Javascript (aka ECMAScript 262) has long been in a love hate relationship with me (along with the rest of the world).

Back in the days of Netscape 4, it was my only method of creating dynamic content. I didn’t have access to flash (nor did I want to rely on plugins). I didn’t have access to a server side language like php. So I used javascript to create my templates. The result was what you can still see to this day on The SMRC.

Ironically, that template implementation might have been great for search engine purposes… but it wasn’t very practical all around.

I continued into the world of DHTML trying to develop my own basic game. I immediately ran into issues with cross browser compatibility (NS4 and IE4 did not get along). However, in the end, I conquered that battle as well, and the result was Mario Battle (still works in IE, but not FF or Chrome).

What I didn’t know until last night, was that while I was developing all of this, there was a standards battle going on behind the scenes with something called ECMAScript.

The standard would be revised soon after I built all this stuff (ECMA 3, 1999) and would result in things like getElementByID (the reason my stuff no longer works in Firefox).

And again, another thing I didn’t know until last night… Was that ECMA for all practical purposes was dying a slow death until someone discovered AJAX. AJAX brought it back to life, such that all the major players started optimizing it. Which brings us to where we are today… With Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari, all able to process ECMAScript (JavaScript) at very very fast speeds.

Now add to that, that a new standard emerged last year (didn’t know that either)… All the browsers are making great headway to implementing it… And something I find kind of cool is that IE10 is actually in the lead with following the relatively new standard (EcMA 5, 2009, according to Wikipedia and the insanely large ECMA Test).

So why am I sharing this with you…

Well, I’m considering looking at testing my skill set at writing something in ECMA 5. I’m still a firm believer that JS/ES shouldn’t be used on everyday webpages to make function… But for an App or Game, it makes perfect sense. Or even, something cool like Tumbledry’s Infinite Scroll Feature (Read about his Infinite Scroll).

Alex, if you read this still: Sorry if I caused your cache to go crazy when I generated the entire blog from top to bottom… I have a pretty cool word doc though… To bad it’s 2000+ pages, otherwise I would print it and mail you a copy… Maybe I still will (in 3 volumes). If you want a copy of it, let me know (doc or pdf).

Richard has been working his own ECMAScript project (MOSIM) as well. If I do start playing with my JS skills, odds are it will have something to do with that.

But the real reason I’m sharing this with you, is because I found this presentation on the future of JavaScript interesting.

Who knows if I’ll have time to play around with JS before the baby comes… He’s not here yet.

There’s a version of me that comes around this time of year. Thanks to Joe, Dan, Steven, Adeeb, and well… me being better at what I do (and because I’m married, it hasn’t quite “come out” like it used to.

It’s a version of me that stays at MSA for hours on end, eating delivered pizza, drinking way to much soda, and moving computers, servers, wires, and software wherever I think it should go. Everything has to be just right. Everything has to be perfect. The goal: rebuilding the entire MSA network from the bottom up for yet another school year of student abuse.

The last few years, I haven’t been doing the full rebuild as much as I would have liked. Either due to not having new hardware to worry about, or servers that were lasting longer than normal. So things have gotten missed… Something that has been long overdue was redoing the server rack.

In fact, I’m not sure the last time anyone redid the server rack… it has to be at least 5 years ago now… So this afternoon, and most of this evening, Steven and I tore apart the entire rack. We moved severs to new spots in the rack. We re-cabled the sucker… And now, for the first time ever, I can see the backs of the servers without cables getting in the way… It is shall we say, “Clean” again.

We also rebuilt 1 of the servers… 3 more are slated to be “redone”, and I’m debating doing the 5th server just for the hell of it. We’re not quite done rebuilding the one we did today, but hopefully Joe can figure it out from where we left off tomorrow. I’ll leave him a note tonight.

I’ll try post a network diagram a little later this week… It’s surprising how complex we make it over at MSA (although so dang cool too).

Oh, and some new computers come tomorrow as well (yay!)

I’ll try to give you a run down of what all I’m up to a little later this week (it’s going to be a week of code, because well… I’m wifeless for the moment.)

I think a lot of business owners get caught up in doing everything themselves.

It’s something I know I struggle with every day, and stems back all the way to my childhood. I can remember being put in groups of 3 or 4 and told to work as a team to solve a problem. The problem for me as simply that 2 of the 4 kids didn’t have a clue how to go about solving it, and most likely, I already had. So immediantly, I would try to “do it all” to insure that I got the A. Most of my team mates rarely minded, as they got A’s as well. The teachers on the other hand didn’t enjoy it as much… But they saw it everyday. The mixture of the group is key for everyone to come out ahead…

But more importantly, I shouldn’t have been doing it all myself. Someone in the group may have been better at part of it, and they should have been left to do that task, if they were dependable. The same is true in business.

