About a week or so ago, I was working on a WordPress project that called for an above average contact form. It needed to give visitors the ability to upload photos, receive auto responses and notifications, have built in spam blocking, and track submissions in the WordPress database.

After a bit of looking, I found cForms II, a WordPress contact form plugin developed by Oliver.

I began working with the plugin and was very quickly satisfied that I’d found a winner.

Now, in setting up this plugin, I made a mistake and was reminded of an important lesson, which became the inspiration behind this entry.

The contact form for this particular project was being used as an extensive questionnaire. As such, we decided to split it up over multiple pages to encourage people to make it all the way through. I came up with a way to do it, but it wasn’t working quite as nicely as I wanted it too.

So, I went over to the cForms II support forum and posted my challenge to see if anyone had any ideas or suggestions.

Oliver replied, letting me know that my request, though possible, was outside the scope of what cForms was meant to do. He also (and this is where the lesson comes in) pointed out the trend that people, developers especially, who’d been using and benefiting from the cForms plugin, had taken to the habit of removing credit for the work.

..And that’s what I had done.

Without even thinking it through, I had chosen to remove the credit link back to cForms from the client’s site. This seemed natural to me. The option was there; Oliver had been nice enough to provide an easy way to add or remove his credit link, and without stopping to think, I’d taken it off.

Now, sure, it’s all open source, we’re more than entitled to add or remove credits as we see fit, right?

Well, we certainly have that choice.. but is it fair?

In my case, there is no excuse. I’m a full-time web developer. I get paid for the work I do and I benefit directly from the work of guys like Oliver who’ve put their time and energy into developing a solid product. If it weren’t for him and guys like him, I’d have had to go and build the same thing from scratch.

Which brings me to the lesson that this served to remind me of, “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” Luke 6:31 As a Christian, no matter what I’m doing, whether it be work or play, I’m to treat others as I would be treated.

Now, being thus convicted, I began to give the situation some thought and was blessed with an idea. In my redesign of JonathanWold.com, I had finished up the work by adding a colophon. Traditionally, colophons were used in print media to provide details about the publication of the book. In the web, we’ve begun using it to provide details about what goes on “behind the scenes” of a website.

I’ve decided to start making the addition of a colophon a habit, in which I’ll provide a list of the resources and technologies used in the architecture and design of a website.

So, a big thanks to Oliver for his work on the cForms II plugin and for being very professional about the entire situation. It was a timely lesson for me to be reminded of and I thank you for it my friend :).

And finally, last but most important, I give full credit for my work, the good work I’ve done, to God. Were it not for Him, my conscience would have never been pricked and my sense of integrity would be non-existant. The things I’ve been blessed to learn and the people I’ve been blessed to meet, have all come as a direct result of His hand in my life. The mistakes I’ve made I take full credit for, but the lessons I’ve learned from them and the victories I’ve gained by applying each lesson learned, all are due to a God who’s been forever patient with me and never given up.

Have a wonderful day my friends. Remember, give the credit where and to whom it’s due.

Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold

P.S. Credit for the awesome illustration up top goes to my brother Joshua, who, in addition to his work with me and the rest of the team, does freelance illustration on the side.

I’ve been holding off on the tagging feature on a few client projects for this release and now that it’s in beta I’ll be looking forward to playing around with it and giving it a healthy test run or two before it’s ready for public consumption.

Also, thanks to Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin, I finally made the switch from my old-school permalinks to something a bit cleaner this evening. With quite a few pages indexed and pulling traffic, setting up 301 redirects was important to switching URL styles and there’s no way I wanted to go through and do it manually. Dean’s work brought it down to less than 30 seconds. We’ll see how it affects traffic (if at all) over the next few days.

Have a wonderful rest of the evening my friends.

Until next time,

-Jonathan

P.S. I started up a WordPress Tumblr awhile back. It’s still a bit small, but it has some good resources for anyone interested in WordPress development. Grab the feed and pass along any additions you may have.

I was first introduced to jQuery, oh.. somewhere around a few months ago. Having a strong background in niche marketing and then front-end web development (design/xhtml/css, etc), my “programming knowledge” had been limited to a basic ability to editing basic PHP, etc, and “making things work”.

A few client projects were calling for a bit of extra user-side interactivity, though, and I knew it was time to do some learning. I did some research and discovered jQuery. It looked really interesting and, being completely new to Javascript from a developer’s perspective, it offered me the ability to give my clients what they wanted without having to spend a whole lot more time than I had to learn how to do it from scratch.

