Boyink! Blog

ExpressionEngine Certification Program

2010-03-08T20:04:10+00:00

I’m pleased to announce that – along with the help of EllisLab – I’ve begun the groundwork of putting together a certification program for ExpressionEngine. The work is still in the early stages – but as it will be the focus of my involvement in some other upcoming EE events I needed to get it announced.

Who
Currently I’m responsible for doing most of the legwork – with EllisLab helping out when and where it makes sense. Throughout the development of this program I’ll be looking for other members of the EE community to have involvement so that the program reflects a fair and accurate view of the EE ecosystem.

What
What the program will be, how it will be created, how it will be delivered – these are all questions I’m in the process of researching answers to.

Where
The goal is that the program will be available to all ExpressionEngine developers without restriction - regardless of location.

When
No set date yet. The parties involved in this project so far are similar in one respect - we’ve never done anything like it before. So for now just know we are working on it.

Why
The availability of a certification program is one sign of a healthy marketplace around a given technology. My goal is that it benefits everyone involved with EE:

For developers - a way to qualify themselves for EE-related jobs and projects, a way to mark progress towards defined training goals.
For end clients - another way to review potential developers and gain higher-quality results.
For EllisLab/ExpressionEngine.com - a more reliable/defined referral channel.

How
My research starts here in West Michigan where I’ve scheduled some brainstorming time this week with some local peers. Represented in the group are heavy EE users, more casual/infrequent users, and developers who’ve never used EE. The group has also expressed a wide range of opinions on the subject of certification programs from negative to positive.

From there I go to SXSW with an agenda of speaking to as many people from the EE community about the topic as possible. If you’ll be in Austin make sure to hit me up via email or Twitter – and I’ll make every effort I can to meet with you to talk about this.

After SXSW will the the EE Meetup in Chicago where I’ll propose the skeleton of a program based on input received so far, and open it up for discussion and review.

After the Chicago meetup I’ll be looking to schedule some Skype chats with the some non US-based EE folks for additional perspective.

Questions?
We’re not ready to discuss this publicly, but when we are there will be announcements both here and over at the EE Blog. So for now, comments are off. But if you have questions, concerns, or want to schedule a chat about the project please feel free to contact me directly.

Thanks!

Startup Weekend West Michigan Wrapup

2010-03-01T23:46:05+00:00

Looking at the clock as I write this it’s been right around 24 hours since we finished emptying trash, packing up, turning off the lights and locking the door on Startup Weekend West Michigan.

I needed that time to catch up on sleep, re-connect with my family, and just sort of let the experience sink in before I could begin to gather my thoughts for this post.

Even now I can’t quite figure out how to summarize, analyze or synthesize anything out of the weekend because all I keep doing is shaking my head and wondering - “Did that all really happen? And in roughly 48 hours?” Amazing!

Why Do This?
I read about Startup Weekend somewhere on the web and just immediately thought it sounded like something West Michigan should do. The economy here sucks and we all know it because it seems like it’s all the media wants to talk about. And if it’s not the economy then it’s the less than respectable actions by people downtrodden and run over by the economy. And look - I know it’s true. I know right now for many people living in Michigan just sucks. Jobless. In debt. Under water. Lacking skills relevant in a non-manufacturing based economy.

But while that’s true it’s not the whole truth. In the tech community I’m part of I keep hearing little stories like “we’re hiring”, “we’ve added 3 people last year”, “we had a great year”. For me 2009 topped 2008 as our biggest year ever in 8 years of being in business. But it seems like we don’t hear those stories unless we’re speaking directly to the business owners behind them. Adding 3 people just isn’t, evidently, newsworthy.

I was convinced that we had, in West Michigan, the ingredients that an event like this would need. Thanks to our office furniture industry we’ve got some great spaces with great furniture. We’ve got skilled people in all walks of life. And - maybe most important - we’re all just a bit hungry. If not in the literal sense, hungry for change. Hungry for to see the positive things already happening get some notice. Hungry to see our home state do better, and make news for something other than the nations worst unemployment.

So I contacted Marc Nager from Startup Weekend asking how to get the process of getting Startup Weekend to come to West Michigan. His answer—“You just did.”

The Planning
Emails started flowing, and somewhere along the way I mentioned the idea to Aaron Schaap of ElevatorUp. This might have been a bit of a ploy on my part as Aaron is well-known as being a startup junkie - and thankfully he was immediately behind the idea and offered The Factory as a venue. The Factory is well-outfitted for an event like this with a variety of furniture, whiteboards, electricity and and just overall a great creative vibe. It’s also nicely located in downtown Grand Rapids with plenty of bars, restaurants and parking close by.

Another benefit Aaron brought to the project was people - both Dayna Beal and Sara Hogan from his staff joined the project to help organize and promote. Amanda Chocko from Lakeshore Advantage also joined the planning crew.

Overall the needs we had were simple: people and money. We initially estimated the event would require roughly $7K - to cover our food and beverage cost and also the overhead cost of Startup Weekend. I’ll spare you the details of all of that work save for two - just in case you are reading this with the idea that you want to do one of these events in your area. We did two things right: we scheduled a weekly planning meeting and we scheduled a volunteer “town hall” meeting.

