I wanted an easy way to manage the two identities so I created a simple bash script to handle that for me. Enter setgit. It’s rather easy to use. I just created to .gitconfig- files. One called .gitconfig-me and the other .gitconfig-wk. To switch between them I just run setgit.

To load my personal info into .gitconfig I run:

setgit -f me

I could also decide to modify the .gitconfig file and create a new identity. To create a new file or save changes bask to the original I run:

setgit -s me

To create new file change ‘me’ to whatever you like.

Check setgit and let me know what you think.

As companies, and employees of those companies, we want to make our customers happy. I do not think you will find a single person in business that does not believe that happy customers are one of the keys to success. After all happy customers keep coming back, right? But at what cost are we willing to buy that kind of loyalty?

In my years of working for a service oriented business I have noticed that when a company tries too hard to focus on their customer they end up not really focusing on any of them. For me the issue that seems to derail the notion of “focus on the customer” is every customer is unique in more ways than they are alike when compared to every other customer. Maybe I’m taking it too literally, but it is what I believe.

What happens is a company releases a product to it’s customer base. Then the customers start adapting it to fit their own business and processes. No matter our intentions as creators our application are not and never will be a silver bullet for our customers. For a company that wants the customer to drive the product’s evolution is then flooded with requests for changes. A few of these requests will be in sync. The next group will be variations on the same themes, but will be different if not behind the scenes from the user perspective. And the rest will be completely different. As a company how do you choose what gets put into the pipeline?

Having spent the majority of my career with only two companies I probably do not have enough anecdotal evidence to be one-hundred percent positive in my theory, but I am reasonably sure most of companies in that position try to group the requests that are alike and then order by popularity. It is a typical divide and conquer mentality. Try to find the commonality between items, twist that into a handful of enhancements, and then start with the ones that will please the most people. The truth is your biggest customers operate do not have the same processes as your smaller customers. So by falling into this trap you have already moved away from the “customer is always right” to something along the lines of “the customer is sometimes right.” The bad news is that in most of the cases your changes will be skewed to your biggest customers leaving the rest of your customers to wonder if you care about them at all.

I’m sure some of you (probably 1 out of the 3 people that will actually read this) are thinking I’m an idiot because everyone knows you cannot please everyone. And why wouldn’t you want to please your big customers? They are responsible for a bigger proportion of revenue. And of course, you would be right. But that argument doesn’t really support the notion that the customer is always right does it? When you design to your biggest customer’s workflow you are quite likely providing hurdles for the small clients. It stretches the meaning again to be more like the biggest of your customers are always right, and the rest…well…have to deal with the cards are dealt.

So we have created a roadmap based on a small section of enhancements that groups of our customers can agree on. Again our biggest clients probably hold a majority when it comes to source of influence for the changes, but we are making the product better. After the next release things are still not quite right, so the requests for changes come again. And once again we try to isolate the requests into categories and combine them so we can focus on a few key features and not fifteen-hundred. We release again, and we start the circle over. By now, if we have not been careful our focus has shifted completely to the biggest customers. They are going to be the ones we are already trying to please the most. They have the big war chests and influence that can that can change our future. It’s just natural if not subconscious to focus on them. By the fourth or fifth iteration that sense of entitlement has set in with those that have been involved with the process. Because while we may not have been paying specific attention to who was at the center of our requests, our customers have. They know we have been paying attention to them since many of the changes have been born out of their suggestions. How do you say no to your biggest customers after they have been getting service like that?

I take a different approach to customer service partly because of the world I have grown up in has really started to embrace open collaboration, and partly because we are becoming more social in how we conduct business. Say what you will but I think services like Twitter have completely altered the business world. Companies and Customers have become equals in the process. There is not longer a counter in-between us, but a table to share idea. Both sides are realizing that we they partner in the process they can both reach their goals faster and more efficiently than they could alone. I like this vision and I truly believe that if we embrace it we will be successful.

