I use the Contact Form 7 plugin on my Command Capsule website. It allows customers to get in touch with me right from the home page. I love how absolutely simple it is to create a quick contact form and I like that I’m able to customize the templates.

One thing that is critical for me is mobile support. The world is mobile now. Command Capsule uses responsive design to fit and read well on any number of devices, from desktop HD screens to small smartphone screens.

However, mobile isn’t just about fitting into small screens. It’s also about a different form of user interaction. It must be quick, simple, and as much as possible, usable with one finger, namely the thumb.

HTML5 includes a number of updated input types for web forms. When invoked in modern browsers, these input types signal a change to the browser, allowing it to swap the normal interface for one that is appropriate for the input type.

The two input types I care about most are email and tel. The email input field on a mobile device using iOS will switch from the usual keyboard to one that allows users to quickly input an email address. Likewise, the tel input type will switch to a number keypad allowing quick entry of a phone number. It’s little details like this that make mobile websites friendlier to users.

Unfortunately, Contact Form 7 doesn’t support these updated HTML5 input types natively. Thankfully, it’s simple to hack support into the plugin assuming your needs are simple. Mine are, and this hack works well enough for me.

How To Hack Contact Form 7

This assumes you have sufficient permissions to edit plugins, either through the WordPress editor or through your filesystem. I’m going to do this inside WordPress.

1. In the WordPress side menu, select Plugins > Editor
2. In the upper right corner of the Editor, find the select field that says “Select plugin to edit”
3. Choose Contact Form 7 and hit “Select”
4. In the list of plugin files on the right side, click the link for “contact-form-7/modules/text.php”
5. At the top of that file you will see a block of code that looks like this:

wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'text', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'text*', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'email', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'email*', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );

Right after that block, add this line:

wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'tel', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );

That tells the text handler to handle tel input types. Your code should now look like this:

wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'text', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'text*', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'email', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'email*', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );
wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'tel', 'wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler', true );

Right after that block is a function called wpcf7_text_shortcode_handler(). Scroll down to near the end of that function and look for this line:

$html = '<input type="text" name="' . $name . '" value="' . esc_attr( $value ) . '"' . $atts . ' />';

Change that line to this:

$html = '<input type="' . $type . '" name="' . $name . '" value="' . esc_attr( $value ) . '"' . $atts . ' />';

Now, instead of the text, email, and tel fields getting an input type of “text”, they’ll have input types of text, email, and tel, respectively. In browsers that react to those input types, the interface for entering data in those fields should change automatically.

In your contact form template, to add a telephone input field, it might look something like this.

<p>Your Phone<br />[tel phone]</p>

That creates an input box with an input type of “tel” and a name attribute of “phone”. An email field might look like this:

<p>Your Email<br />[email your-email]</p>

As the blog post suggests, this is a hack. It’s not foolproof and it only works if you use text, email, and tel fields without the asterisk. Also, every time you upgrade the plugin you will overwrite these changes and you’ll have to add them back in again. If you upgrade the plugin without changing the files, your custom contact form will break. Make sure you’re in a place where you can edit the files again while you’re upgrading.

Like most married parents our age, we did everything online before the trip. Found the tickets, found the car, and prepaid for everything. No big deal.

For the car, we decided to go with Avis. We used their website to book the deal. We asked for two car seats and a car big enough to hold all of our junk. When you travel with a small circus, you can’t forget to bring peanuts for the elephants, bananas for the monkeys, the tent, the blankets, the trapeze, and oh yeah, the animals. If you don’t have kids yet, let me share a secret. You have no idea how much crap you depend on to keep your children happy until you try to spend a night away somewhere. Sure, you’d prefer a small car and a couple pieces of carry-on luggage but it’s just not feasible unless you’ve got people waiting for you at your destination who can provide it all. This is how people end up with a Winnebago, I’m sure of it. I have no desire for one, but I don’t judge anymore.

So we’ve prepaid and we’re a couple days away from the trip and my wife finds a coupon for the car online. We check the website but can’t find a way to apply the coupon to an existing order and we didn’t want to lose our reservation so we decided to hang on to the coupon hoping a friendly person would be able to apply the coupon at the desk.

