I didn’t intend to leave the Statesman any time soon, but a local company began to pursue me about a month ago.  After a lot of back and forth via e-mail and a couple of interviews, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  In addition to that, this company is an excellent fit for me as far as the development team, the tools and languages they use (LAMP stack with Zend Framework), the projects in the works, and the corporate culture.  They’re also extremely profitable with very impressive year over year revenue growth.  It may seem like a strange choice to anyone not familiar with the company, but I am very excited to say that I will start work on September 22nd as a software engineer at Bodybuilding.com.

Their consistent focus on customers and investment in employees really won me over.  A prime example of the character of their employees and the unwavering commitment they have to their customers can be seen in their response to Tropical Storm Fay last week.  This is not a one-time incident, but an integral part of the culture and values of the company.  In addition to a strong customer focus, they invest heavily in their employees with excellent pay, benefits, and perks that encourage and reward a healthy lifestyle and professional growth.

I’m sure I’ll have much more to share about my experiences at Bodybuilding.com in the coming months.  In the meantime, I have a lot of projects to wrap up at the Statesman.  And I need to hit the weights pretty hard in the next three weeks to prepare myself for the new employee orientation.  I hear it involves lots of shaving, fake tanner, body oil, and a Speedo.  Nah, I’m just kidding of course.  At least I think I’m kidding…

Shiny, happy features

These are just the highlights of the past six months.  Obviously we did a lot more than four things, but a lot of it was behind the scenes.  For example, I set up a new Web server and moved ten of our external sites over to it.  You didn’t notice?  Perfect.  Anyway, the high points were:

• More blogs (up to about 15 now)
• New site search (powered by Planet Discover)
• New events calendar (powered by Zvents)
• Assorted Yahoo! stuff (part of a new partnership)

On the horizon

The next three months or so will be extremely busy with at least four sizable projects in the works as well as a dozen or so little ones.  There’s never a dull moment at the Statesman.  Sorry, I can’t say anything more about the upcoming stuff until it launches.  You’ll just have to stay tuned.

Challenging times

It’s no secret that many newspaper companies are struggling to adjust to changes affecting the industry.  Some of these changes are cyclical while others are sadly systemic.  I often joke that we share a morbid problem with tobacco companies: our customers are dying.  The obvious difference is that newspapers don’t kill people, but we still have to find new readers somehow.  A lot of very savvy people are working on these problems day and night, but the outlook still isn’t too good in the near term.

The Statesman (like many McClatchy papers) has undertaken some cost cutting measure in the past several months.  The paper is narrower now and has fewer pages to save on newsprint.  During the current hiring freeze, several people have left the newsroom and not been replaced.  Recently we’ve seen a couple involuntary layoffs.  While I’m confident that we will emerge from this in a strong position, I’m not sure what the company will look like or how many people will be left.  At least for now, I feel like my job is safe.  However, in these turbulent times I’ll close with a classic Magic 8 Ball response: “Ask again later.”

So what do I mean by “slash and learn”?  Let me illustrate by example.  My official job title is Web developer.  A far more accurate job title would be the following:

Web developer / database administrator / search engine optimizer / social media marketer / Linux administrator / database designer / information architect / project manager / vendor whisperer / wannabe Web designer /  JavaScript ninja-in-training / young grasshopper in a dozen other areas

See all those slashes?  Some people would recoil in horror at a list that long, but I actually enjoy the mix of responsibilities.  I love to pick up a book or tinker with a new technology to add another slash to my unofficial job title.  Slash and learn, baby!  I suppose it’s no accident that I’ve gravitated toward smaller shops where I can take on a lot of different challenges.  Constant learning is a plus in my book and so I love what I do.

There is a downside of course.  Most notably I don’t consider myself a true expert at anything that I do.  Some of this is probably due to relentless self-deprecation and being my own worst critic (aren’t we all?), but I really think there’s some truth to it.  The good thing is that whenever I reach the limits of my current knowledge of some topic, I usually know somebody who can take the baton (or at least point me in the right direction).

If I worked at a large company, I would probably end up specializing more than I like.  However, I appreciate the people who do work at those large companies because they’re usually the specialists I turn to when I get stuck.  All my friends at McClatchy Interactive certainly come to mind.

So what’s your official job title and what would be the unabridged version?

