year in review

It was a good year for me both personally and professionally. My daughter is growing up fast and I’m cherishing the time I get to spend with her. Watching her grow and seeing her imagination flourish is just darn awesome.

At Crowd Favorite we are continuing to expand our capabilities and raise the bar on both our client projects and the products we are building. We remodeled our office this year, and expanded the team by several folks – all great changes that are allowing us to continue to take on new challenges.

On this site I was able to make great progress on a number of changes I’ve been wanting to make. In particular, I wanted to make progress in several key areas.

I wanted to have a more casual relationship with my site. I had gotten away from daily posting a while ago, and the longer I went without posting the more I felt my next post needed to be substantial. The combination of the site redesign and the content integrations I created with several social sites I participate in has been a big part of that. It has also helped me move towards making my site the home for all of my online content.

I also moved from weekly link posts to individual link posts. This is something I’d experimented with in the past, but I’m glad I finally cut over wholesale. I don’t have consistent time on the weekends like I used to, and it’s nice to be able to post stuff in a more timely manner.

I wanted to get back to contributing code back to the community with more frequency. I’ve been moving just about everything I can to GitHub. I’ve got some stuff under my account, including a number of Gists. My WordPress plugins are being moved to our Crowd Favorite account as we work on them.

I feel like I’m still at a mid-way point on a number of the things I’m trying to accomplish, hopefully 2012 will see continued progress.

I’ve run the numbers for my site again this year (and made the code available as a Gist). I see just about what I expected: more frequent posts with fewer words per post.

Hello I am [REDACTED] and I am a member of some financial communities. I just visited your site (alexking.org) and I am a frequent reader of your site. The articles of your blog is really worth reading. The quality of your content is excellent. After seeing this, I would like to request you something. I love to write financial articles and I would like to contribute something for your site if you’ll give me the permission. I can give you an original guest post and I assure you that it will be published only in your site. If you want, you can suggest me the topic also and I will write accordingly. Please let me know your thoughts. Waiting for your positive reply. Reach me at: [REDACTED][at]gmail[dot]com

My reply:

Hi–

I’d consider posting a thoughtful, well-written piece about why you shouldn’t accept guest posts on your blog.

We’ve been rolling out our hosting services slowly, mainly for our clients at Crowd Favorite, but we’re at a point now where we’re willing to open it up a little more to folks who need reliable, scalable and tested hosting – with a focus on WordPress powered sites.

Our approach to hosting is a little different. We work with you to understand your traffic needs, then we design an architecture to support that – using a variety of cloud services. We then run real load tests to see how the configuration holds up under standard and peak loads. Then we adjust and re-test as needed. We also make recommendations about how to structure your WordPress site, and can help implement new features and techniques in order to scale the site as needed.

By using cloud services, we are able to do this type of configuration and testing quickly and cost efficiently. We can also easily spin up a clone of the site for future load testing of new features or to test new architecture approaches as traffic load dictates.

CloudMoxie definitely isn’t a hosting solution for everyone. I am very pleased to recommend WordPress.com’s VIP hosting which offers great hosting and services if your site is a good fit there. We are happily part of Rackspaces‘s partner program as well and have a number of clients on their servers.

Apparently Google didn’t think my pithy little section title was very funny.

Fair enough, I’ve kicked it back to the “boring” setting. And shed a small tear.

The result? I’m not participating in as many conversations as I’d like to, I’m not sharing as many of my ideas, and I’m not as in touch with the community as I was. I’m also not using the writing process to help me refine my ideas.

I want that to change.

It’s easy to say I’m too busy. Yes, Crowd Favorite has grown to a full time team of 13 in less than 3 years and yes I’ve got a baby girl to keep me busy now. It’s true that I’ve got a lot going on. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back to daily posting, but I’d like to be more engaged here than I have been.

I’ll wrap this up since there are few things as boring as blogging about why you haven’t been blogging… we’ll see what I can produce.

year in review

Last year I wrote this as an intro to my annual retrospective:

This year, unlike previous years, my blog is less of a good record of the past 365 days. It’s a combination of being a lot busier due to the growth at Crowd Favorite, and working on more client projects that I can’t talk about as they happen the same way I can with things I’m building for myself.