After a bit more research and the discovery that WordPress, my current development platform of choice, now comes packaged with jQuery, I was sold. I began scouring the web for tutorials and started putting into practice what I’d learned.

Happy with the results and eager to learn more, I checked to see if there were any books available on the subject. A quick search on Amazon (at the time) left me disappointed. I kept looking, though, and not long after discovered that there was a brand new book on the horizon, appropriately titled, “Learning jQuery”.

I emailed the publishers and they graciously agreed to send me an advance copy of the book. It arrived not too long after. I had planned to set aside a few days to pour through it, but life had a few other ideas and a couple of trips, along with some rather big business moves, took away any spare time I had.

As such, I haven’t been able to review the book in detail, yet, but I’ve skimmed it through and am fully satisfied that it will be just the hands on experience I need to open up the jQuery platform to some healthy experimentation.

Once I’m situated in the new office, I (or someone else on the team) will be going through the book in detail and we’ll be sharing our experiences then.

Meanwhile, full credit to the jQuery team for developing an excellent platform. Keep up the good work guys! Also, full credit to Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg for their excellent work on the book and to PACKT Publishing for another fine release.

To get your copy of the book, buy Learning jQuery on PACKT’s website or on Amazon (a tad more expensive, but nice if you have Amazon Prime).

Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold

Just a little over a month ago, on July 10, 2007, an overwhelming growth in business led to our move from a bedroom office in our tiny home to a full sized studio in the nearby town of Woodburn, Indiana. My good friend Christopher Jones was staying with my family at the time and he was here to help with the transition.

We moved into the new office in record time and, after a few short days delay, were setup and running happily on a 16MBs Cable Internet line, courtesy of our friends at Comcast. This may not seem like a big deal, unless you knew that we’d been running the entire web development business on a dial-up line from home : ).

Here’s a few quick pictures of the office:

It’s hard to believe that was barely a month ago..

Our good friend Chris headed back home a few days after the move and we were back to work. Over the next few weeks, Joshua and I continued working like crazy, taking on and finishing WordPress projects as fast as we were able.

Despite our best efforts, though, we just weren’t able to catch up on things. Project demands continued to pile up and I knew that something had to give.

While attending HostingCon with my good friend Travis Walker, I became excited about the possibility of launching a WordPress hosting solution. The market was ready for it and my experience with hosting, along with a lot of experience on the WordPress platform, seemed to be a perfect match. I began sketching out ideas and putting together a product lineup.. then I stopped to think.

God began to speak to my heart and asked if this was really what I wanted to do. I stopped and thought about it. The money would be good. I already had several amazing opportunities just waiting for me to open the doors. The work, though hard, would be straightforward and I knew that with the right team, it would be a solid success.

But I kept thinking about it.. and then realized that, no, this isn’t really what I want to be doing. Taking on WordPress hosting, or hosting of any kind, requires a serious commitment of time and effort. I’m afraid of neither, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that setting aside the next few years of my life to pull off the kind of success that I saw possible, well.. my heart just couldn’t be in it.

So, I decided to scale back my operations and return to private web development. That meant closing the doors on a few larger opportunities and continuing to work on smaller scale projects with new and, especially, existing clients.

Not long after that, God began awakening in my heart a desire to get back to my roots in niche marketing. Being in private web development, though the pay not being nearly as good as it could have been, allowed me the time to start building up some of my old niche marketing projects as well as focus on new ones.

And then, 2 weeks ago, life began taking a turn.

I’d been praying for some time that God would open and close the doors for me on the opportunities He’d have me let go or pursue. During the first weekend of August, my brother and a good friend of ours made our way down to Louisville, Kentucky, to attend ASI (Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries). That Sabbath night, I met Jared Thurmon, the founder of PresenTruth.com. We began talking and I became excited as he shared his vision for the project that the Lord had given him. Another visitor stopped by his booth and began to talk. I stepped away and promised to return later that evening. As I began to walk away, I was suddenly impressed, distinctly, that I needed to go back. I asked God why, but He offered no explanation, just a further impression that I needed to return.

After a quick stop at another booth, I returned. Jared and I started talking again, and then another young man (whom I’ll introduce later) came by.

Over the course of the next few days, this young man and I began talking over the phone and ideas began to spark. Just under 2 weeks after our meeting, Joshua and I drove down to Southern Indiana to visit with this young man and his family. A few days after that, we made the decision to pack up and move south to relocate and work in a new office.

In just around 2 weeks, we’ll be finalizing the move and business over the next few weeks, months, and years, will take a very dramatic turn for the better.