I know right now - especially fueled by the recent release of the new 37 Signals book there is a popular notion that “all meetings are evil”.

This just isn’t true.

Startup Weekend would not have happened without the regular meeting. But I did notice that the meeting worked much better when the purpose was action rather than creating a to-do list. Wonder if a particular person would like to speak? Don’t create a to-do to follow up on later. Pick up the phone and call. Now.

The Volunteer Town Hall was also crucial to the success of the event as it brought out some volunteers that just plain got some stuff done that we were having trouble finding time for - talking to restaurants about food, coordinating t-shirts, getting some press for the event etc. This group is also where we found lodging for Marc to save him the costs and indignity of a hotel room. Great bunch of folks - and it was very humbling and not just a bit amazing to have people jump behind an idea and help carry it out. Thanks to John Rumery, Stephanie Stenberg, Jonathan Ward and others for coming out and jumping right in.

Along the way we realized we had overestimated our financial needs and revised them down to around $5K which greatly eased the fund-raising stress.

The Event - Friday
I will admit - the last few days before the event I found myself wishing I had kept my mouth shut. I have two businesses going - between client work and some other opportunities cooking I was starting to wonder if I had chosen a poor use of my time and found a good way to kill a weekend.

Yea, I was wrong. Totally, completely, wrong.

Friday afternoon I made it over to the Factory, met Marc in person finally, and help with the preparations. We knew we had roughly 40 people coming and it was great to meet and talk to them as the filtered in. Lots of good networking was already starting to happen:

Food was running late - so we conferred and decided to start the pitches. Marc asked how many people had ideas to pitch and roughly 14 hands went up. We numbered them off and gave them each 2 minutes. This is where the excitement for me began to build. There were some really good ideas here. And not just good in the “West Michigan Nice” way - good in the “get that done and you can make money with it” way.

Marc kept track of the pitch people & ideas:

Somewhere during this time the food came - but during the initial pitches another 4 people had decided to pitch something to the crowd. Burritos were consumed and the pitching continued. Once done some additional networking time was allowed then came time to vote.

How? With dollars. And no - not Monopoly money but real American greenbacks. Pitchers were given envelopes, and everyone got 2 dollars to use as “votes”.

Once everyone had voted the accounting firm of Schaap and Nager tallied the results.

And winners of the vote were announced. They were:

24/7 Healthnet.com
An online service that efficiently brings doctors and patients together by booking open appointments with local physicians.
MichiganFilmReel.com
We’re just a couple of film and video geeks who get excited about making movies here in Michigan. We love this business and want to help you get involved and stay up to date on the latest news and industry chat.
Jaiplace.com
JaiPlace’s mission is to offer the highest quality information, products, services, media, education and experiences that lead individuals and groups towards their highest potential.
PennyPlanner.com
An amazing tool that helps people manage their expenses on a day to day basis. It is built as a platform that will allow various type of users to utilize in custom and convenient ways to help plan, project, and keep track of expenses. Will be launching April1st.
LocalGR.com
The ultimate downtown Grand Rapids Guide. Eat, Drink, Shop Grand Rapids.
EchoTask.com
Automate your life. Getting things done has never been easier.” A great application for managing tasks and coordinating them in any number of various ways with others.
LegallyBlog.net
Customize your content. Connect with your clients.” Providing custom blog content for lawfirms that can’t afford not to use this service.
hu2m
In 1962, President Kennedy challenged us to go to the moon. In 2010, we are using the Internet and social networking to crowd source going to Mars! One charismatic leader (old model) to NOW all of us together … (new model). Let’s go to Mars!!

Now the eight teams found a spot in the room and whiteboard. On the whiteboard they listed what they needed to move forward:

At this point in the night it was around 9:00 - and an amazing thing happened. The thought was that people would like to move from the space and walk to a local bar for another hour or so of networking lubricated by alcohol.

Friends - hardly anyone left.

I looked around and people were just too engaged, too animated, and too involved with already getting the work of the weekend underway to move.

Well, that, and we had beer with no walk through a wet heavy snow required.

But I was still inspired.

With a Startup Weekend there is no formal process for figuring out the team structures. People just figure it out. Some teams end up with more people, some less. Some people choose to float from team to team offering more specific and timely advice, others plunge in and do anything it takes to get one specific idea launched. It’s a bit of crazy randomness that somehow works.

Friday night ended around 11:00.

The Event - Saturday

Saturday found us back at the building at 8:30 AM, and the work began in earnest. It’s hard to describe the vibe that was going on—the room was positively buzzing with energy. I slept maybe 4 hours Friday night and fully expected to crash somewhere Saturday afternoon. It never happened. The naming of new businesses, the choosing of domain names, the flowcharting of business processes and refining of ideas - this is energizing work and Saturday was filled with it.

Saturday at lunch we had the first of 3 excellent speakers - Bill Oechsler of Xler Consulting who organized his thoughts around several “F-words” (all good!). My favorite part was in the living “fast& furious” where Bill said how fun the creative process is like the delivery room - a place where things are born but it’s loud, messy, and stressful. If you want things quiet, neat and orderly then that can be found in the graveyard.

