Then I returned to work.

I brought back the excitement of my reading with me, and shared the core tenets of the ROWE with a number of my coworkers, encouraging them to read Why Work Sucks as well. Unfortunately neither I nor the supervisors in my team are in a position where we can begin the ROWE transition for the whole organization, but we did talk about how we could begin to move in that direction, at least within our own team, and that was encouraging.

Shortly after I returned from my vacation, my coworker Krista began working remotely full-time. I remember discussing the idea with her and our supervisor. Looking back, I see how the traditional work environment was so ingrained in me.

You see, even though I am a young 28, and I’ve only been out of college for 4 years, as I read through Why Work Sucks, my views on work were still challenged. One might think that me, coming from a younger generation of workers, might be more naturally inclined to the ROWE, but at least for me, that wasn’t entirely the case. I found myself wondering about the possibilities for making sure my soon-to-be remote coworker got enough “face time” and that we had multiple ways to contact her.

Apparently my laziness in finishing this post has paid off. Now I can give a bit of a before and after picture all together.

Months later, my coworker been working remotely just fine. I’ve also started working remotely three days a week, and several others have started working remotely more often as well. Our team has adapted well to it, and to a more ROWE-ish environment. Obviously, remote working arrangements aren’t the same as a fully ROWE organization, but we’ve certainly moved more in the direction of ROWE than a traditional telecommuting setup. Granted, we still have corporate red-tape holding us back, but our supervisors are great about staying within the traditional corporate rules, without following them to the letter, allowing us the freedom to work the way we work best. We still have a 9 to 5 schedule, but if we need to take time to take care of something else, it’s not a big deal at all. We don’t count the minutes away and make up for them. We just do what we need to do, and make sure our work gets done.

Unfortunately, just this small change has also shown how much sludge exists. We’re not even fully ROWE, and those outside of our department are quick to blame our different working environment for issues when they come up. It’s frustrating to hear and recognize the comments, but for me it’s been a challenge to find out how we can provide the level of service we need to to offer while maintaining the flexibility to work the way we want to work.

Over the past 8 months, I’ve gone from being totally inspired by Jessica Lawrence‘s talk at SXSW, to slightly skeptical about how the ROWE could apply in my own workplace, and full circle back. I’m a believer now, and I’m seeing a glimmer of hope as my coworkers grasp on to the   freedom we all want and deserve in our work life and work to respect each other’s control over their own time. I think my idea of management has changed as well, and I’ve purposefully tried to apply the same principles as I run Conflux Group as well. I look forward to seeing my work environments evolve even further in the months to come.

Anyone got Dreamhost to do 301 redirects in tandem with removing #eecms index.php? Weird query string stuff happening.

Well, having a bit of experience working with Dreamhost, I responded. This problem isn’t specific to ExpressionEngine, it actually will apply to any website or application where you are using .htaccess to rewrite index.php out of the URLs. Dreamhost and many shared hosts like it is are set up in such a way that .htaccess is always a bit more painful than usual, using the query string URI protocol. (Not that .htaccess isn’t painful to begin with.)

A typical .htaccess file on one of these hosts would look like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [QSA]

That works out fine until you want to add some 301 redirects into the mix. If you add a standard redirect like:

Redirect 301 /oldpath /newpath

You’ll find that instead of redirecting to www.domain.com/newpath, it ends up going to www.domain.com/newpath/?/oldpath, which isn’t good at all.

The key to fixing this is making sure that your index.php removal rule excludes your 301 redirects.

Just add this line after the RewriteEngine On line:

# put all your redirects inside the parentheses, separated by |s
RewriteCond $1 !^(old|old1|old2) [NC]

Hopefully that’s helpful to someone out there. Thanks to Jonathan for asking a question that I could actually answer.

As I sat in the session, I was impressed and taken aback by the ideas she presented about a Results-Only Work Environment. As I spend my days working in an old, mid-sized nonprofit organization, I have experienced first-hand many of the spirit-crushing realities of these types of organizations and identified immediately with Jessica as she spoke about how the Girl Scouts were when she came on board and later became CEO.

The core changes that Jessica implemented were from the book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. After returning home, I purchased several copies of the book and distributed them to some of my coworkers, but I had yet to actually begin reading it for myself. I was excited to get started, but wasn’t able to find the time to get into it.