I would suggest that the statement that the customer is always right is a half truth if even that. It should be used to focus company’s mission and high-level goals, but should have a very small say in the actual creation of our products. We, as companies, should design our products around our customer’s goals but not their processes. I am not saying that customers should have no say in the design process or that we should not as creators consider our customers processes but think that should be more of an exception to the rule and only when there is a true major consensus among customers as to what could make our products better.

Henry Ford is reported to have said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” I think that one line might just be the single biggest argument against the “customer is always right” mantra. The truth is as technologists we are better at designing creative solutions than our customers. It’s not because we understand or even claim to understand the business better than our customers but because we understand the technology behind the solutions better. We are good at looking at a problem and then using technology to solve it. We can see the future beyond a faster horse, or should be able to see if we stop focusing on the present.

I think it’s time for companies to stop being overly preoccupied with our customer’s day-to-day processes and start building solutions for their future. If our customers needed to dig a holes and we could provide them with a shovel what should we focus on in the design phase? If we focus on integrating that shovel into their process we will inevitably design a shovel that only works with a subset of our customers. However if we focus on designing a shovel that digs faster, and removes more dirt with less effort on their part we can deliver a product that 100% of our customers can use. As long as we take the time to understand our customer’s goals, and shift our mission from trying to build products around their process to providing the solutions they need to meet their goals I think we can deliver some great products.

I believe a lot has changed since my parents – who have both retired – entered the workforce. Hell I think there has been a tremendous amount of change since I entered the workforce. And a lot of that change, in my opinion, has been brought about by the industrial revolution.

I know what your saying. How could an event that occurred over a century ago continued to change the workplace in the last couple of decades. Well, its quite simple. The industrial revolution continues today. Look around at the economic landscape and think about what was a major outcome of the industrial revolution when it began. I’ll give you a hint. It was all about technology. I believe the industrial revolution had a lot in common with the Big Bang.

What started with the industrial revolution was an expansion of the economy. Not in terms of growth, but in distance. Just like the Big Bang started an outward expansion of the universe. The IR started an outward expansion of the economy. At one time people lived the majority of their lives in a small circle. Everything they needed was in a small radius from their house. The IR change all that by enabling the consumer, supplier, and manufacturers to no longer need to be within a short distance from each other. That gap has only continued to expand with time. Now our economy is global. A company in California can have its products manufactured in China and the consumers of those products can be anywhere in the world. Some people will tell you that is a bad thing. But I think it is awesome.

Just like the arrival of machines on farms ousted farm hands from the fields and forced them into other careers, this widen gap has allowed us to expand our careers beyond repetitive tasks. I have always bene a believer in efficiency by putting people to work doing what they do best. And frankly we are best at creative solutions. For repetitive tasks, machines will always be able to complete the job faster and more efficiently than humans will.

I know a lot of people will see that as a problem and there are those that will always fear technology will one day steal their job. Or that someone in a country on the other side of the planet will replace them. But those people are not adapting to the changing world. They are simply trying to hold on to the past much like the Music and Film industries appear to be doing. But I think it is an awesome opportunity for us to really start having jobs that can be fun and possibly change the world.

Unfortunately I do not believe business and management have yet embraced this new business model. Management at most companies appear to focus on trying to control the machine instead of letting it take on a life of its own. It will be a hard thing to give up. Management has always been about control. The idea of management may actually ruin counter to what I and others before me are proposing. Control can stifle creativity. And these days, in this new Digital Age creativity is more of an asset than it has been before. We need to encourage creativity. We need to let it run wild in our companies. While I will not argue that a company can grow with strict controls in place, I am willing to bet with employees are allowed to let their imaginations carry them to uncharted places that growth will be exponential.

There is a great video on youtube that covers part of a talk given by a man name Daniel Pink, called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He also has a longer version of a Ted Talk he gave on the subject. I think it highlights the kind of organizations we need to be building towards in order to maximize our efficiency both as employees and as companies.