How can I be so sure?

Well, while many of the details are yet to be worked out, I have absolute confidence in a single fact, and that is this: God has brought us together.

God heard my cry for help and, as I’ve been willing to put my best into the work before me, He has greatly blessed. Everything about this move and transition in business made a perfect and beautiful sense in a way that only God could arrange. I’m eagerly looking forward to this next step in my life and I’m looking forward to continually sharing how God has lead.

May your days be richly blessed my friends. Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold

I’ve had many ups and downs in my life. As I began work as a freelance web developer in early 2007, I was slowly but surely making my way back up, along a new path, from the most serious “down” I’d yet experienced.

During my stay as a volunteer in the Dominican Republic in early 2007, as I had been blessed with time, I began learning more and more about the world of professional web development. Through personal projects and helping friends, I began to put into practice the things I’d learned and putting my many years of earlier experience to good use.

My efforts were not in vain. God greatly blessed me and with each new project I would learn new things and strengthen still further the knowledge and experience I had. Soon there was nothing within my areas of expertise that I wasn’t able to tackle. As I had practiced a careful balance of my time, asking God each and every day for His guidance and direction, and as I was blessed with patient friends who were willing to help me and teach me new things and through a God-given desire for mastery of my field, I pressed forward.

Suddenly my financial situation, though still daunting, was beginning to look a whole lot brighter. I was blessed to meet and make some awesome new friends. I had a steady stream of new requests for work and a just as steady stream of happy clients (I was also very blessed with patient clients during my work overloads). Everything seemed to be going great.

But something wasn’t quite right..

In the midst of all this success, a slow and subtle change had begun to take place in my life. As the demands of the business grew, I found less and less time for personal Bible study and prayer.

I rationalized that all these demands on my time were a blessing from God and decided that He’d understand if I didn’t have as much time to spend with Him anymore. I reasoned that He would bless me and strengthen me nonetheless. Thus, satisfied with own explanation, I plunged my energy into work still further, rarely paying heed as the time flew by.

Then, it began to happen. Slowly but surely, as I spent less and less time with God, a change began to take place in the way I would act and think. Little by little, almost imperceptibly, I began ascribing some of the credit for my success to myself, to my hard work and my ability to learn.

That’s where I went wrong..

In those moments, subconscious as they may have been (I wasn’t yet at a point where I’d have taken credit “outloud”), I failed to realize that it is too God alone that honor and glory is due for the talents and abilities He has blessed me with.

I failed to realize that my success had been directly proportionate to the time I’d spent each day with God. There had been days in my past when, after choosing to start the day with God through prayer and study, no matter what the cost, the hours would go by and sometimes leave me with as little as a single hour in which to work. But what an hour it would be! I have never had a day where, when deciding to spend that extra time with God, that I have suffered any loss. Quite to the contrary, those days have been the most productive days as my mind has been quickened and my ability to grasp and understand the technical challenges presented me has been deepened.

In the recent weeks of “busyness”, I had forgotten that God is a God who knows no failure and when you work with Him, there need never be a mistake made. I took the weight of responsibility upon my own shoulders and began looking to myself to solve the problems that would perplex me.

And then Sabbath morning, July 21st, a video that my little brother was watching caught my interest and I went to my room, opened my Bible, and began to read the story of King Solomon.

He started out very humbly. His ascension to the throne after his father’s death and the turmoil that came with it, combined to help him realize the great weight of responsibility that now rested upon his shoulders. With an entire nation waiting to see what he would do next, he recognized his helpless and presented his case to God in prayer. He asked for wisdom to discern between right and wrong and God wondrously granted him his request. God blessed Solomon far above and beyond what the young king had ever asked or dreamed of. His kingdom grew strong and became one of the wealthiest kingdoms that ever existed. All seemed well.

Then, a change began to take place. Slowly but surely as he grew older and his wealth and fame increased, he began to depart from God. His success, which in the beginning he had recognized as being completely from God, he began to ascribe, bit by bit, to himself. The praise of other men began to get to his head and before he knew what had happened, he was living in idolatry, in sharp disobedience to God’s law.

But, God never gave up on him and though it took many years and there were severe consequences to follow, Solomon turned back to God and his life was changed from being a curse in his idolatry to a blessing in his repentance and his desire to warn future generations.

One of the many great blessings of the Bible is that we can see the results of choices made by character after character and, by God’s grace, we can learn from them.

