t want huge titles wrapping across multiple lines. Here’s a couple screenshots.

Download it
The Top Pretty Links widget is free and you can download the zip file here. If I didn’t make it obvious before, you will need the Pretty Links plugin as mine is only a companion plugin.

I hope you find it useful!

Big thanks go out to Blair Williams! I’m absolutely loving the Pretty Link plugin!

(funny side note: I’ve been using twitterfeed to auto-tweet my blog posts. They, of course, use bit.ly. Fixing that is next on my list….)

Since starting 9seeds back in October, we’ve collected a fair amount of contact information for clients and prospects. The trouble is, we don’t really have a single place where we can keep that information and share it between our geographically diverse team. I’ve tried a few CRM programs like Sugar CRM and Highrise, but a CRM is way more than what we need. I’m just looking for a simple way to store my contacts and make them available to the people in our company.

I entertained the idea of building my own contact manager as a theme for WordPress using Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. But before I wrote my own, I sent a request on Twitter asking if one already existing. That is when I was introduced to RoloPress.

From their About page:

RoloPress is an Open Source Contact Manager, licensed under GPL v2, and built on the WordPress platform (also, Open Source). That means that you can download it, modify it, do whatever you want to it. Isn’t Open Source great!

I took a quick look at their demo site, and at first glance, it appears to be exactly what I’m looking for. So far, so good. Time to test it out myself. After downloading the core theme and the child theme I was ready to get started!

Installation:
I had a little trouble, albeit self-inflicted, with the installation when I tried running the theme on an existing WordPress install on my development server. It did not care for the existing content in my database. So to install it, here is what I suggest:

1. Set up a fresh install of WordPress
2. Delete all default pages and posts
3. Upload the RoloPress core and child theme
4. Activate the child theme

Side note: If you are planning to run RoloPress on a server accessible via the internet and don’t want to give everybody access to your information, you should install a plugin like Force User Login.

Setup:
RoloPress is VERY customizable. After the install the first you need to do is select one of the many (13) page layout options by going to Appearance -> Layout from the WP dashboard. I messed around with a few but settled on “2 columns, primary on top right, secondary on bottom right” which looks something like this:

The content for each layout is handled by widgets. Again, there are many to choose from and you’ll likely want to play around with the placement and order of the widgets. After you have a few contacts in the system, try moving the widgets around and viewing the results to find the configuration that works best for you.

After the install and setup are completed, you won’t be back to the WordPress dashboard unless you want to tweak more settings. Everything else from this point forward takes place on the front end of the site.

Adding Data:
When you first install RoloPress, it creates a few pages automatically. Two of those are used for data entry; Add Company and Add Contact. When I first viewed the page I instinctively clicked Add Contact. The Add Contact page is really straight forward. It has all the requisite fields you’d expect in a contact management system, including a field marked Company. I’ll come back to that in a second.

I filled in all of the contact information for one of my clients. I clicked the Add Contact button and then headed back to the home page to check out my handy work. Here is what my results looked like:

The form saved my contact just fine, but it also created a record for a new company. The trouble is, the company record was entirely blank. I clicked Edit for the company, updated the information and saved it and everything was fine. This is obviously just a bug and I expect they’ll clean this functionality up in a future version.

One other small bug I found on the Add Contact page also has to do with the company field. I entered 9seeds, LLC as the company name, and when I saved the page, it assumed the comma was a delimiter and it created 2 company records. I removed the two blank company records and decided to try the Add Company page first. I filled in all of the information about the company and saved the entry. I then went back to the Add Contact page to test it out again. In the screenshot below you can see that the form auto-suggested the company name. This worked perfectly and was really simple now that I had the process down.

Finding Contacts:
Once I had a few contacts in the system, I was really curious how well the search functionality was going to work. If you have a ton of data in the system, how good is it if you can’t get to it easily? I have to say that the search functionality in RoloPress is excellent! I tried a bunch of different searches; first name, last name, part of an address, city, on and on and on. Here’s an example of a search I ran for “hen”. It returned 3 results where ‘hen’ was found as part of a street name in the first record and part of the city name in records 2 and 3. You’ll also noticed that it returned 2 contacts and a company record.

In Summary:
From a developer’s standpoint, since RoloPress stores contact data as metadata attached to posts, building add-on functionality that uses that data for things like mass emailing your contact list would be pretty straight forward if you are already comfortable building WordPress plugins that interact with post data. And, if you can’t find a layout that matches your exact needs, taking the existing parts and creating a new template would also be pretty simple.

RoloPress isn’t ready for enterprise level Contact Management, but, if you just need a place to store some contacts, it does a solid job. I’m definitely going to continue using it as it fits my needs perfectly. The small bugs I found have easy workarounds so I don’t see them being any trouble whatsoever.

After 5 years of trying, I was finally able to get my hands on the domain name VegasGeek.com. Best Buy owned it at one point, then it changed hands a couple times between people who would never respond to my offers to purchase it. That changed recently and I’m a pretty happy camper.

Now that I have it, what the heck should I do with it was the next question that went through my mind. It sat dormant for a couple months until I saw this theme from WooThemes called Object. Bingo!

I’m a big fan of my friend Todd’s photo blog, 606diaries.com. He takes photos with his camera every day frequently at 6:06 pm. He’ll post the photo and will go back later to write a quick post about what he was doing. I’ve wanted to do something similar for quite a while. Finally, it’s ready to go.

A quick install of WordPress and the Postie plugin and the site was basically ready for blogging on the go. I take the pics with the iPhone and email them to a secret address. Postie checks the mail once an hour and if it finds an email from me it cranks out a new post. Super simple!