The day of the trip we get up around six in the morning to prepare for a flight at ten. We live about 30 minutes away from the airport. The majority of this day will be spent in transit, standing in lines, buying overpriced frankenfood, changing diapers, and keeping small people occupied.

The flight lasts almost three hours. It’s mostly uneventful but there are tears, of course, constant movement, constant appeasement, constant food, and constant trips to the bathroom. We are already tired when we arrive in Denver, collect our bags, and hobble along to find the Avis bus.

The bus takes you to the next way station, the rental center. Basically, it looks like a used car lot in the middle of nowhere. Strangely enough, the experience at the rental desk feels like one, too. The salesman calls up our prepaid rental reservation and then attempts to upsell me on car size, insurance, extra features, even gas.

I politely say no to all these things. Then I bring up our coupon that we found. He politely says no. Since we’ve prepaid, he’s unable to change the price and refund part of the bill. We cannot use the coupon after we’ve prepaid. It’s a good coupon. Had we found it before we made the reservation and used it online, it likely would have saved us fifty bucks.

The clerk continues typing away at his screen. I stop him and say, “Do you find it funny that you’re able to add items to my bill, but you’re unable to remove items from my bill?”

“What do you mean?” he says.

“I mean, just a few minutes ago, you pulled up my prepaid reservation and started asking me if I’d like to add all these extra items to it. Obviously, the fact that I’ve prepaid has nothing to do with it. You can change my bill, you just can’t change my bill in my favor. Someone at Avis headquarters made a business decision some time ago that you can change my bill as long it’s increasing, not decreasing.”

He sort of shrugs, and then in that I-don’t-make-the-rules-I-just-follow-them kind of voice, he says, “Yeah, I’m just following what it tells me to do on my screen here. I can’t really control how it works.”

I tell him I understand. I’m not lodging a complaint and I don’t want to get someone higher up involved. I know it’s not his fault. I tell him I build software systems like this for my job, so I know it’s not technically impossible. It’s just that some executive decided it should work this way, regardless of how the customer feels afterward: used, like the cars in the lot.

In business, there’s a lot of talk about building customer relationships. As soon as they start spouting that crap, I know they’re full of shit. A relationship with a person runs both ways.

So we finish the billing process and finally I go sit down next to my wife in the waiting area. She manages a haggard smile. Glad to be here. When do we go home? We wait while they finish processing the paperwork and our car.

Ten minutes later they call me over and give me the keys. You’re in stall number such-and-such. Walk that way. Use this form to mark up any problems you find with the car.

Ah, that time-honored ritual: the marking of the paper with the problems you find. In America, this is pretty typical in rental situations. If you rent anything, be it a car, a moving truck, or a place to live, when they hand you a form and give you the responsibility of making sure things are in order, you’re most likely screwed unless you mark down everything. I have no idea what they do with these forms, because every car, moving truck, and apartment I’ve ever rented has had scratches, dents, and stains. So they’re definitely not using your notes to get the thing fixed and cleaned up. The only possible explanation is that they want to have something to hold against you should they want to take more of your money. “Oh, the car had a dent in it when you picked it up? Why didn’t you mark that on the form? I’m sorry, you forfeit your deposit.”

If that’s not the case, a responsible, customer-centric organization would take this marking-the-form job upon themselves, show the itemized list to the customer so the customer can verify, and not leave any doubts in the customer’s mind as to who might be at fault. And they’d fix the cars or, at least, clean them before demanding they come back to the lot in pristine condition.

So we’re standing there next to our car. It looks fine, even newish. We note some of the dents and scratches and the bent license plate. We note the black marks on the upholstery. We take pictures just to be safe.

I mentioned we paid for two car seats when we booked the car. The price is outrageous. You can buy two brand new car seats for what we paid. We’re at the car and the car seats are nowhere to be found. Did they make a mistake? Did they forget? No, the lot attendant tells us that they’re running low on car seats and he’ll have to look for some.

“But we prepaid over a week ago,” I tell him. I mean, how can you not have seats available when it’s part of the reservation and it’s paid for? How do you get away with selling something that you can’t reliably provide?