I truly believe the path to efficiency is through creativity not control. I believe that we can build great companies and deliver great products if we focus not doing a few things better but by not being afraid to do everything different. And I believe that if we harness our strengths as humans and not just mimic machines we can change the world.

Lets say you want to do something like this:

The easiest thing to do is simply override the topbar selectors. Because of the nature of cascading stye sheets we do not need to include every element included in the topbar selectors within the bootstrap.css file, just the ones we want to change. In this example I created my own CSS file with just the selectors with the elements I needed to modify. This is preferred to editing the bootstrap.css file directly because it enables you upgrade the bootstrap framework without breaking your customizations in the future. So I created a css file, I called mine style.css, and included the following in style.css file:

.topbar-wrapper {
    position: relative;
    height: 40px;
    margin: 0;
}
.topbar-wrapper .topbar {
    position: absolute;
    margin: 0;
}
.topbar-wrapper .topbar .topbar-inner {
    /* Rounded Top */
    -moz-border-radius-topleft:4px;
    -moz-border-radius-topright:4px;
    -webkit-border-top-left-radius:4px;
    -webkit-border-top-right-radius:4px;
    border-top-left-radius:4px;
    border-top-right-radius:4px;
}

Then to ensure your css overrides the bootstrap css all you have to do is include your css file after the bootstrap css file in the head section of your html.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.min.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" type="text/css" />

The last step is body of your html. Just include your logo, and/or div that you want to contain the content you wish to display above the topbar. Like this:

<div class="container">
<a href="/">< img src="images/logo.png" alt="Jeffrey Stone" title="Jeffrey Stone" ></a>
<div class="topbar-wrapper" style="z-index: 5;">

That all there is to it. Other customizations to Twitter Bootstrap can be carried out in the same way allowing you to customize Twitter Bootstrap to fit you next project. This code has only been tested with Twitter Bootstrap 1.4.

You can view the live demo.

Git is a little more contained. No servers to setup. Actually not much setup at all until you want to publish your project at Github.

I am on a Mac so these instructions are for Mac, although its just as easy to setup on your PC.

First, you will need to grab git. You can find the dmg file at code.google.com. Or if you have macports installed on your system you can just do the following:

sudo port install git-core

Once you have that installed we will need to do a little configuration. The following commands just setup the default user and email that will be included in the git files. From the command line you will need to run:

git config --global user.name "Joe User"
git config --global user.email "joe@user.net"

After that we are ready to setup project. You will want to do the next commands from the directory your project is in, so you will need to cd to the directory:

cd /home/jeffrey/newproject

Once you are in the project directory run the following command to setup the repository.

git init

After we have the repository setup we need to add the files. The following command add the files to the staging area.

git add .

Now that the files are staged we need to commit the changes to the repository. What ever you put in the quotes should briefly describe the changes.

git commit -m "First Commit"

After that everything is setup. After you make changes and are ready to update the repository just do the following.

git add .
git commit -m "Fixed typo in index.php"

The period on the git add line simple means include all files. Instead of a period you could just specify a specific file as in “git add index.php”

Once you have got your initial repo going with git, now is time to start using it to it’s full intention. I suggest you read Andrew Burgess’s Getting Good with Git. He goes into branching and checking out branches which is where the true power lies in my opinion. Git can literally manage multiple versions of your application in one directory. The files that are visible in that directory are set by Git and based on what branch you have checked out. Git makes it very simple way to manage your source code and without the headache of setting up a repository on a server. There is no reason why you couldn’t be using Git to manage your source code today even if you have no desire to ever push that code to a public repo like Github.

Git definitely makes version control easier. If you are struggling with the concept of version control and how to set it up and use check out git and put Andrew Burgess’s Getting Good with Git on your reading list.