I will not Tweet them here or there

First off, I should probably come clean and admit that I was an ardent detractor of Twitter for a long time.  Sure I read about it and poked around a bit, but my initial exposure left a sour taste in my mouth.  It seemed absolutely pointless, a complete waste of time, and I simply didn’t get it.

Try it and you may, I say

So I ignored it for months until it started coming up in online discussions of new media and how newspapers could go out and meet their potential audiences on sites like Twitter and Facebook and somehow drag them back to their newspaper websites (probably kicking and screaming).  Cha-ching!  Massive traffic guaranteed.  Well the jury is still out on that count, but the discussions did prompt me to give Twitter a fair shake.  And I must admit that I like it AND I think I get it now too.

And I will Tweet them anywhere

My impression of Twitter so far is that it’s like a virtual happy hour.  People talk about work and official stuff to some extent, but they also discuss their families, sports, the weather, and all sorts of other topics.   It’s an interesting window into someone’s life.  And as Katie pointed out, it blows chain of command away.  And that’s a great thing.  (Howard is my “Twitter buddy” too.)

Thank you, thank you Sam-I-am

My thanks to Tac for leaving “Do you Twitter?” as his Gtalk status message for weeks on end and getting me to thinking about it.  And thanks to Ryan for blogging about the relevance of Twitter to newspapers and making all of this loosely “work related” (kind of).

These days I’m following 26 people and most of them are following me back.  Many are McClatchy folks in various locations, some are Boise technophiles, and others are friends I’ve met along the way.  I also got the Idaho Statesman on Twitter a few weeks ago.

So if you’re not a “Twitter gitter”, give it another look.  Feel free to follow me while you’re at it.  Happy Twittering!

You can definitely count on some more mapping projects in the future.  We’re just scratching the surface at this point.

The writing on the wall

I’ve been programming in PHP for more than five years and I’ve coded some rather large projects completely by hand and from scratch.  I sort of take pride in that I suppose, but I also realize it’s not a very sustainable way of working… especially in a fast-paced environment like a newspaper.  Sure, I’ve built up a library of reusable functions and classes, I have my own standard file structure and naming conventions… the whole nine yards.  But my own methods have a couple of significant drawbacks.  The first problem is that things start to get unwieldy when a project grows to about 30 or 40 different views.  This may not be a problem on most projects, but scope creep is always lurking and software has a tendency to expand over time.  The second problem is that my methods are rather ad hoc and difficult for other people to fully grasp without a lot of time spent getting up to speed.  This is probably very similar to how I feel when I inherit somebody else’s wacky code base.

A better way

So I started looking around for something that would be more scalable and that would adhere to some widely accepted architecture… probably MVC.  At the same time, I didn’t want a solution that was all-or-nothing.  On small projects I wanted the freedom to cherry pick what I needed from a framework and jettison the rest.  Obviously that disqualified most of the usual suspects like Ruby on Rails, Django, CakePHP, Symfony, etc.  I decided to give the Zend Framework a spin and see what I thought.

Cannonball!

Last week I started testing the waters and using a few classes like Zend_Config, Zend_Db, Zend_Mail, and Zend_Validate.  My original intention was to dip my toes in the water, but I ended up just going ahead and jumping in with the full MVC framework and the whole shebang.  It’s a relatively small project (for now) that is completely scoped out and technically very feasible.  The deadline is Thursday (yeah, this week).  Despite my 5+ years with PHP, I’ve never done anything with an MVC architecture so I’m reading pages and pages of documentation online and figuring it out as I go.  Fortunately the docs are good and the ideas are fairly intuitive once I get my head around them.

It’s strange to feel like a newbie again, but that’s what Web programming is all about: constant learning and adaptation.  Stop learning and the Web world will pass you by in a hurry.  Anyway I should have quite a bit more to report later this week.  Wish me luck.  If nothing else, it will be educational…

Being plugged into the new media blogosphere like I am, I’ve already heard of other applicants being asked for proposals more than a month ago. My modest proposal is “not at that stage, yet.” I’m not quite sure what this means, but I’m guessing that I’ve been placed in some sort of pool of alternates just in case there’s any money left over after funding the top projects. Naturally this is quite all right with me as I felt all along that my application was a long shot at best. Although I’ve worked in Web development for more than five years, I’ve only worked in journalism for about seven months… and I’m not even a journalist! We’ll see what happens.

