Chris Monnat » Misc.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Chris — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:21:24 +0000

Image by ~MVI~ (scrounging for photos) via Flickr

Big changes on the horizon. September will mark the end of 4+ years at my job in Rochester, NY and the beginning of a new job in our nations capitol Washington, DC. Yep, I’m taking this show on the road and will be moving the middle of September. New place, new people, new job… it’s all new and I think that’s what I need. Sometimes you just need to mix things up.

Things will most likely be quite for the next month or two as I do the actual moving and get situated in a new place, but I hope to get back to work shortly thereafter.

Access your snail mail online!

Sign-Up-Sheet.com Relaunched

Chris — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:25:57 +0000

I’m proud to announce the relaunch of Sign-Up-Sheet.com this morning. It’s been a long 4 months, but I’m very excited that things are up and running after suffering some initial setbacks. Check it out and let me know what you think.

http://sign-up-sheet.com

Is it 2010 already?

Is it 2010 already?

Chris — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:00:27 +0000

Is this really my first post in 2010?? Wow, that’s a bummer… so much for that new years resolution to pay more attention to the blog. Lot’s of things have been happening:

sold BadgeTracker to a great bunch of folks back in January
kicked off re-development of Sign-Up-Sheet.com in January… relaunching next month (hopefully)
been desperately trying to keep up with the personal MBA business crash course (to no avail)

Mostly I’ve been trying to work on my new outlook, or master plan, that I mentioned in my last post. So far so good… very excited about relaunching Sign-Up-Sheet.com next month. And thanks to Sign-Up-Sheet I have a bunch of new things to share with you right here on the blog in the coming months.

Keep your eyes out for new posts as well as some other bits and bytes I’ve been working on. Stay tuned!

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Update

Chris — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:10:01 +0000

It’s been about a month since I posted anything worth while and I wanted to write a quick update to let everyone know I’m still here. Things are pretty hectic right now because I’m trying to get BadgeTracker ready for it’s next major release next month. That’s monopolizing most of my time at the moment so of course the blog takes a back seat. I know I left you all hanging in the middle of a post series on Spreedly which I do intend on revisiting once things get back to abnormal but just hold tight for the time being. Better yet check out my Delicious account, which is also syndicated in the sidebar under Side Notes. I usually post new links there once or twice a day about the exciting things going on on-line.

More soon!

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ScoutMailer Case Study

Chris — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:23:47 +0000

I’m a big fan of the e-mail marketing app Campaign Monitor (CM). A couple of months back I wrote a post about how I resell CM to a niche market as ScoutMailer. Today the folks over at Campaign Monitor have posted a case study of ScoutMailer with some insights on how to resell CM to other niche markets. Check it out!

Your thoughts: why so negative?

Chris — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:00:12 +0000

I came across this post on TechCrunch yesterday about SitePoints new project Flippa. I’m a fan of SitePoint, have been for many years, but I have not used any of their auction or design services. The thing that struck me the most about this situation is how negative the feedback and responses have been in regards to the new change to SitePoints website marketplace. I read it a couple of times and I kept coming back to a more general question: why is it that we typically respond to things we disagree with or don’t understand in anger?

I’m just as guilty of this as the next guy… your number 23 on hold for phone support or your routine has been disrupted by product changes or something you have no control over and you fly off the handle at anyone or anything without thinking. Like SitePoint I recently made some modifications in one of my programs that users didn’t quite understand and instead of engaging me in open and civil dialog I received a number of very pissed and clearly unhappy e-mails. Why is it that when these sort of things happen we rush to anger instead of calmly and collectively reaching out to the person or companies involved to see if there is anything that can be done to correct what we see as a problem?

Your thoughts?

Your thoughts: Do web apps need offline components?

Support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

Chris — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:00:14 +0000

“The U.S. Department of Justice reports that in a one-year period of time 797,000 children were reported missing. That is an average of 2,100 children reported missing each day. 1,682,900 children ran away or were thrown away. 203,900 children were abducted by family members. 198,300 children were involuntarily missing, lost or injured. 58,200 children were abducted by nonfamily members.”

“The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has been instrumental in improving the recovery rate from 62% to 96%.” – NCMEC Timeline

The NCMEC is the nations resource for child protection and is celebrating 25 years of service in 2009. In this day in age when kids can log onto the Internet and befriend anyone with a screen name it’s more important than ever that we have organizations like the NCMEC to aid in the recovery of lost children and prevention of child exploitation. That’s why I’ve chosen the NCMEC as by cause to blog for. You can learn more about the NCMEC by viewing this promotional video available on their website.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

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Good Commercial

Chris — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:12:46 +0000

I’m not a Sprint customer… but this is a pretty cool commercial.