I do have one gripe about the new site. If you subscribe to the RSS, the photo doesn’t get sent. Just the content of the post. I’m going to see if I can get that fixed pretty quick though. – FIXED!!

My goal is to try and post at least once a day. We’ll have to see how that goes.

Do you have a similar project? Leave a link in the comments. I’d love to check it out!

Can you believe it? A geek such as myself who, until today, was still using Microsoft Outlook! Oh, the horror! Oh, the shame! Well, shame no more. I’ve left Outlook and have started using Thunderbird! Huzzah!

What took so long?
First, some history. Several years back I was using Goldmine as an email client and CRM. As simply an email client, it was WAY too much. Nothing like having 1000 features that you were using 5 of. However, when I was using it to run a side business, I found it amazingly handy for setting up auto-responders and for mail-merging newsletters. Not to mention the fact that I really loved being able to see the entire history of contact with a client in a single window. I know this will probably make you cringe, but I would likely still be using Goldmine today if it the would allow me to sync data back and forth to my iphone. Unfortunately that requires the latest version of GoldMine, which they won’t sell to a company with less than 5 users. This is how I came to use Outlook again.

Honestly, I’ve never been a really big fan of Outlook. But, they sure made it easy to sync my email, calendar, notes, and address book back and forth with my iPhone. So even though it was embarrassing to admit that I was using it, Outlook remained my go-to app.

Why switch now?
You know how it’s really difficult to throw out a pair of jeans you’ve had for a long time even though they have some holes? That’s really what I was being faced with. It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to switch. I did want to switch. But, I wasn’t really excited about the options that were available to me.

Over the past few weeks, something really crazy has been happening with my computer. All of a sudden the TAB and ENTER keys would become useless. After much digging around, it turns out that Outlook was starting a second instance of itself which was sucking up large amounts of memory, and apparently locking up a few keys on my keyboard. Sure, it was easy enough to fix. CTRL-ALT-DEL and then kill the duplicate process. But this wasn’t the only issue. Actually, this was just the final straw.

Why Thunderbird?
I’ve actually used Thunderbird in the past and have been a big fan. I really enjoy the keyboard shortcuts and the ability to install add-ons is a big benefit. I was able to install add-ons for syncing my contacts and calendar out to Google which will allow me to sync to my iPhone. Plus, I have several friends who use it as well. This means I have built in tech-support when I need it, which is never a bad thing!

What have I learned?
While I’m initially happy with the new app, it’s definitely going to take some getting used to. Things that I’m so used to doing in Outlook are just a little different in Thunderbird. But, one of the main things I have learned is that I’m not 100% convinced that I need to be syncing my contacts from my email program to my iPhone.

It’s funny how a feature that 24 hours ago I would have said was critical has turned out to be not so important. This came up today when I was installing the add-ons for syncing the address book out to Google. When it imported my contacts from Google I realized that there are easily 200 contacts on there that I have ZERO need to import to my iPhone. Somebody I’ve emailed once certainly doesn’t need to be taking up a spot on my already huge list of contacts. I may try to set up groups and see if I can import them and keep the important people on the front page and the less-than important people a few pages back.

Overall I’m happy with the move. It’s still early yet and I could change my tune a few days. But, for now Outlook is a thing of the past.

You know how easy it is to switch themes in WordPress, right? Click Appearance > Themes and then activate the new one you want. Simple. Give me something that easy to switch around and I’m going to use it. A lot.

I’ve been wanting to mess with creating a child-theme using the new WordPress default theme, twentyten for a while now. I didn’t really have anything specific in mind, but wanted to go through the process to get myself familiar with it.

For those who may not know what a child-theme is, it’s a way to use an existing theme as a base while overriding the pieces that you want to change with your own elements. The great part is, you can change as much or as little as you want. Making your edits in your own child theme makes it simple to upgrade the parent theme down the line.

So how does a shoe become a theme?

Last week I bought a pair of old-school Vans that have this cool white stitching. I liked the look and that was enough to kick start the idea for my theme. There’s no better way to learn something than by diving in and trying it out and now that I had an idea in mind, it was time to dig in.

There are already a bunch of theme frameworks available specifically designed for using as a base for child themes. I made the decision to use the new twentyten theme as my base as I knew it already had many of the basic design elements I wanted. Personally, if I was going to use a theme framework, I’d likely go with the Genesis Framework from Studiopress.

What I learned during the process

• Creating a child theme is ridiculously simple.
  I won’t bother you with a tutorial here, but if you want to learn more about how-to, the tutorial at op111.net is pretty solid.
• Me and CSS are not friends.
  If you want to develop themes these days, you need to know CSS. But seriously, the stuff just pisses me off at every turn. If it was up to me, I’d just use tables to lay out the theme. But that didn’t go over well.
• I really enjoy the development process.
  I have been building websites for over 15 years and one thing that never gets old is the feeling I get when hit save on a file, open a browser and first see my work come to life. I’m not even talking about the whole site all at once. I’m talking about the detail work. Tweak this or that, hit save, refresh the page and Bang, there is your little slice of success.

I don’t think I’m 100% finished with the theme. I think there are still some things I’d like to tweak. It’s not winning any awards, but I’m really liking the new theme.

Credit where due

I owe a ton of thanks to Shayne for his help with the new theme. Every time I ran in to a CSS issue I wasn’t able to solve, Shayne was there to get me back on track. Have you ever heard the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? I proved that over and over again this weekend. Thanks, Shayne.