Saturday afternoon it was back in the trenches building businesses:

At suppertime we again took a pause to hear from Rob Stam of The Big Red Group. Rob spoke of his history in the business world, hitting rock bottom of bankruptcy and court dates, and how it’s changed his outlook in life, personal finance, and his role in the workplace now.

Work continued on Saturday night - I stayed until around 10:30 when I finally had to kick out one of the teams so I could get home.

The Event - Sunday

We fired back up at 8:30 AM Sunday morning - with the teams trickling back in at a noticeably slower pace. However by 10 AM or so it seemed like like everyone was back engaged in their project. We made a concerted effort to get some media coverage for the event - putting the word out on Twitter, making phone calls, and when all else failed, talking to certain friends. We received word that the local Fox news affiliate was sending someone over - and that definitely increased the fervor in the room. I could tell teams were in the home stretch - wanting to have certain milestones in place for the presentations at 3 PM.

At this point in the weekend I was just so impressed with the people who showed up—truly creative professionals with a desire to make a difference. I switched lenses and tried catching some of the faces present:

At lunch time we had Daniel Estrada of D.C. Estrada speak.

Daniel’s topic proved controversial - as it was around why business plans are unnecessary for so many startup businesses. The controversy led to an active post-talk Q&A session. After Daniel answered several questions the teams buckled down - by now 3:00 was just a couple hours a way.

Oh yea - at this point the Fox news guy showed up. The level of excitement definitely went up a notch. Ignoring my suggestions that the teams were the real story, he first interviewed yours truly and then took some b-roll around the room:

A few others from the community were also starting to show up - interested in seeing what the results of this madness were.

But wait - an unplanned presentation! Dayna Beal (who is involved in getting Downstream advanced in it’s progress as a startup) took the opportunity to map out the overall process of starting up a business and the likely financing opportunities at different points in that process:

With that done - it was time.

Final Presentations

Teams were given an order - and the early ones wrapped things up while later ones kept one eye on the presenting teams while continuing to work.

The idea was that each team would get 5 minutes to present the problem they were trying to solve, their intended solution, and the progress made on that over this weekend.

We didn’t stick to the rules well, but no matter—as each team went through their presentation, answered questions, and reported progress it was apparent to everyone that it’s pretty amazing what you can get done over the course of 48 hours. Business plans were refined, websites were ideated, wireframed and even created with new content. Videos were shot and edited. Applications with email, text messaging, and even text to speech integration were developed. Marketing strategies were defined. Legal ramifications were analyzed and discussed. All with an energy and passion that I haven’t ever witnessed at any sort of professional event. Ever.

Oh - and our timing here? Presentations started at the same time as the “for the gold medal” hockey game between the USA and Canada that was serving as the grand finale to this year’s Olympics. While I know some folks were kind of keeping an eye on the score via the internet it was by no means a focus in the room—it was quite surprising to see ideas and business win out over sports.

When I think just about the generosity of the event it’s astounding. It cost $40 to get in - but if you took all the skillsets present, came up with an hourly rate for them acting as consultants, and multiplied it by the number of man-hour spent over the course of the 3 days, what would the value be?

Priceless.

THANKS!
This was truly an event to remember, and plans for a 6-month reunion and the date for next year were already being discussed before the pop cans and pizza boxes were cleared away. I’m a bit sad that with our intended big RV trip we won’t be around for it next year. I will be keeping an eye out for other Startup Weekends around the country that I can attend - I’d love to connect with this kind of energy again.

My humble thanks to everyone involved - sponsors, attendees, organizers, food providers, media folks, spouses, families, hosts, and the Startup Weekend folks. Best of luck to all the companies & ideas coming out of the weekend!

(Note - you can view all of the photos from the event as a Flickr Set, and follow StartupWMI on Twitter for other news/photos/videos coming out of the event).

Our Digital Heritage: Blessing or Burden?

2010-02-20T13:40:59+00:00

What you see above is the scanned-in image of a postcard mailed by my grandparents to one of my grandmother’s sisters while they were traveling in 1957 (interesting to note the lack of a house address or zip code). I scanned it in because it’s one of the few samples I have of my grandmother’s “voice” and handwriting and I wanted my kids to be able to see it. Scanning it was a great way to both preserve it, back it up, and not have to worry about storing the physical postcard.

In the same vein - over the past few years when my parents (Hi Mom!) send us emails I’ll sometimes copy and past them into a closed blog post so that we preserve a bit of their writings. I’ll also blog bits and pieces of interesting conversations - stories from when they were growing up etc.

My folks have a large library of slides - both from photos they took and from my grandparents, inherited when my grandparents passed away. And they haven’t stopped taking pictures - they’ve had a digital camera for a few years now and have been busy recording their various travels and four-wheeling adventures.

Here at home we recently paid to have roughly 4 years of film pictures digitized - adding to almost 8 years of digital family photos. I’ve also transferred 8mm video to DVD, and have started copying the DVD files onto our backup drive. In addition to photos and video there are weblog posts going back to 2003 here on Boyink.com.

