Chad Hutchins

I enjoy working. Some call it an obsession or they call me a workaholic, but I call it a passion and my hobby. Just as an athlete works to reach their sporting goals, I do the same with my work. Life is too unique and precious of a thing to waste it being lazy. I choose what I do with my time. Not having enough time to do something is NOT an excuse anymore. Everyone is busy.

I’ll say that to people, and they ask, “Well what about my job? I can’t choose what I do there!”, but I disagree. Even in the current US economic situation, you should never work somewhere that you can’t be happy and enjoy everyday; given, there will always be those days nothing goes right no matter where you work. If you don’t like your job, be patient, work hard, save some cash, quit your job, and find a new one that you can be happy with. Don’t waste your life doing things that have no meaning … I could write more, but I’d rather here what you think.

What is keeping you from making good use of your time? What are your thoughts?

The New York Times published an article a few days ago discussing how Proctar & Gamble and other large organizations have tried to advertise using social media, specifically on Facebook. The article explains how the companies are struggling with social media. In my mind, there seems to be a clear distinction between those who are successful with social media, and those who see blah results.

Here is the difference: Perceived Motive.

By perceived motive, I mean “What do others think I am trying to achieve by connecting with them in social media sites?”. To have a successful social media campaign, you have to remember to be social. Am I stating the obvious? When being social, say at a meet-and-greet after a day at a conference, do you come off as, “Hey, you really need to buy our products. We are really awesome.”? No, you introduce yourself, and try to understand and connect with the person you are talking to. The same goes for interacting with potential and current customers in social media. Showing that you care and understand who you are talking to should be at the highest priority.

Now some may say, “That’s all fine and dandy in a perfect world where you don’t have to worry about the costs of your campaigns, but I want to see returns”; but, I would argue that you will, most definitely, see great returns, but in non-traditional ways. By truly engaging and understanding those that are listening, you begin to build great respect and the attention. I believe that social media campaigns played correctly have the potential for exponential returns, compared to typical print, tv or radio advertisements.

Plain and simple, social media will not work for you if you do not care about who you are trying to engage, but if you take the time to become active in your community of potential and current customers, showing that you really care, social media may become the strongest tool for your marketing strategy.

This article, authored by Tony Wright, is a nice breakdown of the traits of two types of entrepreneurs; builder entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs. Builder entrepreneurs are those who “designed, coded, played sysadmin, and played all sorts of other production roles for their startups”. Tony goes on to write that business entrepreneurs don’t “really have a useful role to play in the very earliest stages of a software startup”.

After reading the article and browsing around Tony’s site a little, I found a cool product that Tony’s current startup is working on, called RescueTime. It is the Google Analytics and Mint.com of “what I spend my time on when on the computer”. RescueTime calls itself “ridiculously easy time management software”. Just as in Google Analytics you see nice dashboards and graphs of your website visitor statistics and just as in Mint you can easily understand where your money is going without doing much at all, RescueTime allows a user to download a plugin (Mac or PC), the plugin then aggregates data while you are using your computer and with no extra work involved at all, RescueTime shows you charts and graphs about where you are spending your time. If you often complain about not getting things done during the day because of X, Y and Z. Use RescueTime to find what they are.

As social media continues to sneak its way into the mainstream, several are trying to figure out the optimal way to engage their users, clients, members, students, opportunities, constituents… the list goes on. The best way to start understanding how social media may work for your situation is to start with simple social web research. The Social Web Research (www.socialwebresearch.com) service answers the question, in the form of a basic report, where are your users on the social web? Once you have this basic understanding, the steps at the bottom of this article are a nice start to starting a social media marketing campaign.

I found a handful of interesting links this morning from my Google Alerts I thought I would share, all having to do with social media and how it is playing a big part in today’s world.

The following article does a fine job explaining how social media played a large role in the latest presidential election, written by Brian Solis of kNow Media. - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/15/is-obama-ready-to-be-a-two-way-president/

The next article is an interview with David van Toor, the senior vice president and general manager of Sage CRM Relevant Products/Services Solutions North America. He gives several insights into how Sage is starting to integrate social media into customer relationship management. (Shameless plug: if you are looking for a CRM system for your business, check out SugarCRM) - http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=1010035OTKKH

Lastly, a longer and less compelling read but interesting nonetheless, an article about the fight going on between the traditionalists and social media believers in the corporate world. The writer, Venkatesh Rao, goes on to conclude that social media will win in the long run. - http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=621

As always, send me your questions or comments.

Interesting video interview with the Ruby on Rails founder.

source: O’Reilly

Also… testing to see if my Wordpress Twitter Updater Plugin is working.

Although I would rather the election to have gone the other way, in McCain’s favor, I feel Barrack has the potential to do a lot of good. So, in short, this is all I have to say. Congrats Obama.

A few of my friends are convinced that they need to learn a programming language, and I am very excited about that. Having web programming experience is unbelievably valuable, especially if you plan to do any business in the web-o-sphere. Before you can lock yourself in your room for a month and learn a programming language, I think it is very important to know how the web stack works. The stack I will describe is the most widely used among the web.

The process of developing and delivering a worth-while web application is quite involved and a complex task. To break things down a little, I like to categorize the stack into the following four groups: web server, server-side languages, relational database and client-side languages.