Enter vacation.

Last week, as I started my two-week vacation at the beach, I brought Why Work Sucks with me and began to read it. I’m about half way through now, and I’m encouraged by the ideas Cali and Jody present. While at first the ROWE sounds like a dream state that can only be realized by Silicon Valley startups and freelancers, they present lots of evidence and experience from their work at Best Buy, where they devised the Results-Only Word Environment and brought it to fruition in the Best Buy corporate headquarters.

I’m excited to keep reading through the book and hopefully work to implement the ROWE at least in my own business and possibly in the nonprofit where I spend my days.

For now, I’d definitely encourage you to check out Jessica’s session, get a copy of Why Work Sucks and also visit GoROWE.com for more information.

As I’ve said on Twitter before, thanks so much for the inspiration Jessica and also for all the hard work Cali and Jody put into shaping and articulating the ROWE.

As one of the first books out to cover the relatively recently released ExpressionEngine 2, I was eager to get my hands on it. I’ve found before that reading through books, such as Michael Boyink’s, Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site for Small Business, has been instrumental in developing a set of standards to use as I develop sites in ExpressionEngine 2.

In case you aren’t familiar with the product, ExpressionEngine 2, released in July of this year, is the latest release of EllisLab’s flagship content management system. The tool is extremely powerful, and is a top choice of web designers and developers for site-building projects that might otherwise resort the such CMSs as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and the like. While ExpressionEngine isn’t free, and many of it’s top addons are commercial as well, they come with professional support, which more than makes up for the initial cost outset when you run into a bind along the way. ExpressionEngine allows you to work with your content in an entirely different way than other content management systems, completely separating it from the design, and this has led to a very active and dedicated fan-base.

With the power and flexibility of a complex and mature tool, such as ExpressionEngine, comes the challenge of working efficiently. In a wide-open playing field, one must set his or her own rules and standards, so that it’s easy to go back to a site you worked on several months ago and still know how it works. This has been the topic of sessions at the EECI conferences, such this one by Leevi Graham.

It’s in this area also, that I’ve found books such as Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 immensely helpful. Murphy’s new book is a good choice for the beginning ExpressionEngine user. It covers all the basics for a user who needs a little hand-holding. I appreciate that it also goes beyond the basics, with a chapter about implementing ExpressionEngine’s powerful membership features, both for control panel administration, and front-end site membership.

As any developer familiar with ExpressionEngine will tell you, one of the greatest features of the tool is its ability to be extended through add-ons. There’s a huge library of them available at Devot:ee, the ExpressionEngine community site, and it becomes a vital part of the development workflow to find appropriate add-ons for a given project. The end of the book includes an overview of several popular ExpressionEngine add-ons, which is fantastic. It’s extremely important to get a firm grasp of the available add-ons before really digging into ExpressionEngine.

While this book certainly isn’t the one for you if you’re already a seasoned ExpressionEngine user, I think any new user will find its contents valuable as they begin using the tool.

I started writing a comment on Phil Sturgeon’s blog post from yesterday, but as my comment grew longer and longer, I felt that it would be better presented as a post on my own blog. I would encourage you to read the post and the comments that follow before diving into my post here, as the context will be valuable in understanding my response.

Also before I move into my commentary, I want to make it abundantly clear that I am encouraged by some of the conversation that has taken place since the initial outcry. Things are certainly not resolved yet, but I do see a glimmer of hope.

My Response

I must say I was taken aback by some of the responses early on to Phil’s post. The negativity from both sides was disheartening, and I know this was not Phil’s intent.

I for one am a huge fan of CodeIgniter, and I know that many of the developers in the CI are as well. I do share in the frustration and disappointment that many others express, though, but it’s only in hopes of seeing change. If I had already lost all hope in the product, I would have abandoned ship much earlier on, and I wouldn’t be writing this response. I think that’s the sentiment that Phil shared as well, though it may not have been taken that way.

Our desire is not to jump ship, but instead to see continued awesomeness from the framework we’ve all loved for so long.