The clerk from the desk comes over and says he’s sorry but they’re having trouble finding seats. He’s going to keep looking around the lot. If I’d like to, he tells me, I can drive (drive?!) to Walmart about ten miles away and buy a couple new seats. I’m not making this up.

You need to know at this point, the Denver airport is not in Denver. It’s way the hell out in the middle of reclaimed prairie land. The Walmart the clerk has described is about 17 miles away in Aurora, Colorado. If I leave now–without my wife and kids, mind you (because we have no car seats)–it would be a half hour to Walmart, ten minutes in the store, and a half hour back. Then another half hour, I’m sure, while we do more paperwork to ensure I’m reimbursed.

“Wait, you want me to drive the car into Denver to buy car seats for you? Why don’t you drive to Walmart to buy the seats? Isn’t that your job?”

“Well, that would take a long time,” he says.

I swear I’m not making this up. This is Avis, one of the most well-known car rental companies in America, in one of the busiest metropolitan airports in America, and they don’t have two car seats on the whole lot, two car seats that have already been paid for, and they’d like their customer who’s been traveling all day with small children to drive to Walmart in another town to restock their shelves. We got up at 6am. After all the rigamarole it’s now 4pm in Denver. Even after we’re done with all of this, we have an hour drive north to my brother’s house, our final destination. The kids are going to need dinner soon.

He says he’ll keep looking. Ten minutes later, the lot attendant walks up to the car and drops two old, well-worn, well-used car seats on the ground and starts to walk away.

“Do you install these?” I ask. I ask because it’s a safety issue. I haven’t used these car seats before. There are no manuals lying on the ground next to the heaps of plastic that tell me how to install them safely so my kids don’t come flying through the windshield if we’re in a crash.

Yes, I own two car seats at home and I know how they’re supposed to work. But there’s a reason why fire stations, police stations, other safety minded community organizations, and even some insurance companies offer to help people install car seats in their cars. If you do it wrong, your kids could die in a crash. It’s that simple. Do you know why paramedics refer to rear-facing car seats as the “orphan seat”? Sort of macabre, I know, but it’s because they’re usually the only ones who survive a crash. Front-facing car seats, booster seats, seat belts, and the like might save your child’s life in a low-speed crash. At the wrong angle and at a high rate of speed, however, they don’t do much. Children aren’t even allowed to ride in seats that have airbags. As a parent, the best you can hope for is that you install the seat correctly, hoping that gives your child a fighting chance. We are fragile things. And if I sound like I’m paranoid and overly cautious, it’s because I am. I love my boys and my wife more than anything. They deserve safe travels. Hell, we all do. We just don’t demand it enough.

“No, we don’t install them,” the attendant says. My wife and I exchange that glance that tired, married parents exchange and I tell her she might as well take the boys back inside the rental office. I’m going to be here a while. They head back inside and I’m alone with our luggage, the car, and the seats on the ground.

I look at the seats. The straps are completely tangled up, but what’s going through my mind is the fact that car seats get recalled from time to time. Some of them just aren’t safe by design. Manufacturers recall them and it’s your responsibility as the owner to keep up to date with what’s been recalled. And I’m looking at these battered seats and wondering 1) are they so banged up that they’ve lost their structural integrity and 2) is there anyone at this Avis rental place who can tell me if these car seats have been recalled by the manufacturer before I drive away with them and thus, accept responsibility implicitly by using them. That’s another sweet, American legal maneuver. Given the experience so far at the lot, I already know the answer.

So we finally have our seats: two dirty car seats with the tangled straps dropped on the ground next to the car. They look old, the fabric is faded from years of sitting in the sun, stains all over the fabric, little crumbs, the ghosts of infants past. And when I say tangled straps, I don’t mean just spin them around a few times and they’re fine. I’m going to have to remove the straps, feed them out the back of the car seat, untangle them, reattach them, and feed them back through the seat. If you’ve ever owned a car seat before, you know what a pain this is.

Time to install the seats. If you’ve never installed a car seat before, one of the rules is to keep the seat level according to markings on the seat. Some car seats have a small level embedded in the seat. Some just have a line marked on a sticker that is stuck onto the seat. I guess in that case you just hope the person who applied the sticker had a good eye.

