One of my favorite things about WordPress is the ability to quickly change the look of the site while all of the content just pops into place.  Recently we updated 6 sites for John Wiley & Sons.  They wanted the color scheme changed from green to blue with a new logo added.  A few of the sites had hundreds of articles already produced, so in the old days, this would have been a long process.

But by changing a few things in the WordPress theme CSS, we updated all the sites in no time.  I can imagine the pain this would have generated going through traditional channels, but one of the most beautiful things about WordPress is the way it empowers the end user.  The marketing/editorial crew is often held hostage by layers of bureaucracy and hurdles from the design & tech crew.  With a fundamental understanting of CSS and the WordPress structure, anyone can now make changes to their site.  With websites, sometimes it’s just a splinter in your finger, and everyone is chomping at the bit to turn it into brain surgery.

These sites have been instrumental in differentiating their product from the competition, and it’s great to see them updated each week with fresh content, and there’s still drive to keep the look fresh and clean.

A new WordPress vulnerability came across my news feed this morning. It seems like there’s always something new floating around that sounds incredibly scary.  Here’s some info on the new hijinx, and an update here:

Hackers are compromising WordPress 3.2.1 blogs in order to infect their visitors with the notorious TDSS rootkit, according to researchers from Web security firm Websense.

It’s not clear how the websites are being compromised, but there are publicly known exploits for vulnerabilities that affect WordPress 3.2.1, which is an older version of the popular blog publishing platform.

Sounds scary but there are some simple things you can do with your  wordpress site so you can sleep easier at night.

• Run a daily backup of your database using a simple plugin like WP-DB-Backup
• Have a copy of your wp-content folder on your local computer
• Keep your WordPress install updated with the latest version
• Update your plugins and get rid of the ones you tried and don’t use
• The same with your themes.  Remove the themes that didn’t work out.

With these simple practices, if the worst happens, getting back up and running is a fairly uncomplicated scenario.  It’s the little things that can make all the difference when something is compromised.

There will always be things out of your control like a random attack on your site, but make sure to take care of the things you can control.

Two years ago we launched our first iPhone app.  At the time I wasn’t sure how big the mobile Apple world would become. Well, it turns out, huge. On Tuesday evening apple announced their quarterly results and the sales were staggering:

• 37.04 million iPhones sold
• 15.43 million iPad tablets sold, doubling from a year earlier
• 315 million iOS devices sold total

People everywhere are staring into these glowing screens around the clock. It’s a good idea to be on them. For some folks, an app is the way to go, for others, a website fits the bill, and sometimes the answer is all of the above. Whatever direction you’re headed, we can help you not only with the technical stuff, but also figure out the right direction.

A related note: last night I took a quick inventory of our app work and was shocked to see almost 20 apps have passed through our digital factory doors. Finally there’s a place to check them out on the site – help yourself.

In the latest newsletter from the University of Richmond, they include a quick profile of Josh Abramson, the co-starter of CollegeHumor.com. At the end of the interview he gives some advice to students:

“Students need to learn how to build websites — it’s probably the most coveted skill in New York City right now,” he said. “If you have the business and the technical savvy, you’ll be incredibly well positioned.”

This isn’t great advice for just students, but for anyone in the workplace.  If you can’t understand a conversation at a technical level, your value plummets.  Last year we started a program for non-technical professionals (marketers, editors, writers, etc) to get started with WordPress.  The program starts at the fundamentals from buying a domain and setting up hosting, to installing WordPress, customizing functionality, and even coding fundamentals.  Just having a core understanding of these technical topics increases your value exponentially.

Some benefits of knowing tech fundamentals:

• Can call BS on an issue when the tech team tries to jargon you to death
• Independence of being able to start a web project without waiting for layers of bureaucracy
• Gain respect from the tech team that realizes there’s a person that understands the work they do
• Represent the tech work appropriately
• Help the tech team make better decisions and vice versa

It’s a new year.  What’s your plan for upping your tech game?

UPDATE:  Just found this related video:

Apple announced their new iBooks platform (iBooks 2 – a free upgrade) and a new Mac application called iBooks Author (another free app in the App Store) that allows anyone to create media rich, beautiful books.  Details are still coming in on distribution, but I imagine that in addition to submitting them to the iBooks store, there will be a way to self publish materials, put them on a blog, and share or sell to the world without entering the iBooks store.  Just like you can produce a PDF today and pop it in iBooks, I’d guess you’ll be able to do the same with a file produced on this new application.  Could this be the start of a new standard?