The web server portion is the weak point in my knowledge of this stack, in terms of installing, configuring and securing, but I know enough to know explain its purpose and give a few suggestions. The web server is a piece of software that is installed on a computer (the more commonly referred to server). This software enables the computer to host a web page and serve it to requesting users. For example, Google’s web server is what delivers the web page to your browser when you goto www.google.com. Domain Name Servers (referred to as DNS server) are also involved in the process of delivering a requested page to a user. A DNS server deals with routing the request from a user to your web server. For example, when a user enters www.google.com in the browser, the DNS server determines and redirects the request to the actual I.P. address of the Google web server. There are many web servers that have been proven in action. I have experience with and recommend the Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers. This list would be a good starting point if you want to see a more comprehensive list of web servers.

Server-side languages live on the web server and provide the functionality for developers to develop a portion of their web applications. When a web page is requested on the web server, the web server executes the server-side code and the script will return data to the requesting user. Examples of server-side scripting languages would be PHP, Ruby, ASP and Python. Many of these server-side languages have development frameworks that allow for improved organization and scalability. Examples of a few popular frameworks are CakePHP (PHP), Rails (Ruby) and Django (Python). The key point to get from server-side languages and how they work is that all of the processing is done server-side and once the server responds to a user request, the server-side code is finished with its work.

Databases are made up of structured tables, and tables are populated with records. There are several ways to design a database, in terms of models, but the most common in regards to web applications are relational databases. Relational databases loosely mean that records form one table can relate to records of another table. For example, if I have a table of banking accounts, I may also have a table filled with account holders; there would then be another table that relates records from each table through the individual records unique ids. The previous example describes a many-to-many relationship. There are also one-to-many relationships; where, in my previous example, an account holder can have many accounts, but an account can have only one account holder. On heavily trafficked websites, the database will live on its own server hardware separate from the web server, but it can also live on the same server. Examples of database servers are MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle or PostgresSQL. The most popular, being open-sourced and free, is MySQL. Through server-side programming languages, databases are able to be accessed. For example, when a user fills out a web form, the data in that form is received by the web server, read and inserted into the database by the server-side language. Using databases allow a developer to accomplish several things; including, creating user accounts for a website, storing any sort of form data, and anything else requiring data to be re-visited at any time in the future.

Lastly, client-side programming is what is making the latest web apps as useful and user-friendly as they are. To show where it fits into our cycle, when a user goes to a website the DNS server resolves the web server address, the web server determines what server-side script needs to be executed, the script is executed, databases are accessed as needed and data is returned to the browser. At this point, the client-side languages can act on the data returned to the browser. The majority of the time, XHTML is returned from the server. XHTML is the child of HTML and interpreted by the browser. XHTML is strictly a markup language that presents all of the data and information to the browser. CSS is the language that describes what the XHTML should actually look like. The last important client-side language is JavaScript, not to be confused with Java. JavaScript allows for modifying the XHTML markup, improving the user interface and even re-accessing the server for additional requests (referred to as AJAX, a buzzword…). Similar to server-side programming frameworks, JavaScript has libraries that speed up development time and abstract browser differences from your code. If you plan on doing any sort of JavaScript coding, please consider using jQuery, YUI, Scriptaculous or any other JavaScript library. It will make your life much easier. The important thing to know about server-side languages is that all server-side languages are only as good as the browser they are running in. Browsers that do not adhere to XHTML, CSS and JavaScript standards and cause headaches for developers. The ideal situation would be that a developer can write client-side code and no matter what browser it is displayed and used in, it will look and act the same. Microsoft, especially with Internet Explorer 6, has tried to do their own, non-standardized, things with the browser and failed. If you remember one thing from this post, remember this: follow web standards, follow web standards, follow web standards.

Having said all of the above, it is very important to know how all of these pieces work together to keep in mind the scope and possibilities of a project or idea. I have added several links for further reading into specific products or topics. After understanding these basic concepts and if you are still interested in creating a web application or site, be sure to start researching specific languages and servers mentioned above. Above all of this, I am open to any questions. If you are stuck somewhere, or do not understand what I wrote, please give me a holla. I want to help.

Back during my TeacherHubs.com splint, I somehow corresponded with Jeff O’Hara, one of the founders of Edmodo. Edmodo is a micro-blogging service for the education niche. If you are familiar with Kevin Rose’s and friends’ Pownce.com you can easily imagine what Edmodo is, simply by imagining Pownce catered to Teachers and Students.

With Edmodo, a teacher is able to post notes, links, files, alerts, assignments and events. Each of these can be publicly accessible or private. Teachers are also able to create groups in which has a special code that can be distributed to students. A student can take the code and sign up for an Edmodo account and safely stay within the teacher’s group. Within the group a teacher, as well as students, can post information. Similar to twitter or pownce, private messages may be sent among Edmodo users. Although, there doesn’t seem to be a connected/friends/following relationship between other users. Any teacher has the ability to send a message to any other teacher. This is bound to be abused by spammers. I am sure this issue will be addressed as Edmodo obtains more users.

Edmodo has a lot of potential, especially with the passion and ambition of the educators who utilize the web (a couple who come to mind: Vicki Davis aka Cool Cat Teacher & Kate Olsen). A nice thing to see from Edmodo would be mobile integration. I am sure those iPhone lovers at Abilene Christian University might have an interest in that.

All in all, a great job by the Edmodo team. Best of luck to them and if you haven’t already, sign up for a free account!

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

From the Digg article description: “Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”

This looks like a really awesome tool. I hope development continues. I am really interested to see how this could be applied to SugarCRM and other data entry-centric types of applications. It would be nice to create a case as simple as: “sugarcrm new case ‘account_name’ ’subject’”. Then it could bring up SugarCRM with the case edit form already filled out, waiting for the rest of the details to be filled in.

Ubiquity is more or less a command line for everyday web users. It really taps into the Mac OSX way (and Vista as of late) of easily finding files, apps and anything else on your computer. Looking forward to new ways for this idea to be applied.

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