My situation was nothing compared to what Solomon went through. I’m not “famous”, I’m certainly not “wealthy” in the things of this world, and my tiny virtual empire isn’t even a drop in the bucket to what Solomon had. Yet there is still a lot I can learn from his experience.

In order to be truly successful, I must put God first and last and best in everything, each and every day. God has blessed me so much.. I can trace His help back to my days of learning CSS and the desire that He gave me for mastery. I can recall challenges that would come up that had no seeming solution which would then lead me to ask God for help. He never failed me. Sometimes the answer would come within moments through a flash of inspiration, other times I would be blessed with the answer through a friend. In every case, no matter how challenging the problem, God always blessed me with a solution.

I don’t know what the next few weeks and months will bring, but I am beginning to realize now, more fully than ever, that I dare not go forward without God. I wouldn’t be where I am today without His help and if He’s brought me safely thus far, I know that He can lead me on.

May your day be richly blessed,

-Jonathan Wold

P.S. I’ll be attending HostingCon 2007 up in Chicago this week. If any of you are planning to be there, drop me an email or a comment. I’d love to meet you :).

1. How did you get started in the business?

Like Small Potato, I got started not in design, but rather development. It all started with.. Microsoft Word back in.. *thinks for a moment*.. 1999. I was 12 years old. While playing around with Word, I discovered that you could “hyperlink” documents. Adding a hyperlink to one document let you click on the link and it would bring up a new document. I was thrilled..

A few days later, I discovered Frontpage Express. I immediately began development on my first website and before long, I had put together an “Age of Empires” fansite for my grand parents, which I promptly put on a floppy diskette and mailed to them.

A few weeks after, I began work on an idea for a website online. I came up with this concept for “ePals” and began developing a community for young people like me to be able to connect and make new friends online. All was going well. I designed some nice buttons (I don’t remember how I did it), wrote the content, designed the layout, and was ready to go.

Then.. hosting.

How was I to get this little website online? Microsoft provided some advice on one of their sites, but their information wasn’t making that much sense to my 12 year old mind. I finally found a host and put my site online. Then, to my horror, I discovered that my image links were all broken. I couldn’t figure it out.. They pointed to the correct location on my harddrive but they weren’t showing up online. I was temporarily discouraged and let that little project go.

But it wasn’t long before I was back again. At 13 years old, I was introduced to the world of “pirated software”. Something hadn’t click in my mind that it might be wrong to steal. I became frustrated that all the good sites I’d try to go to to find software were full of pornography and other junk. So, I began development on a clean and friendly “warez” site. Within a few months, I had thousands of visitors on a regular basis and was meeting people all over the world. I kept working on this off and on until about 16 when my interest in running a community was usurped by a temporary (thankfully) interest in gaming.

At 17 years old, I was enrolled in an R.O.P. class and learned, for the first time, that Photoshop just wasn’t for editing photos. Man, I got excited. I went online and found some tutorials and began merging everything together that I was learning. 13 hours of solid work later and 3 days into discovering the power of Photoshop, I finished my first painting. I was hooked.

The next several years I advanced off and on in the world of web design and development. I started “SandStorm Studios” with my best friend Sterling Evans. I wrote an article in the local newspaper on keeping your computer virus free, which led to one of our first big design/development projects. We both became hooked. Then, life pulled us our separate ways and SandStorm was set aside.

In 2005, I began taking web design and development more seriously. Another best friend and business partner, Matt Geri, started work with me on Blue Flame Design Group. We learned a lot and finished a handful of small projects and then moved on to other ventures as our lives changed.

Also in 2005, I was introduced to CSS and WordPress. A client of mine wanted a blog built and, not knowing CSS or WordPress but, thankfully, having just been introduced to them some friends, I determined to learn and make the website work. From that experience, I wrote my first tutorial.

Then things went quiet for awhile as my life took some rather dramatic turns until the Winter of 2006 and Spring of 2007 when I started life as a freelance web developer.

Everything from my first website at 12 all the way to this year began adding up and after purchasing several excellent books and working on more projects than I had fingers and toes to count, I began developing and designing full time, which has led me up to today.

2. What kept you going in those early years?

Hard to say.. Entrepreneurialism is something that’s been in my mind since I was 10 years old and selling home-baked banana breads door-to-door. Having the ability to take an idea and make it into a virtual reality went hand and hand in my mind with the many business ideas that would come and go. On top of that, although it would often cause lack of sleep and serious red-eye, I was always up for a good challenge. CSS definitely presented that challenge and I eventually became determined to achieve a mastery of it. That striving for mastery, which has become an integral part of my faith, is a part of what kept me going back then and is completely what keeps me going now.