This is one of those cases. Two sets of stickers marking what’s level. As luck would have it, the rear passenger seats in the car we rented are sloped in the back. That means we have to put something under the car seats to level them out.

And what, pray tell, shall we use to level out the seats? Of course! Let’s open up our luggage and stuff our wadded up clothes under those car seats. I mean, you packed extra clothes to stuff under that car seat, didn’t you, honey? I know I did. Everyone does it these days, what with the extra $35 charge for packing too much luggage and all. Airlines and car rental companies: a parent’s best friend.

I install the seats, put our now lightweight suitcases back in the trunk, and phone my wife to come back out. We strap our boys in, say a quick prayer, get in the car, drive off the lot, and start searching for food on our way north. Is this what people mean by the Paleo food movement? Because we feel like first world hunter-gatherers at this point.

If you haven’t gathered yet yourself, this post is about companies getting inside the heads and hearts of their customers. When I travel, I get the distinct sense that the whole operation is geared toward the single business travler, and even then it’s not so great. Parents traveling with small kids aren’t even on the radar of travel-related organizations.

Yes, I singled out a very real, bad experience with Avis, but the whole system is an onion of crap. If you’ll indulge the mixed metaphor, keep peeling and there’s crap at every layer. From the pricing structure to the extra fees at every turn, to the god-awful food, to the security theater, to the delays, the overselling, the overbooking, the under-delivering, the angry, underpaid, under-appreciated employees in every department, and the general feeling of get-me-the-hell-outta-here I feel whenever I travel, even when I’m traveling alone.

I don’t know if this can ever be fixed. I know we’re hell and gone from the golden age of flying. I’m starting to realize we’re probably hell and gone from the age of travel in general. The only good thing I can say about that day is I’m glad we didn’t have to pay for a hotel, too.

But if you do work for a travel-related company and you hope to win some business from traveling families, spend a moment or two thinking about what we’re going through when we travel. Traveling with small kids? God, we just want to survive the day. Any kindness you can show us, even just the slightest hint that you understand our world would make a world of difference.

Reading Give me spark today at 37signals I was reminded of some of the lessons I learned reading Patrick Lencioni’s business books. If you haven’t read any, his most famous is probably The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

When you start discussions with a group around an issue for which a decision must be made, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Tempers flare, politics arise, quiet people get really quiet. It’s easy for the real issue to get lost. It’s easy for the wrong decision to be made in order to appease the group.

Leaders

The key for leaders is to remember that you’re not trying to build consensus, you’re trying to make a decision. Sometimes everyone will see the path forward, or it will be easy to eliminate alternatives, or it will be a really simple decision, and no one will raise any objections. Fine.

But many times there are at least one or two people who don’t agree with the decision. That’s okay. The most important thing is to make sure that everyone is heard, and most importantly, that everyone feels like they’ve been heard and respected. Especially the quiet ones. Don’t let anyone brood. For the talkers in your group, don’t let anyone dominate.

The leader’s job is to explain the criteria for the decision, facilitate the discussion, keep it fair, keep the discussion on point, keep it moving, and help people provide their best answer, even if it goes against yours, and then make a decision and move forward. Oh, and make it snappy. Don’t waste people’s time with a long back story. Explain what’s going on, get to the point, and ask for questions if you think people don’t understand the decision being made.

Explain the Criteria

There’s a reason why you must explain the criteria for the decision. If there are factors affecting your decision that are outside the group’s control, such as organizational factors, long-term strategies, and interactions with other groups, they need to know about it. Part of respecting other people includes being honest and transparent. This also helps people formulate answers while keeping the big picture in mind.

And here’s the kicker. If having a discussion won’t affect the outcome, don’t have a meeting hoping it will satisfy the group’s desire to participate. You’re insulting your team and no one ever falls for that crap. Just send an email explaining your decision.

Team Members

For team members, the first key is to be present and to participate. Put away your computer and your phone unless you’re researching supporting evidence for your opinion. Be at the meeting. This is one way to demonstrate respect.