It occurs to me that somebody out there may actually be curious about my proposal. I applied for the minimum - a $15,000 blogging award - to blog about “creating a virtual community united by a passion for Malawi.” Here is an excerpt from my proposal:

Third world countries around the globe are slowly entering the digital age. One of these countries is Malawi - a place where I lived for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer. Internet access is becoming gradually more commonplace and several Malawians are now blogging from within the country as well as from elsewhere in the world. In addition many travelers and expatriates (including current Peace Corps Volunteers) are blogging about their experiences in Malawi. Thousands of other people around the world - Malawian and otherwise - seek out current information on the country each day.

As it currently stands, no central online meeting place exists for the many people blogging about Malawi and those simply seeking out information. I plan to use open source software (primarily Drupal) to create a central meeting place anchored by forums, but also including blogs, photo galleries, videos, links, news summaries, and maps. With the exception of the forums which will be hosted on the site, the other information will be imported and aggregated via RSS using a collection of external sites. This “mashed up” data will be gathered from individual blog feeds, Flickr and Picasa tags for photos, YouTube and Metacafe for videos, del.icio.us for general links, Google News for news summaries, and Google MyMaps for personalized maps. All of these services are relatively mature with stable API’s. The aggregation of relevant data from so many external sources will add significant value to the site with very little impact on the bandwidth and disk space needed to serve the site to visitors. The main source of disk space will be the Drupal database holding all of the forum data.

It is my sincere hope that this approach will succeed in building a thriving online community of people passionate about Malawi and that it will be easy to replicate and apply to other third world countries in the future.

There’s quite a lot more in my proposal, but that should provide the gist of what I’m looking to do. It’s a project I would love to take on, but I really need the funding in order to invest the amount of time it would take to have a chance at succeeding.  I’m not sure when I’ll get another update from the Knight Foundation or what the news will be, but I will be sure to let everyone know.  Thanks for reading.

Yes, domaining is going mainstream in a big way these days and I’m looking to capture a small piece of the action.  Last night I bought ten domains through GoDaddy purely as an investment.  I already owned about half a dozen assorted domains including the one you’re reading and a few that I plan to develop, but this is the first time I bought for the sole purpose of domaining.  This particular batch of domains has a common theme and it’s something that happens in April.  That should be a big enough hint for everyone.

So my strategy right now is to hold them until about February and then get a sense of what they’re worth.  I may choose to auction some or all of them at that time or just hold them for another year.  Between now and then, I’m researching the various domain parking services looking for the best fit.  Yeah, I’m perfectly capable of building ad-supported sites on these domains myself, but my time is valuable these days so I’m going to leave that aspect of things to the pros.

One thing I love about domaining is that individual domains with good potential can be bought for a few bucks from a registrar.  I also appreciate that brainstorming, trend spotting, and just plain language skills are critical to making good purchases.  It’s hard work and takes some time and imagination, but it’s also fun.

It kind of strikes me as the 21st century equivalent of panning for gold.  The equipment and techniques are a lot more sophisticated, but the process is very similar.  We’ll see if I actually find anything valuable.

I want to thank the Academy

I’d like to share a list of accomplishments for the first six months. Please bear in mind that most items on this list were a group effort not just within our online team, but also involving the staff at McClatchy Interactive, our resilient vendors, and often my counterparts at other McClatchy papers like Anchorage and Fresno. Don’t worry. I’ll spare you the “shoulders of giants” speech. Here is the list:

• E-mail newsletters (via ExactTarget)
• Mobile version of our site (via Verve Wireless)
• Brand new Boise State Football section front (mostly Bob here in Boise)
• Story commenting (based on Drupal module from Anchorage)
• Blogs and forums (Drupal)

There were many other smaller projects that I worked on, but these are definitely the highlights. Story commenting has probably been the most interesting for all of us. We launched the feature about six weeks ago and we have roughly 6,500 comments on 1,000 stories by 1,400 different people! This is far more than anybody expected and the pace is still increasing each week. It is not without its challenges, though. I have created a rudimentary profanity filter using regular expressions, we are employing Drupal’s spam module, and a healthy dose of human moderation is also in the mix to catch the innuendos that computers can’t identify. For the most part people have behaved, but the conversation does get heated quite often and many of our reporters have had to become a little more thick-skinned. Overall, though, it’s been a huge success.