3a. Did you ever feel like you weren’t good enough or you would never make it in this industry?

The feeling I would get when I’d see excellent work done a peer of mine or someone with ability far beyond mine was an overwhelmingly strong desire to raise the bar on my abilities. Sometimes it would be crippling as I’d take on far more than I could chew and would become overwhelmed. But, the other times, it would help encourage me to keep learning so that I could put even better thought and energy into my work.

3b. How did you work through that?

I rarely, if ever, felt that I wasn’t good enough or ever doubted that I would make it, but there were definitely times when I’d be intimidated by my lack of understanding and, now and then, it would discourage me. But the reason I’m still here and, I’m sure, the reason many of my peers are still in this industry, is that we took those tough times as valuable lessons and kept moving on.

4. Do you look at others today and think “Wow, I wish I were that good”?

Hmm.. When I see excellent work done by my peers or people with talent and ability above what I currently have, it brings a smile to my face, a faster beat to my heart, and inspires me to raise my standards higher. There have been the times, as I mentioned, where it would be discouraging. But I’ve learned to take that and, instead, be encouraged by the fact that I have new things to learn and even higher standards to raise the quality of my work too.

5. How do you measure success?

There was a time when I measured it by the satisfaction of my clients. That worked well for awhile and still plays an important role, but I’ve learned that it’s deeper than that. I measure success in knowing that whether I was paid well or not, whether my client appreciates the quality of the work or not, I put my absolute best into the work. As it relates to my faith, I measure success in knowing that even if nobody else ever took any notice, my Father in Heaven has taken notice and at the end of the day, when I close my eyes to sleep, I can know that He’s said, “Well done.”

6. By your standard, do you think you are successful?

I’ve been blessed with success far beyond anything I deserve. I’ve been able to meet many wonderful people and form lifelong friendships and I’ve been blessed with an industry that “pays the bills”. If I never had another potential client ask me for work, with the experiences I’ve been blessed so far and the people I’ve met, I’d still be completely happy. Though some of the lessons along the way have been long and painful, I will continue to strive for mastery and put my best into the work. If it were just my standard, I would have probably given up long ago. But as I’ve been influenced by the high standards of my peers and, above all, by God’s standards, I’ve continued to go forward and to that I owe my success.

-Jonathan Wold

P.S. I’m tagging Matt Geri, Joshua Mitchener, two good old friends of mine, and a new friend of mine, Mike Jolley. Looking forward to reading each of your entries guys! :)

An interesting experience of mine as a developer has been my limitation to dial-up Internet access for just about a year now. My family and I have a nice little home out in the country and although our neighbors have been graced by DSL’s presence, our little home was ignored.

As such, I haven’t been all that big on downloading new programs. Internet Explorer 7.0 is still on my “to download” list along with a few other updates.

But, yesterday morning, I made an exception and downloaded a copy of Opera 9.2, weighing in at a relatively light 4.6
megabytes.

And so here I am, writing and (in a few more minutes) working a way on a new browser. So far, I’m impressed. Here are a few
things I like:

• “Speed Dial” - Typing Ctrl + T in Opera now opens the “Speed Dial” tab. In my short experience with it, I already see it as an improvement on Firefox simply opening a new empty tab.
• Mouse Gestures – My good friend Mr. Mitchener has informed me that this isn’t something new to Firefox. What impressed me, though, was the very thorough explanation given and the fact that Opera made it a point to make me aware of the features
• “Faster” – While speed is subjective, especially for those of us web developers on dialup, and though I may be just imagining things, I get the sense that Opera has a bit of a snappier response time than Firefox and certainly more so than IE.

That said, there are a few things that would take some getting used too. It appears that Opera doesn’t work so well with WordPress’s built-in WYSIWYG editor which quickly became a reason for me to dump the WYISWYG altogether.

Other than that, I’m impressed and will continue to experiment.

I’m still a big fan of Firefox and am even looking forward to playing with Internet Explorer 7 when I finally get a chance to download it (Maybe 8 will be out by then?). A primary reason for getting Opera is to add another level of testing for client projects. But the other big reason after that is “the bottom line.” How can using this browser make my life as a web developer easier? I will continue to experiment with Opera and see if I can find a solid answer for that. If I can, I’ll be hooked.

Cheers to the Opera development team. You guys have done excellently.

For the Opera users out there, web developers especially, any tips or suggestions you have to share from your experience are all greatly appreciated.

Alrighty, back to work! :)

-Jonathan