Here’s a great first look from Engadget:

I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of new positions available for folks with HTML, Javascript, and media creation skills in the publishing world!

UPDATE: You can watch the complete Apple presentation by clicking here.

Long time client Larry Sicular wanted to get control over what people found when they Googled his name. The results were a hodgepodge of social networks, past jobs, and random mentions. He decided to build a site to serve as a launching pad into all things Sicular! Designed by Melissa at costd.com, we developed the site in WordPress and added some cool custom functionality to handle his portfolio of articles and manage his favorite snapshots.

You can check out the end result here: http://sicularassociates.com. It’s clean, professional, and most importantly, crawling up in the search results.

The folks at WordPress created a great post on this topic and anything I’d say would just be a derivative, so why not check out the source.

If you want to do something with your own site, there’s a great WordPress plugin called the “Stop SOPA Widget”. Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-sopa-widget/

Here’s what it does:

Many companies have voiced their protest and will be blacking out their sites or informing their users about these upcoming bills. We saw what other companies like Reddit and Craigslist were doing and wanted to offer other sites an easy way to participate. We came up with a javascript snippet you can add to your page that will show a popup like you see in the screenshot.

The SOPA popup will only be displayed on January 18th from 8am-8pm EST (1300-0100 UTC) by default, but if you’re javascript savvy feel free to change that. The popup will also only be displayed to a user once (by setting a cookie in their browser). You can also manually trigger the message before then by adding the hash #stopsopa to the end of any URL that has the JavaScript installed. If you don’t want our hosted version, feel free to grab the source from github (https://github.com/torbit/Stop-SOPA-Widget), otherwise grab the plugin and add it to your site.

Help us protect the internet! Contact your representatives, spread the word, and join us in protesting censorship!

There’s a rumor floating around that Apple is going to release a new application that lets anyone create visually rich eBooks with audio and video capabilities.  The idea is just as Apple made creating movies (iMovie), music (GarageBand), and Photo Books (iPhoto) easy, fun and beautiful, they will do the same thing here for books.  And just in time!

Last night on the train back to Thicksole Global Headquarters, I was reading the Steve Jobs book on the iPad.  Throughout the book there are a number of photos that launch chapters.  They’re small and you naturally want to zoom in on them.  You can.  But they get pixelated and fuzzy.  Zero thought went in to creating this product in a digital format.  It was just shoehorning content into a package and sending it out the door.  Garbage.

There are authors like Neil Strauss that have held off putting any books into eBook format due to this terrible formatting issue.

So, if the rumors are true, we’re going to see some fantastic books from both publishers, and hopefully from individuals if this package is made accessible to the masses as Apple has done in the past.  Just reading the Jobs book last night, I thought of the ways rich media could be embedded into the book:

• Video clips of the actual product announcements the author describes.  Let’s see it!
• Audio of Steve and other folks that were interviewed for the book especially in the extended quoted sections.  Let’s hear it!
• Rich photos and galleries of the products and packaging described in the text.

It’s endless.

If this happens and richly produced books begin to hit the iBooks store, it could definitely get me to move away from the Amazon Kindle format.

UPDATE:  Apple to Announce Tools, Platform To ‘Digitally Destroy’ Textbook Publishing

“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Since starting Thicksole, I’ve been lucky to work with a list of non-conformists.  Some easily identified and other disguised in business suits being subversive in corporate high rises.  They all wanted to do something that they’ve been told can’t be done, is too expensive, or would never work.

Regarding why I’m working on a holiday, I’m lucky enough to have a job that doesn’t feel like work.  Since starting this business, I’ve never looked forward to a three day weekend or a two-week vacation.  Imagine working 50 weeks a year at something you can’t wait to get away from a couple of weeks?  Hopefully those folks are using today to start something they care about.

Sometimes it bugs me.  Maybe because I’m an old WordPress user and haven’t added the bar to my workflow.  Other times it throws off the look of my site.  Of course you can go into the code and remove it, but I happened to stumble across a handy plugin that makes the removal a snap.  The name?  Oh, it’s “Disable Admin Bar” and you can download it here.

It’s fairly simple with just a couple of options in the admin.  Download and activate the plugin, then you’ll see a new line under “Settings” called “Admin Bar Options.”  Click that, you’ll see a page with two options.  I check them both but use your best judgment.  Now you can enjoy complete freedom from that sometimes oppressive admin bar.