And now the music is playing

I should wrap this up. I will probably make these updates more frequent - every three months seems reasonable. We have quite a lot on the horizon including a new search plugin, user submitted photos and video, and several custom mini-sites that I’m not at liberty to discuss until they launch. I would hate to tip off the competition. So look for another round-up of Web news in January if not before.

For me personally, I have noticed a similar trend in my ever-evolving career.  Reading about the concept mentioned above just brought my vague thoughts into much clearer focus.  The simple fact is that I have a double bottom line and have had one for quite some time.  This helps to explain why working at traditional for-profit companies has never really appealed to me in the way it does for most people.  Sure I’ve worked for a couple of them, but something was missing from the equation.

In the physics of my career development, the double bottom line has played the role of gravity.  It’s a constant force exerting influence over my professional decisions.  From time to time I’ve strayed, but it has always pulled me back.  This past spring was an excellent example of this.  When we were looking to move away from the Seattle area, I considered a lot of different jobs.  I applied for most of them even if they didn’t seem like they would be a good fit.  Many of them were corporate jobs for Fortune 500 companies or regular consulting gigs for large corporations.  Quite a few of the opportunities sounded really great on the surface and would have certainly been financially rewarding, but that was about it.

It’s hard to know if it was serendipity, fate, or just my own personal career “gravity” taking over, but I knew immediately that the job of Web developer at the Statesman newspaper was where I was supposed to be.   It’s not a glamorous position by any means.  The online team generally toils in obscurity until somebody needs something (or something breaks).  And I could definitely make more money elsewhere with the skills I have.  However, there is an element of public service to the job that makes it more than worthwhile.  Bringing local news and information to people around the clock and providing opportunities for them to interact with each other as well as with our news staff is more than a job, it’s a calling.

Okay, I’ll stop there before this gets sappy.  Suffice it to say that I enjoy my current job on many levels despite the challenges of being in what many consider to be a dying industry.  The opportunity for innovation is virtually unlimited and the work that we are doing is definitely important.

So will I work here for thirty years and retire with a gold watch and a pension?  I honestly can’t say for sure, but I really doubt it.  This job is great experience and a unique challenge, but I believe that it is preparing me for something bigger.  What that will be and when it will happen, I have no idea.  I just hope that I’m ready and willing when the time comes.  I’m sure I will be.  It’s not like gravity is suddenly going to stop working…

I’m also noticing some subtle shifts in my reading habits.  I used to read mostly blogs about Web development, open source, SEO, and blogging.  I still read a lot of those, but I’ve dumped several of them to make way for new interests like business, domaining, and new media.  The new media category is sort of a catch-all for blogs about newspapers trying to survive in the digital age.  Seeing as how I now work for a newspaper, I’ve taken a particular interest in the topic lately.  I’m actually planning to make it a focus on this blog along with Web development, open source, and Africa.  I have an idea for tying all those together that I’m starting to explore, but the details of that particular venture will have to wait for another day.

So have your blog reading habits shifted at all recently?

Quite naturally I began to wonder what in the world I was doing. Why hadn’t I just gotten a job… a real job like a normal college graduate? Sure everybody talks about joining the Peace Corps. We all saw the same TV commercials growing up and thought that looked like a really “cool thing to do”. But who actually goes and does it? As I stepped outside the morning of the 20th, I knew that the answer was… me. I actually went and did it.

At that moment I really had no idea what was in store for me during the next two years. In retrospect it was a wonderful experience that I would never trade for anything. Of course the highs were high, the lows were very low, and there were many times along the way that I thought I had made a big mistake. But I was always able to pull myself together, laugh about my troubles, and continue the journey.

My ability to make it through those two years was due in no small part to the support of those around me: my fellow Peace Corps volunteers, the Peace Corps staff, the teachers and students at my school, and all the Malawians I met along the way. To this day I feel a special connection to Malawi and a strong bond with everyone from my original group. Most of them I’ve kept in touch with, many I’ve seen recently, and the rest I think about regularly. I’m sure this ten-year anniversary of the beginning of our adventure brings back memories for all of us.

So to Alaina, Alex, Angie, Becky, Betty, Christine, Craig, Eleanor, Elise, Fred, George, Ivy, Jen, Jodie, Joe, Judy, Julianne, Julie B, Julie S, Katrina, Kim, Melanie, and Tonya, I thank you for sharing the Peace Corps experience with me and wish you the very best in all you choose to do. Zikomo kwambiri and yewo, yewo, yewo chomene.