I am not a designer so one of the tasks that seems to drain my spirt is designing a layout. Don’t get me wrong. I am very opinionated about usability of a layout I just hate coding the layout. Then I stumbled on the Twitter Bootstrap project. If you have not seen this open source project from the Twitter team you really need to… especially if you are like me and hate building the UI. I won’t go into the particulars because U trust you can all read for yourself. The Bootstrap framework has some great documentation. It basically contains 90% of everything you would need for the majority of sites and is easy to use. Customization is not as easy, but as long as you understand CSS you should be fine.

So if you need a new layout for your site or application I suggest checking it out. If it isn’t perfect it will at least be a great spring board.

First was a redesign on katherinestone.net. Previously the site was a simple photoblog. We updated it so it could not only have a portfolio but also a blog for news about her work, and a store. I think it looks good and does an excellent job of showing off her images. The change was in part due to her first solo photography show which officially opens today.

Second was a redesign of angel-photography.com. The biggest reason behind the change was I wanted to not only get rid of the flash slideshow on the main page (I hate flash) but also update the site to HTML5/CSS3. I used jQuery to power the slideshow to ensure it was accesible on any computer or mobile device. The layout was slightly modified in the process to give it an updated look, but the majority of the content remains the same.

If you get a chance to check them out, let me know what you think.

Google+ really is like Twitter, Facebook, and tumblr got together, got drunk on cheap beer, fooled around, and the result of that one night of drunken debauchery was a social media love child. Like a special edition love child that only a few people can play with. Really it’s the Jesus of love childs with only a few people knowing the location of the manger so can take in peak and the new arrival in the social media world. Despite the much disliked exclusivity right now I think they might be on to something.

First off I really like Circles. The concept is not entirely new. Diaspora used a similar concept for setting up permissions, and to a lesser extent Facebook has groups. But for me it’s the combination of the privacy aspect with the intuitive editor. It’s just a great interface and it gives much more control of your content based on groups you interact with. Our social interactions offline are not the same so why should they be online? I only seldom share the same stories or details across every group I interact with offline. I tend to make some things private based on my groups and this is where Circles really shines. It mirrors offline social interactions in an online environment. And I think that is a first for any social media network to date. Not to mention, the whole idea that I define my relationships differently than the people I share content with is also refreshing. We no longer have to be separated into just followers and non-followers, or friends and non-friends. Now there is a social media site that will let you group your friends based on the beer they drink or their hair color or even based on the number of letters they have in their name. It’s like an OCD person’s dream come true.

Speaking of privacy I think Google’s intention and implementation of privacy is radical enough that many people are having issues. It seems there is an expectation around things like mentions and sharing that is causing some issues manifested in content being shared with a group larger than expected. I really think this comes down to people not bothering to understand Google+ and just jumping in and using it like they have used other social media sites. I see this same mentality in people migrating from Windows to Linux. It results in a lot of frustration for the user and the majority of the time those people say Linux is hard and go back to Windows. I’m not sure it serious enough to turn people off, but I think it will continue to cause some frustration. Developers will no doubt take the blame for the frustrations, but I tend to think it’s a user problem. Although that could just be the developer in me talking. Back to Google+.

The idea that I could really use it as the landing page for my online identity or even my blog is somewhat exciting although I’m not ready to go all in with Google+ myself. You really can’t do that with any of the other social media sites out there with the exception of Tumblr. Kevin Rose already made the move according to a twitter post. So it might give Google+ a slight edge when the masses join up.

I’m not sold on the idea of hangouts. Its a cool concept and it feels better implemented to me than Facebook’s Skype video calling, but I’m just not sure people outside the online celebs would use it. I could see it as a collaboration tool, but I wouldn’t get on a video conference call with 10 other people just to chat. Perhaps if Google+ was my only access to real-time, face to face social interaction with my friends it might be exciting. I would rather head to the bar with 10 of my friends. Of course they would probably just be hanging out Google+ on their phones so maybe Google was on to something.