This year was a year of many starts and few finishes. I have too many projects still in a state of “mostly working, not quite ready for release”. I’m pleased with the base that I’ve built in 2008, and I’m hoping that 2009 will see much of this work come to fruition.

Unfortunately, many of these things were true again in 2009. I had several spurts where I tried to make time to blog more frequently, but was unable to keep it up. My responsibilities have grown significantly in the past few years, and I don’t get as much time at the keyboard as I used to.

I currently have a number of projects in various states of completion, blog posts in various states of draft, etc., etc. Time has become my biggest challenge. That said, we’ve got a number of things progressing nicely and I’m very excited for what I see on the slate for 2010.

Instead of going through month-by-month as I have in the past, I’m instead going to pick and choose some events to highlight.

Personally, this has been quite a year:

• I became a father – my daughter Caitlin was born on April 18th. She’s doing great; is now crawling backwards (hasn’t gotten forward figured out yet) and walking around while holding onto my fingers. She’s turned our lives upside-down a bit.
• 10 Year Anniversary – my wife and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary in November. I feel very fortunate.
• More family time – my in-laws moved to Colorado from Minnesota and they have provided invaluable support to us. My parents have also visited a number of times from Seattle – it’s great to be seeing them more often.

All of this has me feeling like an adult in a very real and scary way. I’m working hard to develop my “I’m too old for this sh*t” persona and building a cache of “back in my day” stories accordingly.

Professionally this has been a great year as well:

• Crowd Favorite continues to grow – this year we were fortunate to enjoy 30% growth in a down economy, keep our entire team intact and add a few more talented folks to fold. All of which I am very thankful for.
• WordPress HelpCenter launched – I’m very pleased to report that the service is doing even better since we took full control of it last month.
• BackupMoxie launched – our managed backup service launched smoothly is working very well; it’s saved our clients a few times already. Look for an announcement about a new offering from BackupMoxie soon.
• WordCamp Denver – we put on Denver’s first WordCamp in February 2009. We are planning another for 2010, probably in June this year (we are coordinating around several other events and WordCamps we plan to attend).
• I went to SxSWi for the first time – I had been meaning to go for several years and it was great to connect and re-connect with a number of folks there.
• WordCamp SF – I finally got out to WordCamp SF, and was privileged to be invited onstage to discuss some of our successes.
• TechStars – I once again participated as a mentor in the TechStars program, though I was not as active this year as in the past (due to the little one). I’m looking forward to next year and the expansion to my hometown of Seattle.
• Carrington Framework – it was great to see Carrington power some of the best WordPress implementations launched in 2009. I put out more documentation and I’m excited about some unreleased features that we are working on.
• Oxygen Framework – we build most of our custom PHP applications on the excellent CodeIgniter framework, but we’ve built a framework on top of CodeIgniter that enables even more rapid application development and implements our own best practices as well as some of the best aspects of the customization ability found in WordPress. I did a ton of work on this in 2009 and it powers a number of our internal systems as well as BackupMoxie. I’m looking forward to releasing more projects and products on the framework in 2010.
• My mobile obsession continues – I used two BlackBerrys, an iPhone, and tested an Android and Palm Pre this year. I moved from AT&T to Verizon, and am becoming more and more frustrated with the BlackBerry OS, software and hardware speed while I lament the lack of an equal keyboard on any other mobile platform.
• Netbooks were a new toy – I experimented with them in the spring, then got them for the whole team for the holidays.
• WordPress plugins and themes – we released a number of plugin and theme updates in 2009, and should be in position to do even more in 2010. I have a personal list of 5-6 that I hope we can complete and release.

My sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the items listed above. I’m quite looking forward to what we can do in 2010.

For you statheads out there, I’ve continued the blog/site stats.¹

1. Run yours using these SQL queries. [back]

1. A flood of comment spam
2. Akismet not accepting connections from my server¹ and/or not catching the spam. UPDATE: this wasn’t Akismet’s fault, see bottom of post.
3. The email notifications from all the spam comments sending to my mail account
4. My mail host started blocking all mail from my server (due to the high volume of comment spam)

This has presented me with a choice between receiving email and accepting comments on this site, and that’s an easy choice.

