I just wanted to take a moment and welcome all the new visitors who may be coming here as a result of new advertising I have started as of this weekend.

When you boil it all down, I am what’s commonly referred to as a “web geek”. 

More specifically, if you need to have a website created (or revised) that needs to do more than just sit there, but do something active, like interact with users, get people to buy something from you, or do something with a database, I’m the guy to talk to.

Check out my Specialties & Pricing page for various ways that I can assist you in your website development needs.  Note: I am constantly adding more things I can do for clients, so what’s on the page may not be “complete”.

Whether or not you think that WebCommons web programming services is the right fit for your needs, please feel free to contact me and start a conversation!  I won’t bite! You may be surprised with all the possibilities!

Thanks for reading!

I just wanted to let everyone know that the WebCommons site crashed yesterday due to some MySQL tables getting inexplicably locked. The restoration of the data has left some things a bit messy. I will attempt to clean up most of it today.

Of course, I don’t want anyone to think this is the final incarnation of the WebCommons site. It is really just a start of a new approach. In reality, all websites stay in flux, and what is here now is just the culmination of moving much of the old content from other WebCommons locations to this WordPress-based site.

But I really do want to know: What do you think, and how can I make this site better? What can I do better to explain what it is that WebCommons does? What information am I missing, except for a visual portfolio (I already have plans for reinstating that).

By the way, if readers of this site can’t easily figure out that WebCommons does programming for websites, and what that means for their web development needs, I’m in big trouble!

As part of the ongoing WebCommons site merger, I developed a new contact form.   I realize that this kind of development naturally doesn’t create a lot of excitement, but I think a lot of the power of the WordPress platform shines through with this example.

A contact form is one of those common things that a web programmer shouldn’t want to re-invent, so I went plugin shopping at the WordPress site and found a straightforward, well-ranked, WordPress 2.7-compatible plugin called Contact Form 7.   I was especially charmed that it had easy-to-setup CAPTCHA and Akismet support (great for stopping spammers!), and upon my initial testing of it, I was pleasantly surprised at how robust and straightforward the admin-side contact form management was.

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I just changed the WordPress setting that required registration here before commenting on a blog post or page.   However, entry of your name and e-mail address is required, and the first post by an individual will always be moderated.

I made this change because most blogs don’t seem to require registration before commenting, and spam blocking mechanisms in WordPress are pretty strong.   I also think this should actually encourage comments more, or so I hope.   It’s a convenience thing.

Now, please understand, I didn’t make this change to encourage anonymity, as I think everyone should stand behind their words.   So, any attempts to “play anonymous” by obfuscating or frequently changing one’s identity will be screened out.

At any rate, I do hope that regular commenters (once I have them) will choose to register.   It does make frequent commenting easier, and it allows the commenter to build a kind of identity that readers can tie from comment to comment.

You may have noticed that this blog/site has been undergoing some structural changes, and you would be correct.

What’s going on is fairly straightforward — I am simply moving most of my content from my old WebCommons site as well as my resume into this WordPress-based blog, and scrapping the rest.   I am doing this for three reasons:

1. I wanted to streamline my updating of the content, and have it all be in essentially one place.   Now, considerably less programming or otherwise awkward intervention will be involved in adding/updating most content from now going forward.   The only exception will be when I want to add specially programmed content.
2. I wanted to learn more about how WordPress can be used as a content management system, including how plugins can be configured or altered, or templates created, to deliver special content features.   WordPress is increasingly looking like a very important platform for website development, and obvious for a web programmer like myself, I need to know it from top to bottom.
3. I wanted a demonstration project I can show potential clients what can be done with their (sometimes very static) existing websites and how much more powerful their sites can become, while not requiring as much attention from hired web programmers (and the expenses associated with that).   Imagine your company website that its owner or administrator (normally a non-programmer) can make most of the content updates to!

Of course, I’m not quite finished, so don’t judge, yet.     But if you’re interested, you get to watch three separate sites merge into one, and I will post about what I’m actually doing.

ReadWriteWeb recently has been talking up the new role of community managers in companies, especially start-ups, here lately.   See their posts “Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?” and “Community Manager Jobs Are Hot”.

The term community manager has traditionally had this definition, but that’s not what I’m talking about.   Well, hopefully, we don’t have any Ralph Furleys amongst us (Don Knotts was cool though!).  

Anyway, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has boiled the definition down to the following:

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

I certainly think this is a great start, but I think it basically captures one side of the job, the part that everyone sees, and the part the person in the role projects, but doesn’t address the actual ongoing intricacy of making a job like this work to success.

The other side of the job is the shaping of the process of discussion itself.   This involves both a grasp of discussion dynamics as well as social media technologies/trends (where being a person with web programming knowledge is very helpful).

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One of WebCommons’ non-profit pet projects, the local discussion board Louisville History & Issues, is becoming increasingly prominent in Louisville political and history circles, but even more interesting for discussion here, it is also becoming a highly functional (master?)piece of web software.

Louisville History & Issues (LouHI for short) is based on WebCommons’ fork of phpBB version 2 that is currently dubbed “Citizen Assembly Board” (CAB for short).   CAB has been in development for several years, and has many interesting and unusual features, many not even available on the newest version 3 of phpBB.   Of course it also doesn’t enjoy some of the newest features and design approach of phpBB 3, but that has its own set of pros and cons, and I will likely muse about that in a future post here.

LouHI is currently undergoing a phased release of its “Version 3″, which I am touting as the “finally useful!” version.   Read about the changes in Phase 1 as well as plans for later phases after the jump.

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I have noted some misunderstanding from clients and potential clients in recent months about my status as a freelance programmer.   My web programming work is indeed on a full-time basis and I am thus available continuously to look at and work on various projects.   The WebCommons website and my resume have been updated in various spots to reinforce this clarification.

Starting today, September 4, 2008 I am embarking on two changes for my web programming services company named WebCommons, one somewhat dramatic, and the other, rather mundane.

The first change is this blog. Surprise! This is now the “front page” for the WebCommons site.

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