You absolutely must voice your opinion when it’s called for. Be fair, but argue your point. There’s nothing wrong with argument. There’s nothing wrong with passion for your viewpoint. On the flip side, if you disagree with the direction the group is taking and you choose not to speak out, you have no one to blame but yourself. Emotionally mature people don’t hide behind a fear of reprisal, of not being heard, or of not being taken seriously.

If you’re a team member and the decision doesn’t feel like a big decision to you, or if any position is acceptable to you, you should still voice that. And then you should still participate by listening actively to your teammates.

Leaders, Take Note of Your Quiet People

Leaders, if a great many of your people have a tendency not to speak up, that means there’s a larger problem of people feeling like their opinion doesn’t matter or that speaking up will lead to reprisal from leadership or others within the group. That’s a leadership problem and you need to deal with it pretty darn quick.

Team Members Should Support the Team

The second key for team members is to remember that part of being a team means you accept the final decision and support the team with all your might. Teams must play as a team. If you’ve done your part by listening intently and voicing your opinion, then respect the role of the leader, which is to make the decision. You must respect the fact that the leader is taking every element into consideration, which includes the opinions and supporting evidence of the team, and then making the best decision based on the necessary criteria. Your opinion is valid and your evidence may be solid, but it may also not be enough to meet the criteria for the decision. The final decision may not be what you had hoped for, but support your team, no matter what. That’s what teams do.

That being said, if you find that you’re consistently going against the team and having a hard time supporting the decision, it may be time to look for another team. All other things being equal, if you think the team is healthy and the organizational context in which it operates is sound, you should take note of your opposition and discuss it with your leader. Talk about the problems you’re having getting behind the team. Be honest with yourself. Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding. Perhaps you’re not a good fit for the team. That’s okay, too. Sometimes the best way to help the team succeed is to leave the team.

Get Out If You Have To

And certainly, if you believe the team and/or the organization is dysfunctional, you’ve expressed this to your leader, and no one is listening or willing to take action, leave. It’s not the worst thing in the world to look for another job. And truly, there are sociopaths and borderline sociopaths among us. Be good to yourself and get away while you still can.

Or just try to figure it out for yourself.

But for God’s sake, don’t ask for help in the Craigslist Flagging Help Forum. The absolute best that will come of it is that you will know, without a doubt, how much you absolutely suck as a human being. And there are at least 500,000 users waiting there to jump on your thread and tell you, as quickly as possible, how much of an asshole you are for trying to sell your stupid shit.

“That stuff you wanted to sell was probably stolen. Did you go to college? You probably didn’t go to college. Your parents were never married. They found you in the garbage. And no one likes you. Or your face. Certainly not your stuff. Did you try to use prose in your advertisement? Oh, that’s why it was flagged. Prose is strictly forbidden on Craigslist unless one of the literary scholars who joined back in the 90s likes your post and puts in on the best of Craigslist. But it’s all who you know, isn’t it? I mean, these days, it’s all about the network. Sorry, dude, no rest for the weary.”

I’m paraphrasing. Well, except for the dude part. You can’t make that up. At some point in a useless argument, the lesser of two evils will bow out by saying, “Okay dude, whatever.” The final insult. The conversation ends because there’s no more wit to be spit. But you need to know, when people say “okay, dude” on Craigslist, they’re really saying “Fuck off, Dicknose.” They don’t really think you’re a dude.

You know that old meme about how many 5-year-olds could a person take on in a fight? I think they were talking about Craigslist, because the forums are full of them.

Okay, done? Now go down to the very end and read Adam Yauch’s list. Adam Yauch, aka MCA, of the Beastie Boys, has apparently started a film distribution company. As I read his thoughts on the films, I could just imagine his input to his staff on which films to acquire for his company.

I was crying I laughed so hard. Really, I haven’t had such a good, hearty laugh in a long time. Thanks, Criterion, and thanks, MCA.

I read a lot of geek news. A lot. For the past couple months I’ve noticed a huge upswing in buzz about Facebook. The company, its interface changes, its longstanding privacy issues, who’s getting what, who’s getting shafted, who got shafted before, who’s coming on board, who’s leaving, who’s investing, who’s going to bat for them in Washington, even what kinds of parties they throw and who gets to go to them. Mostly, it’s been negative in tone.

