Since I became a full time contract developer, I’ve been leaning heavily on the community to find answers to questions, learning new technologies and techniques to add to my toolbox, and helping overcome any hurdles I may run across during any given day. Learning Ruby on Rails without having that developer to just lean over to and ask questions has been a difficult, frustrating, and at times extremely humbling experience. So in return back to the community that has helped me, I want to help those that are in a similar position as I am. In a sense, that is a goal of this blog, but in order to reach out even further, I will be contributing to Smashing Network’s Developer Drive. I would like to thank Jeff over there for giving me the opportunity to write for them. Stay tuned, as I will try and write there on a weekly basis.

Starting out as a newb in anything is always tough because you never really know what “the right” way to do things are. If you are anything like me, you can easily hack your way through things and get them to work, but are always afraid that you are missing something. Well, I’ve come up with my own list of best practices before I deploy a Rails application to the public.

• Some of these best practices are, of course, universal to any web application development effort, so I won’t go deep into them – but at least they are here for “the record.”
• Do NOT store user passwords as clear text.
• NEVER allow user submitted information fall directly into database queries.
• Always backup code, data AND user uploaded data such as images, documents, etc.
• Validate the content type and extension of user submitted files and make sure the upload directory is secured from running scripts.

Now onto the Rails specific practices. Some of these may be repeats from other lists that you may have encountered, but becoming a Rails developer I found that they were key to ensuring that my applications stayed secure and performed as designed.

Read the rest of my post on Developer Drive

I’m pretty sure that we all know exactly what the the_content( ); and get_the_content( ); do in a WordPress template. If not, then refresh your memory over at the Codex.

So what’s the difference? The different is pretty simple actually. If you find yourself annoyed with formatting of the content, more specifically the added p-tags that WordPress puts into the content that you didn’t. Just use get_the_content(); and you will remove those tags.

When working with WordPress, or anything else for that matter, I know I always start saving some of my most used code snippets. I’m sure that you may find these elsewhere on the web, but I figured I’d share a few of them here. These are 5 snippets I find myself using often, of course some more than others.

1. Getting Custom Field values from within The Loop

2. WordPress Menu Navigation

The De Facto Standard to create a WordPress navigation since version 3.0. If you consider yourself to be a WordPress developer and aren’t using this method, first stop calling yourself one. Go read up on the Codex and learn it. Implement it successfully. Then begin calling yourself one again. I can’t tell you how many WP3 sites I inherit that are still hard coding menus. It’s appalling!

3. Restrict The Excerpt Length by Characters, Not Words

I sometimes get asked on projects to change up the length of the excerpt. I’ve used the new_excerpt_length filter before, but what happens most times is that it’s more about the space that the client wants to put the excerpt into. Whether its on the homepage, just above the footer going across the site, or in a sidebar that has a bunch of other things in there. So instead, let’s restrict the excerpt by the number of characters it displays. Drop this into your theme’s functions.php file.

Then call the_excerpt_max_charlength(25) within your theme file to get the first 25 characters of the excerpt.

4. Are you hiding your login page

Redirect to the login page, so that it “hides” the out of the box login. Put this into your .htaccess file

5. Lost Admin Password

Resetting the Admin password (if you know what the admin username is) – I use this more often with clients that transfer their site to me from a bad experience with another “freelancer.” This is the MySQL command you would throw into your command line, phpmyadmin, or whatever tool you use for executing SQL statements.

If you really want to learn some cool tricks within WordPress, please take a few minutes of your day and head over to The Codex and poke around. There’s tons of useful information and functions and methods there that will help you on your next project. What are the snippets that you use most often?

Ever want to have a page of posts, but use custom fields, a specific template, or any other page attributes in WordPress. Well, I recently had a project where there was a need for great flexibility on each page and post of the site to manipulate the right and left sidebars. So I was using the custom fields so the client can put links, text, pics, videos along each side. As with most WordPress implementations, I use the Reading Settings to tag a static page for the home page and blog page. But in knowing how the blog page uses the index.php file to render the index of posts, I didn’t want that since the blog page had custom fields that needed to be rendered.

Since the blog page was only going to show a specific category of posts, I thought that I could “confuse” WordPress. I made the category slug and the page slug exactly the same. Important to note, the slug is not the title. The slug is usually lowercase, no spaces, and WordPress usually generates it based off of the title, which you can obviously modify.