The one thing I wish could be clarified from all the commentary, especially that from those who work at EllisLab is this:

We’ve consistently heard that EllisLab invested lots of money in a framework that doesn’t make them a dime. We know you’ve invested heavily in the framework. And we’re VERY grateful for that. But why ISN’T it making you money?

But, it’s the second part of that I guess I don’t fully understand. I don’t see why EllisLab does not draw value from their open source offering. Why is CodeIgniter CHARITY and not indirect PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT?

As a business owner myself, doing something for the good of the cause is great, but not if it’s going to be a hindrance to my bottom line. That why I wouldn’t create a free product just to be a good will offering, something that I wouldn’t use myself. I would create a product that I use myself to better my business AS WELL as the community. The thing is, companies have made millions of dollars from their products that are based on open source projects that they sponsor.

Of course I don’t understand the inner workings of the company, but from my perspective, investing in CodeIgniter does not take away resources from your commercial offering. On the contrary, I would hope that every feature added to the framework by the community would be code that you can use as you develop ExpressionEngine, perhaps even eventually REDUCING development costs for ExpressionEngine. It’s an indirect connection, but for me it’s simple to see.

Conclusion

My conclusion is simple. I love CodeIgniter and I love ExpressionEngine. I’m an active user of both, on almost every project I do. I want to see the best for both.

It’s not and easy road or a short one, but in the end, I think the only way that you can successfully foster both communities is to put your FAITH in CodeIgniter, not just as charity, but as a core for ExpressionEngine. Set a roadmap that supports your ExpressionEngine roadmap. Let the community contribution help you be even more successful than you already are with fewer resources.

You have two great products, but one is always going to suffer if you don’t allow them support eachother in a much greater way than they already do.

Thank you for reading. And I do hope that you can see the positive mindset I have on this issue. This post is not here to spawn further attacks, but rather to catalyze EllisLab to re-envision their products in a way that benefits THEM and the COMMUNITY.

I’ve noticed two threads of discussion happening surrounding the addons we’re creating, selling and supporting, and I’m finding both of these discussions to be a bit discouraging. So I write this post- a rationale of why and how we do what we as well as a plea for your support.

The first discussion revolves around the question, “Why do you charge for all of your addons?”

From my perspective, commercial addons are the ideal solution for a commercial product such as MojoMotor. While it may come across that we just want to cash in on a new market, for me  at least the rationale is deeper than that.

As a web developer using ExpressionEngine for my clients, I often need the functionality provided by addons. I am given a choice when I start the project, either I can build all of the functionality myself, or I can purchase someone else’s addon and use it. There is also the third option of finding a free alternative.

I normally choose to purchase a commercial addon. Why?

In either the case of building my own or using someone’s free alternative, I lose support for the addon. If I build it myself, I have to support it. A free addon may have support, but there’s no guarantee of how long it will be available, how attentive the developer will be, etc.

When I’m charging customers thousands of dollars for a website, I don’t want to be taking that kind of risk to my credibility. If something isn’t working, I need to be able to get in contact with someone who knows what they’re doing. Sure I could dig through the code and figure it out myself, but that’s a waste of both my time and the customer’s money. That’s why I use a commercial CMS like ExpressionEngine, and stick with commercial addons to add functionality.

In the same vein, the addons I and other MojoAddons developers are selling come with support. That’s where the price comes into play. Most of us wouldn’t mind contributing a small piece of code to the community to help people out, and both Dan and Phil have done this, but the influx of support requests makes it unreasonable to do this for our larger and more complicated products. It just comes down to a matter of time—donating maybe two or three hours to the cause is one thing, but the unending hours of e-mail support add up and take us away from our other priorities.

Support is the main reason why we charge for our addons.

Along this same line of thinking, I just want to remind our customers that you shouldn’t hesitate to contact us for support. In the MojoAddons download center, and e-mail is provided for support of each of the products you’ve purchased. You’ve paid for our support, so please don’t hesitate to use it.

We’ve had a lot of great reactions to our addons, and we’re excited about that. But a few bugs have cropped up here and there, and I’d encourage you to contact us for help when you do find a problem, rather than trying to fix it yourself. In the end it’ll help make our products better, and it’ll help us help other users of our addons.

The second discussion I’ve become aware of surrounds the development of free alternatives to the addons we’re selling.