At some point in this process it struck me how much more digital content is being stored from each generation. A few MB from my grandparents, hundreds of MB from my parents, and I just bought a 1TB drive to be able to store and backup both our current “digital heritage” and what we expect to add to it on our upcoming year on the road. If you plotted these points out on a chart the curve would be exponential.

It brings up a number of interesting questions and issues:

If cheap photography means we take more photos, does the value of each photo diminish?
Will “green” thinkers start to worry that we’re storing too much information, much of it duplicated (how many photos of Big Red does the world need)?
What happens when the storage technology changes and people neglect to convert? Old prints could be forgotten in a basement for 30 years and still be viewable - will your digital files last that long? Have we traded longevity for the low cost and instant feedback of digital photography?
Will future generations even be interested in still photography from the past - assuming virtual 3D type experiences will exist?

But there’s another issue that’s been on my mind lately - and that’s how these digital collections will start to become an inheritance. As digital photographers age and begin to pass away, their work will likely pass down to their children or other still-alive family members—much like how I came to own the postcard from my grandparents. But as each generation is storing more, that digital heritage will become larger each time it’s passed down. It will also likely to contain a large number of different file types, files compressed with different algorithms, and other digital assets like domain names—all increasing the complexity and overhead of managing it.

It gets me wondering - will this digital heritage start to become a burden? Will siblings argue over who has to become the “keeper of the files” - always tending to them to ensure old formats are being converted? We are already information-overloaded in this age - will future generations have the time/attention to plow through what would be hundreds of terabytes of photos/video/blog archives/life-streaming? Will businesses emerge to handle this strain? Will people or families declare “digital heritage bankruptcy”—like some of us do now with email - and just start over?

Or will the file format issue solve this for us by essentially putting an expiration date on content because it will be forgotten or neglected - essentially the future equivalent of having a collection of 5.25” floppy discs now with no way to access them? As I write this it strikes me that this has already happened to me - I kept a journal for a while in college but it was written in a now-defunct word processor and stored on a long-lost 3.5” floppy drive (all things considered - it’s probably best that it’s gone).

Lots of questions and I certainly don’t propose to have the answers. The only thing I can do in the meantime is try to be better at culling out and storing only the good or important digital content. Right now the easy way out is to just save it all—the storage space is cheaper than the value of the time required to sort through it - but in the long run my laziness is going to become a burden for someone.

Frustration with Foursquare

2010-01-21T13:42:14+00:00

Over the last couple of weeks a couple of new site/service/apps have started getting popular on Twitter - and it’s causing me a bit of frustration. Since 140 characters is too short to explain myself, a blog post was in order.

The two sites I’m targeting with this post are FourSquare and Gowalla. I have not signed up for either of these sites - but looking at them quickly they seem to be similar. Users sign up and using a mobile app on a smart phone that can also provide location information (geocoding) they make a visit to a particular location (businesses usually) and then “check-in” with the site. There is a game element - allowing users to earn points, badges, and claim titles like “Mayor”.

Businesses with a physical location can add themselves to the sites which allows users to check in at the business. Businesses then get promotion on the site plus being promoted on the users hooked-up social networks like Twitter or Facebook. I’m hearing that some businesses are offering freebies if you show them that you’ve checked in with them while there - a restaurant might give you a free appetizer etc.

I’m a bit torn with these sites - because if I look out to our upcoming travel adventure we might be able to use services like Foursquare and Gowalla to find great places to visit and good restaurants to eat at.

But right now, today, the net effect of the popularity of these sites is that I’m starting to unfollow people using them actively. Why? Because if I follow you on Twitter it’s because you provide value to me. You post witty, challenging or insightful comments. Or—you’re interested in EE so we share that commonality. Or I’ve worked with you either as a client, customer, or peer and want to maintain that relationship.

When a high number of tweets are nothing more than “I’m at Joes Taco Stand” or “I’m at Toms Health Club” or “I just became the Mayor of Jim’s Basement Refinishing on Foursquare” I have to start asking…“So what?”. What does this information do to improve my day? Is there really nothing more valuable you have to say or to add than simply where you are? That information is really only important to me if I’m trying to find you to meet with you. I’m not sure the information would ever be valuable on a 1:1: basis - only when aggregated (500 check-ins at the Taco stand over a day or two would tell me it’s a good place to eat).

It seems to me the net effect of these sites is to allow Twitter or Facebook users to earn freebies, giveaways, and status by whoring out their audience’s attention. As a recipient I’m done with it already - I simply don’t care where you are. As a user I value my audience far too much to spam them with inline Twitter ads for local businesses just for a free beer.

Startup Weekend: West Michigan

2010-01-11T00:23:54+00:00

Huh…I announced this on Twitter a few days back but seem to have neglected announcing it here as well.

So - I’m happy to announce that along with the ElevatorUp folks I’m getting the ball rolling on hosting Startup Weekend in Grand Rapids on February 26th - 28th.

What is it?

48 hours of pure business-building madness.

There’ll be speakers, food, whiteboarding, coffee, ideation, creation, bootstrapping, networking, learning, teaching - and overall just a loud buzz of activity that will hopefully burst forth with new businesses, new relationships and some positive press for the West Michigan area.