So I created a News page, and then a News category. Then I created a news template within the theme as well. I applied the news template to the News page under the Page Attributes section on the Edit screen. The News page previewed just like any other page. Then after some thought and scripting, I came up with the code below which allowed me to pull in the posts based on the slug.

Place the above code into the theme’s template file where you would like the list of posts to appear. The part of this code that does the heavy lifting is that it reads the slug of the page and then builds the query to pull the posts of that category. Obviously, that can spark some creative ideas with the page and post relationship. I’d love to hear what other people have done for this type of situation and I hope that this helps others.

The other day I was working in a new rails app and for some reason the rails.vim plugin would not run any of the commands. The error went by so quick that I couldn’t see what it was. I dropped to Terminal and ran the generator for the controller and it worked just fine. I ran it again inside MacVim and got the “Command Terminated” result again and noticed that it was not respecting my rvm gemset.

It was not picking up my rvm instances at all. Because I was using zsh, when I launched MacVim from the command line in Terminal, it was not respecting my sourcing rvm in the .zshrc file. After some looking around on Google, I found out that if I sourced it in .zshenv file that would work. So I took

and dropped it into .zshenv and it worked perfectly.

The rut means different things for different people. But one thing that’s common among all the definitions is that people want to pull themselves out of it. When you are in a rut, you lack motivation and you feel exhausted with the mundane that keeps repeating day after day. It’s like the movie Groundhog day. The only thing you want to happen is that you don’t want to feel this way anymore.

I’ve been there, more than a few times for sure. Lately though, I wake up each day with excitement to see what the day brings for the projects I’m working on, people I’m going to see, and things I’m going to learn. I didn’t get here though over night, I worked hard to get to this spot in my life.

I was in a rut for a few years, where I was doubting myself and what I was doing with my career. I knew where I wanted to go with it, just didn’t see any sort of path to get there. So I wound up sucking it up each day and sitting in a cubicle from 8-6 everyday and listening to someone else tell me how to do my job, and do it wrong for the most part. I had always did freelance development in the past, and liked it, but never fully explored it to the point it would need to be to live off of. Well one day I just decided that I was tired of listening to someone else telling me the wrong things to do and working to put money into someone else’s pocket who didn’t respect me. But how was I going to get to where I want to be?

The first step for me was to set a goal and writing it down. That goal back then was to get 5 new clients after 3 months. By setting a goal it was putting me on the hook for something. Now this seems simple and it is. What this does is have the right side of your brain (or the creative side) tell the left side of the brain (or the logical side) about it. It puts your entire brain on the same page.

Then once that’s done, the ball starts rolling. Ideas start to flow on how to achieve this goal. For me it was designating a set number of hours each and every night to making sure that I got something done towards the goal. Before you know it, you are starting to climb up out of that rut. You start to feel so much better and excited for the time you get to work on your goal. Next thing you know, you are out of the rut and walking along the tops of the hills and enjoying every minute of it.

If you are wondering if I obtained those 5 clients in the 3 months, I didn’t. I got them in 6 weeks and I still have those clients to this day.

As some of you know, or at least picked up from my latest batch of a Foursquare checkins that I’ve moved. Now during the move, I definitely had my share of the broad spectrum of customer service. More importantly, I learned a thing or two about how I can improve upon my own client communication and service.

One of the worst experiences I’ve had with customer service was my recent interaction with Con Edison. For those outside the NYC area, this is the power and gas company. I had to get the power turned over into my name at the new place. I called ConEd and asked them to have the power to the apartment switched in my name. They proceeded to tell me that I had to fax them some pieces of information to prove I wasnt the previous tenant since they scooted on their bill. So I understood that and besides, I didnt want to be responsible for their bill. I faxed everything they asked for over to them and called them back at the specified time. They proceeded to tell me that the lease wasn’t up to THEIR standards and told me what I needed have on it to be accepted and to refax it. So I did what they asked, even had my landlord rework it accordingly and called back. They proceeded to tell me that I now needed a notarized letter from my landlord now because the lease was different than the first one I faxed over.