In the midst of this I’m sad for Facebook-the-idea, the people who work there, and the people who own chunks of it. It seems like it could have been great. I mean great in the noble sense. I don’t know if any of what I read about the company is true, but I know it makes me sad when I read it. I feel dirty afterward, like I’m reading gossip. It just doesn’t come off as a noble enterprise.

Not only that, it smells like inevitability. The takeover kind. The we-have-more-money-and-more-users-than-all-of-western-society kind. How do you beat that back? Truly, I don’t think you can. Facebook has reached the size of most empires. Did you know that this planet had less than one billion people until around 1800. Facebook could reach one billion registered users next year, or very soon thereafter. Maybe by this Christmas. All of them legitimate? Maybe not. Even at half, would it matter?

At that size, that’s not just a business. That’s a power. That’s a world power. That’s an economy. That’s a culture. You can measure GDP in there. Alright I’m stretching, but hear me out.

It’s true that they don’t have Apple’s design and market cap (yet) or Google’s utility (yet) or Amazon’s product offerings (yet) or Walmart’s physical distribution capabilities (yet) or the infrastructure held by the telecommunication companies (yet) but they have something that most companies don’t: the voice of the people. Or at least, they have the attention of the people. At the push of a button they can put a message in front of millions and millions of people around the world simultaneously, in their native language, just about anywhere on the planet. Even the Superbowl can’t do…okay, even the U.S. government can’t do that. And the Superbowl only gets one day of the year.

It’s even better on the receiving end for Facebook. They’re an aggregator of all shared sentiment, emotion, and consumption of every conceivable kind around the world. They know you and what you did last summer. And at their size, they can probably guess with high probability what non-Facebook people think, do, care about, and consume as well.

They’re kind of like a web inside the world wide web. What Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve tried to be before the real web took over. Only Facebook is slowly succeeding, and branching out into more territory. Like bacteria that bathe in anti-bacterial soap just to show you how badass they are. They’ve mutated beyond the reach of antibiotics. And I’m stretching again.

So there are a lot of geeks and non-geeks aware of that growing power who are starting to shout about it more and more. And I commend them for asking tough questions and for trying to expose practices that could be considered shameful at best and harmful at worst. There will be some victories there, I’m sure. At the very least, some fortunate few will reap rewards from lawsuits and we’ll feel good about that. We’ll watch the biopic of the lead lawyer on Netflix inside of Facebook. Together. Competitors will get acquired or squashed. Or acquired and squashed.

But I think, like all world powers they’re probably going to run their course. There’s too much momentum and not enough friction. And certainly there is nothing large enough to repel them. Not even government. Especially not government. Why? Because everyone believes it’s in their best interest to meld with Facebook. The incentives to join, to integrate, to stay, to share, all of it, they all point to helping Facebook succeed. For as much as we bitch, I don’t think anyone really wants them to go away.

Of course, I don’t think they’re going to hold the world captive for all eternity. If it’s one thing history demonstrates, empires come and go. But they have to play themselves out. They have to wither internally before the gates come crashing down. I think Facebook is a long way off from that day.

It’s a lot of work and I’m really happy with the results, but it’s been over two years since the last video was produced and the Rails workflow I was demonstrating has changed for me. I don’t use RSpec and Cucumber anymore, for example. Rails is now at version 3.1. At some point I may revisit making screencasts like this, but there’s no time in my schedule right now. Enjoy them as part of my history.

Follow along as I build version 2 of Jetrecord using Ruby on Rails.

1. The Tabula Rasa of Doom: every project has a beginning
2. Tell Me a Story: customers are integral to completing the project
3. Git, Capistrano, and a Test Release: put code in a repository and release it
4. Cucumbers and Webrats!: set up Cucumber and Webrat testing

The Building of Jetrecord by Harry Love is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. When code, text, or media in this series is not created by me and is not in the public domain I will provide links to their sources from which you can find their respective licenses and terms of use.

I have no point. I just wanted to say the name.