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I’m a Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE)

Chris — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:04:29 +0000

Last week I mentioned that I was going in for my Zend PHP 5 Certification exam on Friday. The test has come and gone and I’m happy to say I passed. To be honest, the test was a little more difficult than I thought it would be and I was a bit nervous at the end. But I passed and I can cross that off my list of goals for 2009 .

If you are considering getting certified I would deffinitly recommend it. I can’t speak on the impact it will have on your ability to get a job or anything like that, but I can tell you that it’s a nice accomplishment just for yourself. If there was one thing I learned while studying for the test it’s how much I didn’t know about PHP. 5 years of programming still left some large gaps in my knowledge which this process has helped me realize and reduce. If your not certified give it a shot, you’ve got nothing to loose.

Zend PHP Certification: Necessary or Not?

WordPress: The Ultimate Hype Machine

Chris — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:00:44 +0000

One of the reasons things have been quiet here for a while is because I’m working on a new project called ScoutPath (http://www.myscoutpath.com). If you have been to my projects page you may know a little about it. ScoutPath is an online community for Boy Scouts where they can track their trail to Eagle, interact with their troop, connect with groups, friends and more. Anticipated launch isn’t until June, but I think this project has a lot of potential so I’m going to pull out all the stops and do a full hype/promo campaign leading up to the launch. To help me accomplish this I’m enlisting the assistance of WordPress (WP). This post is about how I plan on using WP to assist/automate the pre-launch promotional process.

Flying Solo

I’m a one man operation… the legendary solo programmer famous in song and story. I handle all the programming with my applications along with the HTML/CSS for the interface and then all the promotional and marketing tasks as well. A few years ago I hooked up with a great designer who handles all my visual stuff but I’m pretty much it when it comes to my projects. This means that I have to be very picky with how I spend my time.

In the past this has meant that I didn’t have time for a big hype/promo campaign before launch because I was too busy programming and finalizing code. But with ScoutPath I really want to make an impression so I needed to find something that would help me accomplish this task without taking up a lot of my time. After coming up with a plan on what I wanted to do I decided to use WordPress for this task.

The Plan

When your coming up with a plan on how to build hype/anticipation of an upcoming project it’s not enough to simply put up a page with a project description and walk away. You need to feed users a little new information on a regular basis so they stay excited and don’t forget about you. I learned this after my first attempt at ScoutPath a year ago. I put up a simple landing page with one or two paragraphs about the project and a mailing list sign-up form to be notified when the project goes live. That “plan” didn’t really go anywhere because I didn’t have the time to do anything with it.

This time around I have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and now a WordPress install to help things go better. The plan is to post some details about the project each week leading up to the launch in June. You won’t find any deep detail with screen shots and explanations; just enough to peek a users interest and get them to sign-up for the launch mailing list. Facebook and Twitter are two additional distribution channels I will leverage to help get the word out to users in other parts of the web. So between now and June I have roughly 12 weeks to get people psyched about ScoutPath.

Using WordPress

ScoutPath is still in the development stages. I’m hip deep in lines of code that don’t yet make sense so again I’m faced with not having time for promotion. But the beauty of using WordPress is that I don’t need time. I devoted an hour or two to writing 12 or so posts and then scheduled them for publishing one week at a time leading up to June. This means that I can continue programming and doing what needs to be done to get the project completed and still get the word out and build hype around the project. I may have to respond to the odd comment or two but besides that I can use WordPress to keep the project fresh in peoples minds automatically while I focus on other things.

WordPress also comes with tons of plugins you can use to integrate it with other sites like Facebook and Twitter. On the Facebook page I’m going to import WPs RSS feed so every post get’s published in Facebook as well. I’ve also installed a Twitter plugin that posts a link to new posts from the blog on the Twitter account. These plugins, with the assistance of WPs scheduled publishing, allows me to put the entire promotional campaign on auto-pilot while I focus on the more important programming items.

Looking Ahead

This is really the first time I’ve every done a formal hype/promotional campaign for one of my projects so I intend on using this experience as a case study to see how it all goes. In the end I hope to answer questions like “did it work?” and “was it really worth it?” etc. As things progress I’ll post my progress and findings here so you can benefit from my experiences as well. Stay tuned… it’s sure to be an interesting ride.

Displaying Code in WordPress