Yup, you read that right…”because the lease was different.” They told me to change it and I now needed my new landlord to get a notarized letter and fax it to ConEd stating that the lease was ok because it was changed according to what ConEd asked for to get the power turned on in my name. That’s pretty much when I got so frustrated that I couldnt believe I was emerged in this stupidity. My landlord couldnt believe it either, so he wound up calling them up and after a few days of that, he told me everything should be squared away with ConEd, because they told him that. Now this was when I was moving all my stuff into the new place so I didnt get a chance to call up immediately. When I did, I was told that my landlord had not called and that all my paperwork was deleted from the system and I had to go through everything again, including the notarized letter because there was a note on the account that the lease didn’t look legit. Now I lost it, I asked the guy on the phone, “so you rather not have me as a willing and able paying customer, by making me jump through all these hoops again, but protect a delinquent nonpaying customer and still get no money? That makes total perfect sense, thanks for your help.” After speaking with my landlord yet again, god bless his patience, I got a call from a supervisor over at ConEd and finally got the service transferred into my name.

The middle of the road was Time Warner. The only reason it was middle of the road caliber was because the issue I had was a defective box. But that was something I figured out by taking my bedroom cable box and plugging it into my living room and seeing if I was having the same issue. Which I didn’t, but by then I had already spent an hour and half online with tech support which ended in them having to schedule out a tech to my place. So after the week in between, when the tech got here I explained what I did, he ran some tests on the line and just swapped out the defective box.

Now in saving the best for last, it was 1800-Got-Junk. Yup, those of you that are fans of the tv show Hoarders, this is the service where a truck comes to your place and a team of guys take out your junk and either recycles it, donates it, or junks it. I had a bunch of stuff that I just didnt want to bring along to the new place such as a twin bed, loveseat, and just some household items. The main guy, Justin, that I dealt with was top notch. Very respectful to my place and items. He and his guys were extremely courteous and made things like the appointment time totally my call and based on my availability and time. It was pouring down rain, and they didnt even blink. “We do this all the time, just a part of the job,” he replied with a smile, to me talking about how crappy the weather was. You know that feeling you get after an experience and you want to tell everyone about it and even to go use/have it? That’s how I feel about these guys. Would totally use them again and very much recommend them as a service.

What I took from this is that customer service is about respect, communication, common sense, patience, and understanding. I’ve always tried to strive to communicate fully to my clients and potential clients alike. Making sure that there is nothing lost in translation. Even if there’s something that I’m not in control of but I know that my client will have to go through, I will let them know about it, so that they can at least prepare themselves and whatever materials they may need. All of us in business end up on both sides of the fence in customer service. Try to think about that when you are on either side, and remain respectful and use common sense.

For those that may have not seen, a couple of weekends ago I tweeted a few videos I like to call my MoFo Videos. MoFo stands for Motivational and Foundation Building. I wanted to expand on them just a little bit more so than the 140 characters allow me. So here’s a roundup of them.

I’ve always been pretty ambitious and entrepreneurial for as long as I can remember. I’ve always had my way of thinking about life, business, and my own career. Whether I was right or wrong about them, I didn’t really ever think about, it was just how I felt about them. The further I got into my career, the more and more comfortable I felt about my thoughts and perceptions. With the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, I’ve got to hear how other people feel and think from their own videos, posts, keynote speaks, and interviews. It was refreshing to see that I wasn’t the only one out there thinking the way I do. More so though, it was great to see how these people were having success in their life, both professionally and personally, and loving every minute of it.

1. Jason Fried – 10 Things I’ve Learned…

When I found out about Jason and his company 37Signals, I noticed that alot of my thoughts aligned with theirs. During this video he speaks about a few things that he learned and does, that I firmly believe in as well.

• making money on your own, don’t borrow
• charge for things, not only does it make you money, but it’s the measure of how good you are
• are you building useful things; is someone going to do something better by using this
• focus on what won’t change
• DIY, learn your way out of a problem; you should know at least a little bit about your entire business
• “I’m sorry”, this is discussed further in the following video
• what would you say ‘no’ to
• very few care about what’s behind the product as far as tech goes, they just care if it meets their needs at their price – “nail the basics”
• do less stuff and you’ll get more done

2. Gary Vaynerchuk – Stop Lying….They are too smart

This is about corporations covering up mistakes with false apologies or even legal jargon. My take when companies would do this is to ‘call BS.’ I hate when people aren’t honest and accountable to their own F ups. I realize that it’s a natural defense mechanism to try and make sure that you aren’t at fault, but if you really are, then own up to it.