Encouraged to attend are: techhies, marketers, lawyers, business folks, designers, doctors, dentists, linemen, bowling alley managers—anyone with a passion for business and a chance to have a great time. If your business would like to sponsor the event please contact me. I’ll be calling you anyway…you might as well beat me to the punch..;)

htaccess Help

2010-01-05T19:15:14+00:00

This issue has been resolved -thanks to Eric Reagan and Fred Boyle for the help.

Essentially I replaced this style of redirect:


redirect 301 /splaat/ssdutch http://www.boyink.com/cj6/

with this style:


RewriteRule ^splaat/ssdutch/(.*)$ /cj6/$1 [R=301,L]

I’m sure I tested the former and had them working - why they stopped I don’t know. It’s one of those things I don’t have the time to figure out—they seem to be working again and I’m moving on.

Integrated Email/Calendar/Invoicing ?

2009-12-18T16:28:25+00:00

So after my main desktop went out in a cloud of glory this week I’m still moving into the new Win7 model. Initial impressions are favorable - but I’m running into snags with the email / calendar / invoicing process I’ve been using for years as some of the tools involved are seemingly now obsolete.

Here’s the process I’m after:

Client is setup as a contact available to both in email and invoicing.
Email comes in - for a meeting or feature request or what have you.
Email is dragged to calendar for scheduling.
Calendar item is assigned to category.
Category determines if item is billable or not, and rate if so.
Invoicing app hooks into calendar data for client billing address, time spent, and calculates invoice amount.
Billable hours can also be assigned by just adding a calendar item and assigning to category.

In the past I accomplished this with Outlook and an Outlook add-on that did the invoicing piece. The nice thing was the calendar could have both personal/family items on it along with business items—and they could be seperated out for invoicing by category.

A new solution doesn’t have to be Outlook-based and could be web-based. If desktop-based however it does need to run on a PC.

It looks like Microsoft had it’s own solution to accomplish this - but it was recently discontinued and I can’t tell if Outlook 2007 can just spit out billable hours to an Excel file or something.

** Update**

I don’t think the perfect app exists here yet - at least in the PC world. So - especially in light of our plans for next year I’m going to give Freshbooks a go. Being all web-based & with available iPhone apps should give us the connectivity we need while not worrying so much if we get vandalized while on the road and lose data.

Along with this move will be attempting to do email and calendaring via the web as well. Our initial idea there is to just try using the more of the features in the web interface that EngineHosting provides, with looking at Google’s services as a backup.

Putting Wheels on a Dream

2009-12-11T12:33:05+00:00

It’s with a great sense of anticipation that I write this post. The last 4 weeks have been filled with lengthy family discussions, meetings with bankers, accountants, and salespeople. There have been more “What if…”, “What about…”, and “Who will….” type questions asked in our family than ever before. We don’t yet have all the answers to all the questions, but have worked through enough of them that we are finally ready to put wheels on a long-time dream, and can finally tell you about it.

Sometime in the fall of 2010, we (my wife, 13 year old son, 12 year old daughter, and myself) will turn over our house keys to someone else, seat-belt ourselves into an RV, shift into “drive” and hit the road for roughly a year of travel, sightseeing, work, exploration, making new friends and visiting old ones. And yes, I fully expect that time will also include arguments, short tempers, frustration, mechanical breakdowns, too-little personal space, and homesickness.

But mix all those together and we think it will fully define what we are after as a family - a true adventure.

While it would (and might, actually) take a book to fully cover the decision making process and everything that went into it, here’s a quick rundown of how we came to this decision, how we intend to proceed, and our expectations for the business side of things.

Self-employment via the Internet

It doesn’t take much nosing around the internet to find stories of high-level executives with million-dollar homes suddenly deciding to give that all up, sell everything, buy an RV and hit the road full time living off their investments and money from selling their house.

That’s not us.

We don’t have an opulent lifestyle to sell out of - quite the opposite. In order to make this work I need to keep an income coming in—so the fact that I’m self employed and can be productive and billable with only an internet connection was a key factor in being able to make this choice. My expectation is that we will setup our RV with a small office space and redundant internet connectivity capabilities so that I can keep doing the work that I do.

Homeschooling

The other key to this decision was the fact that we are already - and have always been - homeschoolers. Not being tied to a local schools location and schedule free us up to really make our life what we want it to be.

Keeping the House

From a financial perspective the biggest question to answer was - “Will we have to sell our house to afford this?”. We answered this primarily in two ways - first by finding out that in the current real estate market our house is worth about what we paid for it 12 years ago, regardless of the improvements that we’ve made. So - there’s no great financial incentive to sell - it’s not even guaranteed that we could sell it in the timeframe we’d need to. I also estimated that the money that we’d lose in just in realtor fees by selling one house and buying another would probably equal the mortgage payments for the year we’re estimating being gone.

The second factor coming into play here was researching RV’s - and finding out that financially we could afford to get ourselves into something that would suit our needs without selling the house. Suffice to say we won’t be in the biggest, fanciest rig out there but should be comfortable enough.

