Whenever I hear something that makes me want to read a certain book, I right it down in my Outlook To-Do list. I have an Agenda item called "Books to Read"-- I add it to my list.
This week, before I left on vacation, I checked my list and found Roy Spence's "It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For." I don't remember where I heard about this book. I thought maybe it was The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast or else Chris Brogan's Blog, but after a Quick Google search I don't think it's either of them. Regardless of the source, I'm glad I'm reading it.
Currently the front page of the Broadstreet Consulting site says:
Broadstreet Consulting specializes in helping small enterprises build and expand their business using the World Wide Web.
This is an accurate statement but not exactly our purpose. Here's what I'm thinking at the moment as a clear, succinct statement of our purpose:
Help small businesses and non-profits leverage the Web to fulfull their mission.
I will continue to work on this and refine this, but I think this is real close to what we are about and where our passion is and where we excel.
The first ever Drupal Camp South Carolina is coming up this Sunday and I am giving a presentation called "Which Drupal Modules Should I Use?" The presentation is geared toward people who are new to Drupal and lost in determining which of the 5000+ contributed modules to use.
Broadstreet has been in business in its current form for about 4 years. By all measurements, business is good. We have a handful of excellent customers that really understand the Web and how it can transform their business. We continue to grow, mostly by word of mouth, and we become more productive and more efficient, making more powerful and better looking websites, and branching more and more into the marketing end of the business.
So now we enter a new phase - old school paper-based advertising which supports a paper that supports our community. I like it. What do you think?
Monday night we had our third Drupal Columbia meet-up at the Richland County Public Library and had 7 attendees. It was exciting and very encouraging since the first two meetings were only 3 people.
Most people attending were new to Drupal but I was glad to see some representatives from Pure Fishing (www.purefishing.com) there. Pure Fishing is a company that owns several well known fishing brands, including Shakespeare, which has long had a presence here in Columbia, and Mitchell, which has a very attractive Drupal Site at www.fishmitchell.com.
We agreed to have future meetings at RCPL, 6:00 pm on the Second Monday of each month. The next meetings are April 12 and May 10. Be there or be square!
I had the privilege Friday night to speak to the MBA Program at the KV Institute of Management and Information Studies in Combaitore, India. I was a guest speaker as part of their International Business Expert Series, and my subject was "From Small Business to Global Business in a Small Town." I did the presentation over live video using ooVoo software, which is similar to Skype.
There was a full classroom (pictured above) and the students were very attentive and very engaged. Coimbaitore is a city of 1.5 Million people, so I started by trying to explain just how small South Carolina is and how small Wagener is. I then spent time talking about two of my customers, Busbee Truck Parts and Tyler Brothers, as well as my own home-based business, Broadstreet Consulting.
When talking about Busbee's, I told how they started selling truck parts on eBay before I built their ProStores store and eventually ported them to Drupal. When I asked how many of the students had ever purchased something online, I was surprised that NONE raised their hand. This points to a great opportunity for online businesses in India. There are over a BILLION people there and a great number, even young people, have not yet made an online purchase. I talked about how Busbee's is now selling parts all over the world using the Internet.
I also talked about how Tyler Brothers has used their Facebook Page to expand their reach among existing and new customers, extending their personal relationship to the online environment. I then proceeded to talk about Broadstreet and how we have collaborated with eNova Technologies to provide reasonably priced Drupal development services for U.S. clients.
After my presentation, we opened the floor to questions and the group had many excellent questions. We discussed Internet business strategies for another 45 minutes. Many thanks to Kumar Gounder and his great staff at KVIMIS for a great experience.
Recently I've had to do this. I create a Drupal Content Type using the Location Module and GMAP Module, I created a Location CCK field and started entering (or importing) location data into the field.
Afterward, I realized that I did not really want a CCK Location Field. Instead, I wanted to set the Locative information on the configuration page of my content type. I did NOT want to re-key my location information, and it turns out I didn't need to.
When you key in Location data to a location CCK field, the Location data is stored in the Location table. It is stored in the same place when you use locative information. The only difference is the data that is stored in the Location_Instance table. Instead of storing a reference to the for a CCK field in genid, it stores the node id in the nid and vid fields.
I ran the following query to take the node id from the rightmost characters of the genid and use them for the node id, and blank out the genid. Worked like a charm...
I wanted to get a tee time for golf a couple weeks back so I Googled Indian Trail Golf Course in Leesville, SC. It's a decent course, close to home, and very reasonably priced.
When I found their Website I was VERY IMPRESSED by the design and particularly the photography. Upon closer inspection I realized it was a Drupal site. After all that I was not surprised to find out that it is the work of Poieo Design, my friends Chad and Dave.
Congratulations Chad and Dave on another great-looking Drupal site.
I found out today that the myrcpl.com site is built with Drupal. Also found out that an old friend and co-worker from Syneractive (Scottie) helps to manage the site. It's a great looking site and very well done.
I love the Richland County Libary (or as Poof would say, the lye-berry), and I love them even more now. Next time you're in the library, tell them you love their Drupal site!
This month we ran our first advertisement in the 