3. Gary Vaynerchuk – Do what you love (no excuses!)

This is a keynote he did way back in 2008 about being passionate about what you do and there’s no reason, this day in age, that you can’t be successful in doing it. I’m a HUGE believer of this and I’ll tell you why. My first job real was at 14 as a stock boy at a fabric store. My Mom had worked there in the past and she got me the job after Newsday had “laid off” all the paperboys. I hated this job! Sorting bolts of fabric, organizing threads, and folding scraps of fabric was not what I wanted to be doing at 14. I vividly remember, as I sat on the floor at the zipper rack pulling new stock out of the drawers and hanging them up, saying to myself, “I will never do for a living, what I dread waking up in the morning and doing.” Now sure, there’s been mornings where I wake up and don’t feel up to do what the day has planned for me. But since that moment in my life, I have always loved what I’ve done. I’ve worked hard to make sure that my professional life (which takes up on average 30% of a person’s life) doing what I love.

4. Jason Fried – How Do You Define Success?

This is an excerpt from a video conference he had. I like his definition in that “do you want to do what you are doing, again?” Makes total sense to me. I like the ability to have flexibility in my life to spend time with my young godson, my girlfriend, and doing things I want to in my person life. My work affords me certain luxuries where my schedule can be flexible enough to do and take of the personal aspect of my life that I want to. Unfortunately this world is built around money and most people base the measurement of success off of how much money one makes. Sure I need to pay bills like everyone, but as long as I’m still able to spend time and enjoy life as I want to, that’s how I define success.

5. David Heinemeier Hansson – Planning is Guessing

This was a speak from Stanford University where he spoke about his views on startups. Now my degree is a BS in Information Management and for my senior project, I had to come up with an idea with a business plan and “sell it” to the professor. As I was writing up the business plan and coming up with the numbers over the first 5 years, I felt that it was a stupid exercise. How can I possibly know that by year 3.5 I’d be making money and that by the end of the 5th year, I’d be in the millions of dollars? It was ridiculous in my opinion. Way too many factors would come into play that I just felt that I was guessing. Spending all this effort in planning was a complete waste of time, and if my idea really was this good, why not just be doing it rather than talking about it.

6. Seth Godin – When To Quit

He talks about “The Dip” which is basically the point at which failure and success divides. One point he speaks about I firmly believe in. “Continuity of focus leads to success” which means to look at what is going on, are you dissipating your resources, taking on everything that comes your way. Or are you focused on one thing, your strength (my word would be passion). Because if you are focused, you will always beat that person exhausting their resources on everything. So strategy says, look at the people that came before you, see where the dip is and how they got from where you are to where they are. Most importantly, understand that they got there by quitting “everything else.”

7. Tim Ferris – How to deal with Information Overload

This is a keynote he gave and spoke to technology people about how to put technology down and get to the business at hand. I’ve had to do this many times, some of which has become habit now. One of which is to only check email, Twitter, Facebook, etc at set intervals and times. When I’m busy in code, as all developers know, if I get sideswiped with something else, it’s sometimes difficult to get back into the mindset before the interruption. So by doing this with your email, Twitter, Facebook, (insert tech distraction here), it allows you to focus on the important stuff, which is the task at hand. Another strategy which I’ve only begun doing is applying the 80/20 Principle to my work. Which asks “what are the 20% of activities and/or people that effect 80% of my desire result.” In other words, figure out those that are taking up all your time and how much they actually contribute to your goals. Focus on the activities to give you the maximum return. If you are spinning your wheels by doing some activity over and over and spending all day on it, did it bring you any closer to what your goal of the day was? If not, figure out a way to deal with that activity so that it doesn’t take you off track with achieving what you set out to do.