Take for example JR.

When JR started, I was very much inclined to believe that we needed to do it all… and I was pretty sure we could. We decided to become our own webhost (because nobody else was doing PHP 5 at the time). We decided to host our own email, our own DNS servers, everything. We then sold our clients on it, as well as the sites we built them.

The problem was this: our primary goal was always to build sites. That’s what we enjoyed. So any time spent managing our webhosting was kind of above and beyond. I liked it, but it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing every day, and it was not helping me grow after a certain point.

It was about this time that I realized, I should have let someone who was doing nothing but hosting run the servers. It would cost less (they were more effecient), it would take less of my time, and I would most likely get better tools as long as I signed up for the right person. Now that the realization is complete, that’s exactly where JR has been moving towards… Our DNS has been moving to godaddy because it’s free with the domain. Our email has been moving to Google Apps because it’s free, reliable, and has some of the best spam filters around. Our hosting has been moving to Westhost, Linode, or Rackspace, depending on the need for support vs. customizability vs. cost. What has this done? It’s free’d up my time (as well as my employee’s time) to do other things.

The one nice part about the mistakes like this though: Although it took time to learn the skills, the knowledge gives me a better ability to communicate with web hosts, which is very key in asking them to perform the service for me… So doing it myself wasn’t a total loss… Just not the most effective use of my time and money.

So for those of you who love Self-Help books… just remember, they aren’t always the best use of your time.

For the last week or so, I’ve been working on a plugin for wordpress that allows people to create a viral marketing campaign using wordpress and Twitter. Viral marketing with twitter you say? How’s that work?

It’s actually quite simple, and it’s based on the “tell-a-friend” email scripts of old… It goes something like this:

1. Twitter user arrives at the site and sees an offer to get something they want. To get this offer, they must enter their twitter username and password.
2. Twitter user enters twitter username and password, causing a forced follow and forced retweet message to go out over their account. The message contains a link back to the site.
3. Twitter user’s friends (followers) see the tweet and click the link.
4. Back at 1 we go.

On top of that, your also building your own twitter list for future marketing campaigns.

Don’t believe it works? Check out the change in growth on Ann Sieg’s twitter account, starting on March 7th, 2009, she activated this very same code. You can see the change in her twitter growth… Quite drastic.

Of course, you have to achieve 2 things for it to truely work. One is critical mass… Nothing goes viral unless a large group sees it. The other is something to offer… People won’t give you their twitter username and password unless they trust you, or you get something out of it.

In any case, if you want to apply twitcapt to your own site and maybe achieve some viral traffic, check out http://www.twitcapt.com/

I spend way to much time in the marketing industry. Afterall, the goal of most of the websites I build are designed to market a business of some sort.

Well today, for the first time in awhile, I had the radio on. Jack FM (104.1) to be exact.

What I was suprirsed at was how 3 or 4 commercials got my brain to pull away from the monitor. To be honest, most of the time, the commercials were just playing the background… I wasn’t even paying attention.

But there were at least 3 today that got me to go “Is that what they really said”. For example:

There was a McDonalds Commercial that said something like, “American’s built this nation on <something>. American’s gave <blah blah, I wasn’t listening close enough>. And Americans invented the McDonald’s Chicken Sandwitch.” it was one of those things where my brain was listening just enough to know that the last thing didn’t fit, and my attention got pulled.

There was another one where an ad said “it was included in the vip gift bags at the Sundance film festival”. Why did that pull my brain? Because I’m pretty sure (not 100%) that this was an ad for some sort of facial medicine… My brain thought, why would I care if the people at Sundance got this drug in their gift basket? It made no sense, and sure enough my brain turned to listen  (although in this case, I missed the brand, so it still didn’t do the trick).

It makes me want to run an Ad tomorrow that completely doesn’t make sense… Or at least contains things that dont make sense… Just to see how many heads it turns at the work place… Did he really say what I thought he said?

In any case, I have to admit, I like working the with radio on now.

Today, was one of those days.