Our plan for the house is to keep it, and make the mortgage payments on it, but also look at this as somewhat of a mission opportunity and find someone who could be blessed by having a house rent-free for a year. This person would be responsible for all utility payments, lawn care, snow removal, and just in general making sure the house stays in working order. Yes, we risk damage, but also figure leaving the house empty presents a risk either with vandalism or maintenance issues not being caught in time.

RV Type

Over the past 4 weeks I have probably stepped into at least 50 different trailers and motorhomes, and looked at least 200 more on Craigslist, eBay and other websites. Our major requirements are that it have beds for everyone that don’t require being “made up” (having to change a dining table or couch into a bed every night), and that it have a small office space.

There’s nothing “off the shelf” that meet those requirements that we can afford - but we’ve identified two candidates that we should be able to modify to suit our needs:

Bunkhouse Travel Trailer / Full-size Van
Camping is often a family activity, so most RV manufacturers offer a “bunkhouse” trailer that has a master bedroom with a queen size bed in front along with 2 stacked bunks (4 beds total) in a rear bedroom. Since we only have 2 kids I would remove two of the bunks and create an office in that space.

Trailers are the most affordable RV because they don’t have the full drivetrain of a motorhome - and are said to keep their resale value longer for that same reason. The puzzle is a tow vehicle - the best option I could find would be a full-size van which can be found with V10 or large diesel engines.

We’d look something like this going down the road:

Advantages of this route include extra cargo capacity in the van, no loss of “home” if the van needs service, the tow vehicle is available for transportation once the trailer is setup in a campground, etc. Disadvantages are that you can’t use the trailer facilities while moving down the road, it’s a bit harder to stop for quick overnights in parking lots, etc, and it will be a pretty long combination going down the road. I’ve also no experience with driving a combination like this.

Class C Motorhome / Towing Something
The other alternative we’ve identified is a 30 foot or so “Class -C” motorhome (Class C means it’s constructed using the front end and chassis of a passenger van). We can make one of these work by modifying the large rear master bedroom into a combination bunkhouse/office, and my wife and I would sleep in the queen-size bunk over the cab area. Then we’d purchase some sort of tow vehicle - most likely a newer Jeep Cherokee. My current Jeep is setup to be towed, but doesn’t make for a great daily driver for a family, nor is it secure for use in big cities, etc.

We’d look something like this on the road:

Advantages of this route are you can access your living quarters while on the road, overnights are easier, we’d have a smaller vehicle for daytrips and errand-running, would be able to do some four-wheeling with all our Jeep friends across the country, and I’ve experience driving this kind of setup. Disadvantages are having to buy and maintain two drivetrains, having to buy an older motorhome than we could a trailer, our “home” would be unavailable if it needed servicing, and it will take more work to make livable for us.

So that decision hasn’t been made yet, and won’t likely get made until sometime next year.

Route

“So where would you go?” It’s a common next-question to ask, and we don’t have an answer yet. We’ve been so busy answering the “is it possible” question that we just haven’t had the time to figure out where we’d want to go and what to see. Since we’re looking at a fall departure it’s likely that we’ll start by being ‘leaf-peepers” out east, and then head south to stay with the sun and warmer weather. From there - who knows?

And I’m not sure how much of the route we’ll pre-determine. Part of the attraction of this idea has always been how much more spontaneous you can be when you live on wheels. An interesting sign, a comment from a conversation with some locals or a poor weather forecast could all affect the route and immediate plans.

Business Expectations

Many of you reading this will either be a current client or someone that knows me through the ExpressionEngine world - so the “what about my site” or “what about support” questions are valid ones.

My still-in-development plan at this point is to keep working both in web development and ExpressionEngine training through Train-ee while gone.

Actually I’m hoping that by being more mobile we’ll be able to offer more EE classes across the country (the specifics of where, when, and how are not yet clear). I expect that my availability will be spottier during travel times. However I also expect to have satellite or phone-carrier based internet access so in the event of any “emergency” type issues, I should be able to stop and get those fixed in fairly short order. I will also look into having backup person/process in place. If you’ve any questions, concerns or ideas in this regard please drop me a line.

I’ve some other fun ideas for work-related stuff to do while on the road, but need to keep those under wraps until they go from half to fully baked.

Family Reaction

This idea started as something a bit secret and shared only between my wife and I (if you have kids you quickly learn to not discuss vaguely potential things around them much - then you don’t have to answer all the questions or deal with the disappointment when the idea falls through).

After MsBoyink and I made an initial visit to an RV dealer we decided the float the idea past our kids - now that they are both pre-teens it’s easier to discuss potential things like this. My son - who is naturally more outgoing and gregarious - was immediately all for it. My daughter - more introspective, sentimental and change-adverse, was immediately against it. She didn’t want to give up her room, stuffed animal friends, or going to the Friday School program that they’ve attended for couple of semesters. After we took them to see some RV’s and have continued to discuss the trip she’s warmed up to the idea, but is still not as gung-ho about it. What I know about her though is that she adapts quickly to new experiences and then will be just as reluctant to stop doing the new thing as she was the old.