Firstly, I’m all about supporting the community. EllisLab is known for fostering active, friendly and helpful communities of users surrounding its products. It’s one of the reasons it’s so great to work with CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine and now MojoMotor. I just want to get that out of the way to begin with. In no way do I condemn the creation of community code and addons for the good of everyone.

What I do condemn is blatant imitation of commercial addons. I’m certainly no intellectual property expert, and I don’t really want to dive into legal battles. But the reality is, there have been several free addons released that clearly have a basis in the functionality my colleagues and I have envisioned and built.

It’s discouraging to see this, tearing down the hard work we’ve done and the support which we’ve committed to offer.

A lot of thinking, preparation, development time and testing has gone into creating the products we sell. And we’re proud of what we’ve done, creating, hopefully, easy-to-use tools for MojoMotor users.

I totally support the creation of free alternatives, as long as they don’t duplicate the functionality of our addons with nearly-identical syntax, etc.

While I don’t have any recourse for this situation, I want to try and turn this around to have a positive outcome. There are GREAT developers out there now, working hard and fast to create everything the MojoMotor users wish and hope for in addon software.  So, instead of condemning these actions I’m going to call them to a greater cause:

As software developers in a great community with a brand new product, I encourage every developer to INNOVATE. Sure the other MojoAddons developers and I have had some pretty awesome ideas thus far, but the community can no move forward if we simply continue to rebuild the same addons in small iterations. The MojoMotor users are calling out for the features they want to see.

Regardless of whether you choose to release your addons for free or commercially, we developers are problem solvers. And trust me, there are plenty of problems out there to solve. So get out there, do it. Don’t let the ideas I or my colleagues have created hold you back to an idea of how your addons should work.

We are a community, and I am glad that EllisLab is committed to organizing its users in this way. I encourage everyone here to respect the creations others have come up with, continue to build up the products we love with equally awesome addons and lastly to work together, not against each other, to bring MojoMotor to new levels of functionality that will benefit everyone.

I had been testing MojoMotor along with several other developers in the beta program and got a head start into working with the code. As a result Zack Kitzmiller and I set off on a path to build several much-needed addons for the new CMS. Along the way, we also built a really cool little site to show them off and sell them, as well as help to sell third-party addons from other developers. In the future we’ll also be adding third-party packaged themes for MojoMotor users.

So, with that, I’m happy to introduce MojoAddons.com.

If you’re trying out MojoAddons and using it for a project, I think you’ll find our addons are a great fit for making MojoMotor just a bit more powerful.

I’m always excited to see new CodeIgniter books published, as the framework is growing in popularity and credibility among PHP developers, with applications springing up across the Internet. The framework is known for its excellent user guide and a strong community backing. But sometimes the resources available aren’t quite enough to make the concepts click in a new developer’s mind.

For me, the process involved viewing some of the available screencasts and looking at code that other had written in their applications. It wasn’t hard, but Adam’s new book would have been helpful to me in those early days of development with CodeIgniter. A selection of other CI-focused books have been published in the past, but I haven’t found many to be as practical as Adam’s. In previous books, often a single sample project is selected and used throughout the book to explain all of the concepts.

Adam’s approach is quite different and takes a look at various pieces of functionality that application developers might find very useful, while not walking them through the entire process of building an example application.

Specifically, Adam’s examples of using Twitter and Facebook authentication as well as accessing RESTful web services prove very useful, as these functions are increasingly at the core of many applications being built today.

The book also spends a bit of time talking about the basics of style in PHP coding. A guide like this would have helped to alleviate the evolution of coding style I’ve experienced as I’ve spent more and more time building web applications. It provides a solid baseline, referencing the CodeIgniter documentation’s style guide as a resource for maintaining code consistency.

Overall, I think that CodeIgniter 1.7: Professional Development fills a void in the market for CodeIgniter resources. I’d certainly recommend it to someone just starting out with the framework as an additional resource to use alongside the various other community resources.

The new book is not without its flaws though. As good as it is at helping a new developer get started at building all parts of an application: models, views, controllers and libraries, the one piece that’s lacking is advice on how to integrate with other people’s code. There a wealth of pre-written code out there, which though it may not be built to work with CodeIgniter, can save developers a ton of time as they build applications—if they know how to properly connect with third-party libraries from within the CodeIgniter framework. It can be a little bit tricky at first, so a primer in that area would be ideal.