I disabled comments, and once the flow of spam mails stopped my mail host seems to be accepting mail again. It’s sad to see the problems caused by comment spam extending beyond the annoyance of having them appear on your blog.²

I’m taking some additional steps to try to get the mail situation set up a little better (domain migration so I have better DNS control, sending mail directly to Google Apps and then forwarding to my primary mail account from there). I’m hopeful that I can get the Akismet connection issues resolved and enable comments again in the near future.

Regardless, it’s been a genuine pain in the arse having to deal with this. Apologies for the impact it’s had on anyone looking to comment here and/or receiving emails from my server.

UPDATE: re-enabling comments, hoping for the best.

UPDATE #2: the inability to reach Akismet appears to have been due to a firewall issue on my server (no blame should be placed on Akismet).

1. It allows connections at times, but then doesn’t for long periods of time. [back]
2. They can also cause server scalability issues. [back]

I’ve had to upgrade a bunch of my plugins in the process, bringing them current with the latest and greatest WordPress code and best practices. Expect a couple more plugin releases soon.

I also took the opportunity to switch everything from Prototype to jQuery – resulting in lighter JavaScript and lighter page loads.

So a bunch of stuff was changed, if you see breakage around the site I’d appreciate it if you let me know.

UPDATE: feeds should be working again. Oops!

MX Revolution: Flashing Red Light in Cradle – posted in January 2008.

If you take a look at the comments here, you’ll see not only a solution to the problem I had, but comments from a bunch of people adding their “me too” to the list. I believe this helps keep the post fresh and relevant in Google’s index. Obviously people are finding it and getting a solution as a result.

CitiMortgage Frustrations – posted in October 2004 (and the follow up post).

These posts have turned into a scary collection of warnings about CitiMortgage and problems people have had trying to work with them. There are nearly 450 comments on these two posts, and many unfortunate stories contained within. These posts have become places that people can share tips and advice about the problems they are experiencing – which definitely has value.

Sure not all posts get great comments, but when you close them you don’t know what you might be missing down the road.

year in review

This year, unlike previous years, my blog is less of a good record of the past 365 days. It’s a combination of being a lot busier due to the growth at Crowd Favorite, and working on more client projects that I can’t talk about as they happen the same way I can with things I’m building for myself.

This year was a year of many starts and few finishes. I have too many projects still in a state of “mostly working, not quite ready for release”. I’m pleased with the base that I’ve built in 2008, and I’m hoping that 2009 will see much of this work come to fruition.

• January – I took a quick trip to the Bay Area with ShareThis for the Open Web Awards. By far the biggest news of the month is the new office space and getting settled in. This has worked out quite well, and pretty much feels like home now.
• February – sell some stuff on eBay for the first time, take another quick trip to the Bay Area and continue busting tail to get everything set up in the new office.
• March – I pick up the Air and take it with me to visit the ShareThis team. I enjoy my (almost) annual weekend golfing to Phoenix and a quick trip to Minnesota for a wedding. WordPress 2.5 comes out and my plugins aren’t all ready.
• April – I take another quick trip to the Bay Area, this time for the Google App Engine launch. Other than that, it’s head’s down working. I do get a new plugin released.
• May – Addictomatic launches and I take a trip to Seattle to visit family.
• June – I present at Refresh Denver and Crowd Favorite continues to expand.
• July – .me domains launch, I manage to duck jury duty.
• August – Addictomatic is updated. The DNC is held a couple blocks from our office and I take a trip to New York to see Yankee Stadium.
• September – JabberWerx AJAX is released. I start podcasting with some friends and I present at WordCamp Utah.
• October – The public launch of Carrington and I enjoy a long weekend golfing in South Carolina.
• November – I speak at Widget Summit 08, get Carrington hosted publicly on Google Code and upgrade to the Bold while in Minnesota for Thanksgiving.
• December – Keep my head above water while end of year projects are feverishly accomplished.

For you statheads out there, I’ve continued the blog/site stats.¹

1. Run yours using these SQL queries. [back]

UPDATE: Looks like everything transitioned quite smoothly. The big speed improvement you see here is in large part due to the good folks at Austin Web Development. Big thanks to Chris and the team there for the smooth transition and for all their great work for me over the years.

Thanks to my matey Dougal “BlueBeard” Campbell for the right proper plugin o’ th day.