Maybe in another ten years, I’ll go all Sergeant Pepper on you: “It was twenty years ago today…” In the meantime, take care and muyende bwino anzanga.

Lately I’ve been evaluating everything that I’m doing outside of my day job with an eye toward separating the wheat from the chaff. There are only so many hours in the day and I like to spend quite a few of those with my family, so time for outside interests and/or pursuits is at a premium. In my previous post I mentioned my reading habits and I’m happy to report that I’ve unsubscribed from several feeds and now click the “Mark all as read” button with increasing impunity.

Bolstered by this “radical” exertion of control over my time, I’m ready to simplify my life a little more. In addition to freeing up some more family time, I would like to devote more time to blogging on a regular basis. Since blogging in a near vacuum is not terribly rewarding, I need to take some steps to build traffic and attract more regular readers. I plan to use the time-honored problem solving technique known as trial and error in a couple of different ways.

1. What do people want to read? I plan to narrow the focus of this blog to just two or three related areas. In making this decision, I will be writing about a lot of different topics in the next several weeks to determine which topics are viable. That’s not to say that I’m going to become like a politician and just write what people want to read, but I do want to know where the audience is within the topics that I already write about.
2. How do I find new readers? There are quite a few services and techniques that I can try out in my efforts to grow my readership. One of them already has a widget on this page. Do you see it over there in the right column? Yes, BlogRush is a new service that promises to bring targeted traffic to blogs in proportion to the number of page views their widget gets on each blog. There’s some referral mumbo-jumbo thrown in for good measure, but it sounds like it’s worth a shot. And if it doesn’t work out, then bye-bye widget. Another site I’ve heard great things about lately is StumbleUpon. Many bloggers are reporting large increases in traffic to their blogs after becoming active users of the site, so I’ve decided to give it a shot. Again, if it doesn’t pan out, I’ll stop.

So this should be an interesting few weeks as I give these ideas a spin. Stay tuned for a wider variety of posts as I try different topics and if you’ve landed here from BlogRush or StumbleUpon, welcome! I hope you’ll consider sticking around.

I subscribe to nearly 300 feeds in Google Reader and this is after pruning quite a few from my list.  I actually feel guilty when I click “Mark all as read” on a feed that I can’t keep up with.  Last week was kind of crazy at my newspaper (and that’s a completely different story), but one result of all the chaos and deadlines was that I fell way behind on monitoring all of our RSS feeds.  This is a non-critical task, but one that I usually stay on top of and that does uncover small areas for improvement from time to time.  And going through all our stories on a daily basis helps me to feel more connected to our reporters and what they are writing about.  Usually I take a few minutes between tasks several times a day to read a few stories.  Last week got away from me, however, so by the time I got around to this I had more than 400 unread stories.  With a twinge of guilt, I clicked the heretofore forbidden link: “Mark all as read”.  I immediately starting wondering what I was missing out on by doing that.  Sheesh.

Then tonight I noticed that Google Reader has released a small update that enables it to count all the way to 1000 instead of just 100 (among other things).  Feeds with lots of unread items used to just be labeled as “100+”, but now more than likely (unless one is really far behind) the actual number of unread items will be shown.   I long ago organized all my feeds into about 25 very specific folders one of which is “blogging”.  I had deluded myself into thinking that I could catch up and at least skim all the unread items in this most neglected of folders.  After all, it just said 100+.  How bad could it be?  Well now I know that there are exactly 524 unread items in that folder!

Plowing through all that information would be borderline quixotic, but I still feel an odd compulsion to try.  I’m not sure if this is due to my competitive nature (me vs. Google Reader) or a desire not to miss out on any important stuff.  I’m leaning toward the latter.  I don’t have a definite plan for resolving this situation, but I’m going to start by going through all the feeds one-by-one and deciding which ones are really worthwhile.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

In doing that, I can’t help but wonder if I would unsubscribe from this blog if I wasn’t me.  In other words, is my own blog worthy of subscribers?  At this point, I’m not sure but 27 people seem to think that it is worthy (according to FeedBurner).  For their sake and mine, I am resolved to bring this ramshackle blog back up to snuff… just as soon as I finish reading these 524 posts…