Additionally, opening up the book with a bit of prior PHP experience is advised. Sometimes the examples don’t fully explain what’s going on in the code, so it could be a little complicated for a complete beginner.

Overall, though, I’m impressed with the direction this book goes. The angle is good, with a focus outside of the typical ‘build a blog in 20 minutes’ example.

Somewhere in between those two extremes lies a perfect blend of the two, characterized by a combination of personality and professionalism.

Recently the marketing department at the company where I work has been working on some branding materials to share with the entire staff, including a set of tips for social media. Since I contributed some of the ideas, and thought the rest were really good, I thought I’d share a modified and annotated list of those tips here:

Use good judgment and common sense

Think about what you’re posting. Think about all the people who may see it. Is there anyone who you don’t want to see it? Yes? Then don’t click the post button.

Use language that reflects core values and key attributes

This one’s a particular challenge. As a communicator for a company, you need to make sure you’re communicating the same message as others who are also communicating for your company. Consistency is key. This does not mean that you should spew marketing speak. That’d definitely be a no no.

Avoid posting anything that reflects badly on the brand, yourself or another staff member

Disparaging remarks about anything can harm the reputation of your company. This includes comments about your coworkers, partners, vendors, clients, competitors, etc. And, it applies to both your company social media accounts and your personal accounts. If you go around bashing people, it’s eventually going to come back around and reflect on your company. Really, this rule applies for social media in general, even without the company aspect. It’s a big Internet world out there. We’ve got to all play nice.

Do not share private or confidential information

This may seem obvious, but sometimes people just don’t think. Talking about that deal you closed prematurely in a public space.. not so good. There’s a lot of information that you may be privy to, or that your company may hold, and that should not be the subject of your latest tweet.

Do share news about the great things that are happening at your company with your circle of friends

Have something to say! The whole reason your business is using social media is to let others see what’s going on, so share what’s happening. Are you working on an exciting new project (that isn’t overly confidential, of course)? Then talk about it. People love to hear about new and exciting things. Even better, include some links, photos or other media so readers can truly get their hands on it. Your followers can be your best marketers if you get them excited about what you’re doing.

This goes for your personal accounts too. You can generate a lot of interest in your business by telling your personal friends and followers what you’re working on.

Avoid posting anything that may indicate endorsement, unless an official relationship exists.

This is simply a case of thinking through what you’re going to say before you say it. How might a post be read by others that you have a relationship with? For instance, if you have some sort of partnership with one vendor, you might not want to post a link touting the great benefits of their competitor.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t share some of the great content you find out on the Internet, but try to keep it limited to useful, informational content with very little bias toward specific companies or products.

On a similar note, try not to sound like a marketing broken record when talking about those companies and products you do work with. You don’t want to sound like you were paid off to say what you’re saying.

Have some personality

When you have the power to send a tweet or post out to thousands of users, it can be so easy to fall into the trap of carefully crafting some nifty marketing speak to sell whatever you’re about to post. Don’t do it.

Social media is about connecting PEOPLE together. Your friends and followers want to see a glimmer of that personality of yours show through in everything you post. I really like the idea of using ^CoTags to tag every post with the identity of the person who posted it. This goes a long way in removing that corporate veil from your posts, which can mean the difference between a lively and responsive follower-ship and a dead one.

Anyway. I hope these tips help you as you’re starting to think through using social media for your company. If you’ve got any more ideas, feel free to post them in the comments section.

A couple little notes:

• Using this view requires the PEAR XML Serializer library. Assuming your PEAR libraries are in your path settings, the view should work. You may need to adjust the path to the libary, though, on line 56.
• This code isn’t meant to be pretty. In most cases, your views get laid out with as little PHP code as possible, making it easy to style them. This is a different kind of view. It’s only purpose is to make API output use the same syntax as loading any other view. Because of this, this view does lots of nasty things that you should NEVER do in a normal view. This is your disclaimer. I created this for my own purposes to work the way I wanted it to, and if you have objections, it’s certainly understandable, but I don’t really care.

Anyway, without further ado, if I haven’t scared you away, why don’t you give it a try?

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