We called parents last night and let them in on it. My folks are long-time RVers so are quite familiar with what we’ll be in for both in the equipment needed and what the lifestyle is like. Their reaction was one of being “non-plussed”. I haven’t got the complete report from in-laws yet but the initial reaction was positive. What older folks have is the perspective of age, and knowing first-hand how sometimes waiting to do something like this is a gamble with health. It seems everyone has a story of people who waited until their retirement years to travel only to have suffer serious health issues keep them from doing it when they finally had the time.

Documenting/Promoting the Trip

Well of course being a web-head I couldn’t look to do something like this and not at least blog it, right? So yes, yesterday I purchased the domain of http://boyinks4adventure.com and we will soon start roughing in the plans for it. It’ll likely start out just being redirected to a new blog under the Fun section here on Boyink.com but at some point will be split out into it’s own site and we’ll see about some fun GoogleMap/Flickr/Vimeo integrations.

But What About..

Mail…orthodontist visits…holidays…insurance…and…and…

We don’t have all the answers yet - it’s one of the reasons we set the “leave date” quite a ways out. There are dozens..hundreds…of decisions to be made so currently the answer is either “I don’t know” or “It’s not important yet’.

What is important is that we took a pipe dream out of the closet, dusted it off, decided to take it seriously and are now putting wheels on it. There’s a ton of prep work to be done, money to be saved, arrangements to be made, large purchases to be made, and modification projects to be planned and executed.

But I’m looking forward to 2010 in a way that I’ve never looked forward to a new year. I’m excited about the experiences to be had and the people to be met.

I’m looking forward to an adventure!

Boyink.com Relaunches

2009-12-05T12:33:34+00:00

On February 3, 2000 I had a cushy corporate IT job at a Fortune 500 company, a couple of toddlers at home, and the first dot-com bubble was just peaking. On a whim one day I checked for the availability of my last name - Boyink - as a domain and found it available. I bought it mainly because I thought it would be cool for my family to have personal email addresses of our first name at boyink dot com—especially my kids as they got older. What I did not know is that a couple years later the site would become the platform for a new business and a whole new way of life. Since becoming a business site Boyink.com has had at least 4 different visual designs, and I’m very proud to have launched the 5th yesterday.

Why Redesign?
While this may seem like an obvious question in the web design world where often sites get redone just because “it’s time” - there were some more significant issues at play for Boyink.com.

Yes - the previous design was showing its age. I don’t keep detailed records but near as I can tell using the WayBack Machine the previous design went live in early February, 2007. For some reason I was thinking it was older than that - but a 3 year old design as a web developer is a bit old. The photos of me, especially, were ones I had taken in 2002 when I first started the business so were quite out of date.

V4 was also a personal experiment with fluid-width designs. There was a time when I thought they were going to save the internet so I took it upon myself to do my own site with one. But while academically fluid-width designs make a lot of sense, I never felt at home in it and ultimately I think it started affecting my urge to want to post new content to the site.

More importantly, my business had shifted. When I launched V4 I was trying to be a one-man soup to nuts web shop, doing strategy & information architecture, design, coding, and implementation. Since then I’ve gotten more focused and smarter, I think, about the way I work and what I focus on with web development projects. I now engage with other freelancers for design and coding. Not only do I get better results this way (because these people are just more skilled in these areas than I ever was), doing so lets me focus on the parts of the project I enjoy more and feel I’m stronger at.

The other major shift that happened in that time was the conception and launch of Train-ee. Train-ee has been incredibly successful and has significantly changed what I spend time working on day to day, my plans for what to do next, as well as our income model as a business. As a brand - Train-ee had eclipsed Boyink in terms of traffic and visibility and I wanted to capitalize that success and draw a tighter connection to it from Boyink.com.

So - in February 2009, I began the efforts to redesign. But - where to start? Between finding the time and looking at yourself and your own business objectively, being your own client is tough to do.

Branding
I started where I would have recommended a client start in this situation - by doing some branding research to find out what the perceptions of the Boyink brand were currently vs. where I wanted them to be.

I used - and highly recommend - fellow ExpressionEngine ProNetworker Lea Alcantara’s Art of Self Branding work. I took the advice she gave in Part One and sent emails to past and current clients and peers asking them to describe Michael Boyink and Boyink Interactive in 3 adjectives.

The responses were quite humbling and inspirational. Now that I had a better idea of my perceived brand I could think about where I wanted the brand to be, and then know what role the updated design and brand needed to play to get me there. I used this research as the basis for a Redesign Brief - with the goal of being able to hand it off to a designer (even one that hadn’t known me before) and have it paint a clear picture of:

Branding

What/Who is Boyink Interactive?
How I see myself
How others see me

Clients

Type
Role Performed
How They Found Me

Redesign

Goals
Page Types
Content Outline

You can download the Redesign Brief here: Boyink_Redesign_Brief_V2.pdf.

I’ll warn you that it gets a bit personal and it’s not highly formatted—but if you find yourself in the position of needing to rebrand yourself maybe you’ll find it helpful.