I like my job. I really do. I like my life. I like how things are moving. I don’t like it when my phone rings non stop all day. Lets use my phone log to talk about my day:

• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 7:00 AM 3 Minute – Call to MSA about a folder that needed to be picked up before school started to make sure students didn’t get there hands on it.
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 9:17 AM 94 Minutes – Phone call to start the day talking about policy and upcoming meeting.
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 10:51 AM 2 Minutes – Call to Joe to let him know it was ok to Work
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 11:00 AM 53 Minutes – Phone Conference with Client
• 4/28/08 WASHINGTON, DC 11:59 PM 1 Minute – Left Message for Client about website
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 12:05 PM 30 Minutes – Phone call with client I left message for about there website.
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 12:46 PM 2 Minutes – Call with client about a bug (brief)
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 12:51 PM 2 Minutes – Call to Amber not sure about what… Most likely about housing stuff.
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 1:37 PM 1 Minute – Call to Amber (No Answer)
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 1:38 PM 2 Minutes – Call from Amber to make sure I talked to the Banker.
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 1:52 PM 3 Minutes – Call to MSA to get my first question answered about tomorrows testing
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 1:56 PM 3 Minutes – Call to MSA to get a question answered about tomorrows testing
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 2:04 PM 3 Minutes -Phone Call with banker to give him the OK to talk to our real estate agent.
• 4/28/08 BLAINE, MN 2:07 PM 2 Minutes – Returning MSA’s call about email.
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 2:08 PM 3 Minutes – returning Ambers call about the banker
• 4/28/08 VM Retrieval 2:11 PM 2 Minutes – Voicemail Check… Blah
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 2:12 PM 17 Minutes – Phone call with WLC to help setup email
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 2:35 PM 1 Minute – Stupid solicator I told 6 months ago never to call me back.
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 2:46 PM 9 Minutes – Real Estate Agent
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 2:59 PM 33 Minutes – Client Phone Conference
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 3:42 PM 2 Minutes – Me Calling Real Estate Agent to find out if house was in fact still for sale (left a message)
• 4/28/08 ST PAUL, MN 4:30 PM 3 Minutes – Client call about opening a Google Checkout Account (which I was doing at the time)
• 4/28/08 INCOMING 4:39 PM 4 Minutes – Last call of the day of sorts from Amber… Just letting me know when I had to go look at the house we put an offer in on.

So yeah… my phone did not stop ringing… Over 2 hours (probably pushing 3 or 4 of talk time, with over 20 phone calls). The evening was much better though… In fact, if you caught on to the gist of what some of the phone calls were about… You might have guess what happened…

Amber and I put in an offer on a home!

It’s a townhome in Woodbury, very close to MSA, Church, City Center, etc. I would give you more details, but I have decided not to get my hopes up until the offer is accepted. More on it to come in the coming days.

So this is actually more a photo post than it is something I got for Christmas… but thats ok, I’ll continue.

I had what I would call my first business Christmas party this year. It wasn’t a party put on by JR, but by one of my clients. All in all it was a lot of fun, food, and friendship. The evening began though with what would best be described as a “Roast”. Each one of us (there are like were called up to the front, and embarrassed to some degree. It was all in jest, and I enjoy it immensely.

To let you know how I was roasted, it basically went something like this: Because of my hard word, and my ability to take charge and make sure things get to the way they need to be (not to mention my strong German heritage), I was dubbed “Commander Gehring”. The picture above is me being a fully decorated soldier.

I’m not really sure what else to say about the event other than that… It was good fun, good food, and I hope to be able to do it again next year!

There’s a part of me that really wishes I had a website as popular as some of the ones I work on. This morning, one of website I worked for launched a sign-up for a free webinar. They sent out an email about it to their list, and within 3 hours, they had maxed out the registrations at 1000. Over the next 30 minutes, they had already had 50 people sign up on the “overflow” list.  Those are impressive numbers for a saturday morning.

There not quite as impressive as the number of people who signed up on engadget yesterday for any of their various give aways… but still… very very impressive from my point of view.

I added twitter to my site. I don’t know how often I will use it (or if I will give up on it after a day or two). It’s nice to be able to update my blog with short quips simply by IMing something to a bot. I wouldn’t want to write full posts using AIM, but this seems to work well for my purposes. I’ll have to find out if there is a way to archive twitter.

I watched Numb3rs for the first time on Friday evening. The reason: Wil Weaton (Weasley Crusher) was on it. Wil, to some degree, puts out the persona of everything I aspire to be. Successful in arts, geekiness, love, and life. I think I’m getting there, although my art is no where near as cool as his writings and television appearances are.

Sometimes I feel I’ve lost my zanniness. I look back at some of my older blog posts and think, “what was I thinking.” Maybe this is all part of growing up. Maybe it’s part of being beaten into submission by society. Maybe I’m hiding some part of me.

Perhaps, I should do something zanny with my day. What better time than a time to do it than on a day that *should* be a holiday.