I would love to be able to set a circle as my default stream. That way I can start my visit with the content I am most interested in and then work my way down the gradient. Now I just get everyone. And while I follow people that doesn’t mean I need to know their every move. It just makes it east to check in. Perhaps that already exists, but if it does I haven’t found it. Also I have not found a place to modify which events generates a automatic “post.” It would be nice to control that as well. I don’t think changing my profile picture is worthy of a post to my stream. Outside of that I would love some integration with Twitter and possibly some of the location based services.

I know a lot of people divide their use of social networks along product or service lines based on the content. For example someone might use Facebook for Family/Friends and Twitter for work. But a lot of the same people I follow and interact with on Google+ I follow on Twitter but many or not. For whatever reason (techno-phobic, Google-phobic, communist) some people just won’t be on every social network so why not integrate the systems so I can cross post without actually having to work to cross post. I hate the idea of having to post content to multiple services. If I re-tweet something on Twitter I want it to post to Google+ because the likelihood of me actually posting the same content on all the sites I use is zero. Perhaps we wont see that until we get Google+ API is released, but hopefully it will be soon. Personally I believe it will only help because I don’t think there is anything Google can do that will cause people – and by people I mean non-early-tech-adopters – to completely abandon their current social networks. So why not make it easier for them to start using Google+ without having to really use it. Perhaps it would grow on them. The only way Google would ever beat Facebook at this point is slowly overtime.

Overall, I think Google+ is off to a good start. I look forward to see what improvements they make. I think this social media love child has the potential to grow up to be a social media messiah of sorts. At the least they have my attention.

This really isn’t all that surprising to me. The business world has always been slow adopters of new technology and the ideas behind that technology. Many times when technology first hits the masses they see the negative. VCRs faced a storm of criticism before videotape tape rentals and sales overtook box office sales and even became savior of some films that struggled to find a home at the cineplex. Consumers flocked to services Napster, and the idea of downloading music long before the Studios decided to embrace the new delivery method of music. And Social Media has not been any different.

It easy to see which companies are really using Social Media to drive sales and service, and those just adding to the noise. There are the companies like Old Spice – who doesn’t know the Old Spice Guy? – who integrate Social Media into ad campaigns that attract millions of views or the companies like Google and Southwest Airlines that actually interact with their customers via Twitter. Authors like Joe Hill, Cassandra Clare, and Richelle Mead use Twitter to interact with their fans providing something that once was only available if you caught them at a signing or conference. The power of Social Media is in the bidirectional conversation. Companies that use it only as a free ad platform are “doing it wrong” as the internet catchphrase goes. Social Media gives you not only the ability to see what people are saying about your brand, but gives you another avenue to get feedback from them and make them feel part of the process. There have been many stories of the past couple of years of incidents where customers were having a problem with a product or service. In each one of these people were having trouble getting results through the normal channels and used Twitter to reach out to the company and the problem got fixed quickly.

The company I work for started “using” Twitter and Facebook about two or three years ago. At first the strategy didn’t make sense to me. Ok the strategy still doesn’t make sense to me. First off, our customer base is not that young and in our industry technology adoption has been slow if not non-existent at times. Our online presence only really started to take off in the last 6 years or so. Online transactions are finally starting to outpace the face to face interactions. We continue to use both Twitter and Facebook as an ad platform blasting those few customers that follow us with blurbs about what is happening that day. There is still no Social interaction with customers. The conversation is still just one-way, and most likely as effective as the emails or faxes they send out. This use of Social Media is all too common.

Companies have been in a frenzy lately hiring people to be Social Media experts. The question is what are all these so-called Social Media experts doing? My guess is while they enjoy using Social Media they do not get the power behind it or how to leverage it in a business environment. There are some people that do get it. Josh Berthume is one working to change the world or at the least how companies use Social Media. But my guess is most of these so called Social Media Experts enjoy getting badges and sending out tweets about the shoes they just bought or the food they just ate, but they have no idea how to integrate it into customer experience. They have forgotten the important part of the phrase of Social Media is the word Social. Until companies start embracing the Social interaction that users of the Social Media services feed on, they will continue to fail at integrating it successfully in their business.