Design
The most significant design decision this time around was that I wasn’t going to do it. Since I’ve let go of design work for clients I felt free to outsource my own design. I had worked with Andy Van Solkema of Visual Hero on the AmercianSeating site and Andy had expressed interest in the Boyink.com project. Andy’s approach to design felt like a natural fit for the project at hand, so I sent him the Design Brief, and we chiseled out time from our busy schedules to meet at a whiteboard for a couple hours and see what my research and his thinking might translate into as a design direction. While often the output of this process might be more formalized wireframes, in this case we just took some photos of the whiteboard sketches as Andy felt they - along with the Redesign Brief - were enough to work with.

It was interesting to be on the client side of this process for a change. But Andy and his crew pretty much nailed it on the first try - the site you are seeing now is the first and only design they showed me. I think the only changes we made were the structure of the blog pages - due to constraints provided by existing content - and I removed an “About” section from the main nav because the home page pretty much tells the entire story.

From a structural view the Teach page is new - and designed to make the Boyink/Train-ee connection stronger.

The Work page is a redesigned and greatly simplified version of my past Portfolio. The past design was quite detailed around each project with a number of screencaptures/descriptions etc. It was tedious to update and looking at my web stats very few people ever looked at the detail anyway.

Write is just the previous weblog renamed.

The previous Hobbies became Fun - which some might feel is inappropriate for what is ultimately a business site but I can’t count the number of times a potential client has mentioned looking at content in this section of the site.

From there it’s the standard Contact page.

Illustrations
This design goes back to a simpler footer featuring the illustrations from Scott Thigpen - which were actually done before any web design work was done. Adding the rollover quotes was a nice design touch from Andy. The illustrations maintain the pogo stick design element (or “pogo schtick” as a friend dubbed it) and are also on my business cards. The hope for the illustrations was to add some whimsy to the site to reflect the playful nature of my last name.

Photos
The main photos used were done by local Holland photographer Rob Walcott, taken at the City Flats Hotel, our main venue for the Train-ee ExpressionEngine classes. Other photos on the site are from Andy Van Solkema and MsBoyink.

Coding
For coding I turned to the second Andy in my arsenal - Andy Ford of Aloe Studios. Andy has been my go-to guy for getting designs sliced for a couple years now and I’ve always enjoyed working with him. He’s detail oriented, responsive, and keeps up to date on current implementation approaches. Andy recommended a “progressive enrichment” approach wherein some design elements like rounded corners, box shadows, and text shadows would be applied using CSS3 rather than graphics - and older or more incapable browsers would just be a bit less finessed looking. Andy also worked out the @FontFace approach to some of the header fonts to replace the sIFR approach we had initially planned on.

Implementation
I knew I would do the site implementation myself, and it would be on ExpressionEngine. The big question was - would it be on EE 1.6.x or EE2? For a while it looked as if the timelines were going to match up such that Boyink.com would be my first EE2 site, but ultimately I decided to keep it on 1.6x for the time being. It’s just more important to me to have the site’s front end be consistent and reliable than it is to have the backend running on EE2. Since EE2 is still beta I prefer to be more experimental in my use of it.

The most significant implementation change is the URL structure. At some point it occurred to me that Boyink.com was a pretty short domain name - and seeming shorter all the time. I decided that this version of the site I’d take that short domain and use it as an anchor for a simplified URL structure - so took pains to code EE templates such that I didn’t have “comments” templates and did the necessary .htaccess work to get rid of EE’s index.php. Adding those efforts to a forced removal of “www” and the end result is quite nice.

Where I used to have a blog single entry url of:


http://www.boyink.com/splaat/weblog-comments/back-from-the-netherlands/

I now have:


http://boyink.com/write/back-from-the-netherlands/

I need to give a hat-tip to Ryan Masuga and his MD Detect Page Type plugin for easing the process of coding smarter index templates for nicer URLs.

During the implementation it also occurred to me that single blog post pages often end up looking odd because the sidebar content is longer than the post itself. This leads to a large area of whitespace under the main post. It seemed to me that a sidebar should be able to look at the length of the main article and adapt itself, but a quick search turned up no existing EE plugins to do the trick. A “gee I wish there was” type tweet led to a nice gift in my inbox from a certain former EE CTO. I’m still playing with the specifics but I’m now able to have shorter sidebars on shorter articles and longer ones on longer articles.

The only other interesting thing from an EE-implementation perspective is the use of Michael Bystrom’s Pagination Extension which allowed me to get EE to spit out the HTML for pagination that matched the code that Andy Ford wrote.

Other than that it’s a very straightforward implementation of EE. The process I took to build the new site in EE while the previous version also existed in EE was the one I detailed in this forum thread.

Thanks!
The response to the site launch on Twitter has been great - thanks so much for all the positive comments. I mainly wrote this (lengthy) post to document the process (as much for myself as anyone) and to make sure credit is applied to where it’s due. I feel like I played a pretty minor role overall - and if the site is successful it’s because I was fortunate to be able to partner with some people who are just danged good at what they do.

So again, to anyone that had a hand in birthing this baby - thank you.

Boyink on Video

2009-11-12T15:24:22+00:00

The video of my presentation from the 2009 ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter Conference has been posted online by the good folks over at Whoooz! Webmedia. You can view it on the Video Page from the conference website, or on Train-ee.com.