8. David Heinemeier Hansson vs Jason Calacanis
Jason’s Show Debating the bottom line

This is a long (about an hour) video, but if you have the time, I highly recommend watching it, especially from about the 18m mark to the 60m mark. This really sums up all of the above videos, which is why I enjoy watching this over and over again. Jason tries his hardest to get David into a corner and get David to agree with him on the fact that the objective, or end game, for business is to gain marketshare and valuation, in order to either get funding and/or bought out by a bigger player. David sticks to his guns and expresses over and over that he’s happy doing what he loves to do, making money to a point where he’s confortable and enjoys life, and from a professional standpoint, focus on what is his best idea, and reach the goals that he’s set out to achieve.

GTD and achieving Inbox Zero inside of GMail is simple. I’ve been using methods and aspects of David Allen’s GTD for several years now and when I ported my email to Google Apps (let’s face it, for the spam filters), I immediately went looking for a tutorial on how to set up GMail for GTD. I didn’t really like what was out there. It was a great way to do it, as I did it for a couple of months, but using the labs that they wanted me to, didn’t work on the GMail app on my Android phone or iPad. I wanted a way that didn’t involved relying on the web version of GMail, so I added my spin to the GTD and GMail world. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about How to Make GTD Automatic and spoke about how email is automatic and something I use constantly. This is the doorway into my workflow, whether it’s a task on a project, notification from Twitter of a new follower, or an invite out for a beer.

GTD can be as complex or as simple as you want to make it. GTD has so many awesome techniques to make sure you get your stuff done. Over the years I’ve learned, it’s not about the way to get things done, it’s about getting things done. So with that, I’m all about finding the best method that suits you. It took a long time for me to get to a point where GTD was comfortable for me. I needed a way that didn’t interrupt me, so I just altered things that I use on a daily basis in order to streamline my workflow. Aspects of GTD that I use are:
1. Inbox
2. Context (to an extent)
3. Archive
4. Inbox Zero (a weekly goal of mine I read about a long time ago on 43folders.com)

There are countless posts out there that explain each of these, but instead of doing that, I’ll just show you what I do with each of them. Inbox is, of course, my email’s Inbox. Everything I do starts there. Even if it’s me sending myself an email for something I need to do. When I get an email I asked myself: “Can I take care of this now?” If the answer is “Yes,” then I do whatever I need to do then go back to the email and click the Archive button, and that email is removed from my Inbox. If the answer is “No,” then it’s a matter of why I can’t. Is it a project based email? Am I not able to do what the email says because of where I am? Or simply, do I not have the time right at the moment to do it? Now comes the interesting part, what happens with that email?

This is where Context comes into play. If I get an email that’s a notification of a new follower on Twitter, but I happen to be reading it on my phone, I will just leave it in my Inbox until I get home, so I can properly follow back and send a personal DM to them. If it’s an email about coding up a piece of a project, I’ll place a label on it (if it’s not already on it) and leave it in my Inbox for when I can get to it. If it’s something that I can’t get to for a day or two, I’ll Archive it, but then have it Boomerang back into my Inbox then. Boomerang is a great GMail plugin that allows for scheduling of emails.

I mentioned adding labels to an email. What I will do is utilize the very powerful GMail Labels to organize my emails that are archived so that it’s easy to find an email based on a project, person and a keyword in the content. 9 times out of 10, the first time I run a search, I will find the exact email I’m looking for. I will set my labels up with the name formatted like ‘P/‘. This way it’s not only a unique string, but also a quick way to see that it’s a Project because of the ‘P/’ and then what project it is. Once I create a Label, I will also set up a filter as well, this way an email will get tagged with the label as it comes into my inbox. Most times, the filter will be based on who it’s from and some keyword in the email body, such as the project name for an obvious keyword.

Of course, this can be just the tip of the iceberg for you. There are things in my workflow that I didn’t go into here because it may not apply to you. I just wanted to give you a glimpse into another way of doing GTD, maybe even a simpler way as well. You have to find what’s right for you and what works for you. If you have to work hard to make GTD a part of your day, then you aren’t doing it right. It should be almost natural.

I took a screencast of a quick glimpse into how I go about my reading my email. Please feel free to leave a comment or questions about it below. As a GTD freak, I’d love to hear how others spin it.

*edit*
I couldn’t figure out how to get Vimeo to have my video as an HD video, so I apologize for the low quality of the video. But it’s still visible. If anyone knows how to do this, or a good process to have these screencasts, please feel free to let me know, thanks. I’ll use it for future posts.