Seth Godin had a good post called "What did you ship in 2010?", which listed out all his accomplishments for 2010 and asked readers to think about our own. Read it at Seth's Blog.
Sometimes we get caught up in the daily busy-ness of business and don't take a breather to see what we've accomplished. Well, here's a list of things we've done Broadstreet Consulting, 2010.
Spoke about Drupal at DrupalCamp SC, DrupalCamp Asheville, and BarCamp Charleston
On a personal note, it's been a year of wins and losses.
I lost my Dad at age 79, who was always a good friend and supporter, and my favorite golf partner.
I've seen my youngest daughter complete her first year of college with excellent grades, and make some great decisions along the way.
I've seen my son earn his college degree and demonstrate amazing talent in music, art, and Web design.
I've seen my oldest graduate from Law School at the top of her class, and demonstrate a servant's heart and a mother's heart with consistency and grace.
All in all, it's been a year to remember, and 2011 is shaping up to be even more memorable.
I'm a little late sharing this but I just wanted to take moment to mention the very successful Bar Camp Charleston (www.BarCampChS.org).
There were dozens of interesting sessions covering everything from Linux to Web Design to Salsa dancing. There were 3 Drupal sessions. The first was 'Intro to Drupal' which was given by Nikolai Burton. Nikolai runs Charleston Drupal Users Group (http://chsdug.org/) and also presented a session called "A Whirlwind World Tour of Film." Nikolai was asked to do this session att the last minute and he filled in admirably. He presented to a packed classroom of more than forty people and it was a valuable session.
My second Drupal session was at 5 pm when most of us were approaching a brain-dead state after a full day of information consumption. The Topic for this session was 'Drupal Next Steps - an Introduction to Drush & Performance Tuning'. By this time the Drupal crowd had thinned considerably. It didn't help that the time slot put me in competition with he very popular 'How to Make Your Own Beer' session. All in all, it was a very productive day and I want to express congratulations and thanks to the team that made it happen.
Like most people, I started doing business with GoDaddy a long time ago, when I first started registering Domain names. Actually, my first domain—sliker.com in 1997—was done through Network Solutions, who I think had a monopoly back then. But like most people, when GoDaddy came out with $9.99 domains it was irresistible. Since then I have had hundreds of domain registrations and renewals at GoDaddy, and two different hosting accounts for my various customer sites and my own Web properties.
While I still host my domains their, I left Godaddy hosting for HostGator In 2007, when I first got turned on to Drupal. GoDaddy has a very unorthodox hosting system and does not support standard tools such as CPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) for managing LAMP hosting. (LAMP is an acronym for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, which is the open source platform that Drupal runs on. At the time I left, the only way to install and run Drupal was using Fantastico, which was very limiting. Since then, they’ve improved their Drupal support—I recent did a job for [county bounty] and created a Drupal Multi-site on GoDaddy’s hosting system. It worked out fine, but it was difficult due to the odd programs and interfaces we had to use.
The other reason I was glad to leave GoDaddy was due to the company’s marketing and the general attitude of the owner, Bob Parsons. When I want to login and check on my domains, I don’t want to feel like I’m checking in to a strip club. Now granted, there is no pornography or nudity on the site, but there is a lot of scantily clad women and a general attitude that makes me feel kind of … dirty. I would just prefer not to participate, or limit my participation to a bare minimum.
Meanwhile… HostGator has been great! They have great service. Their ticketing system and engineers are top notch. Their phone support is very good. And I love the online chat support—I can talk to a tech support agent via chat at any time of day or night. The HostGator experience has been all good, and I highly recommend them for your Drupal hosting.
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?
Here are the some of the blogs I've read this week and thought were worth sharing:
www.drawncloser.com - My new favorite comic strip, drawn by my friend Jimmy Steen. You can also follow him on Twitter at @steenfamily.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/23-essential-elements-of-sharable-blog-posts/ - Chris has some good tips for making people want to share your blog posts. I'm probably not following any of them right now, but for those of you trying to get started with a blog, some good advice. Do as I say, not as I do, my Dad used to say...
I read quite a number of blogs ever week, but I spend very little time "surfing the Web." Instead, I subscribe to blogs using RSS, or Real Simple Syndication. My RSS Reader is Google Reader. When I find a new blog that I like, I subscribe to it by looking for the following image and clicking on it.
If you want to understand RSS better, you should take a look at this video from CommonCraft:
I had the pleasure of listening to theDuct Tape Marketing Podcast recently, the March 23 episode featureing David Meerman Scott, who recently wrote the book called World Wide Rave. David makes some really interesting points about how trends get started on the Internet. He provides numerous case studies on viral videos and blog posts, and how people have used these to build their businesses.
Examples included Blendtec, a maker of heavy-duty blenders who increased sales tenfold after creating some wacky videos and the site Will it Blend?, showing their blenders chop non-food items. He also talks about Helaine Smith, DMD, a Boston Dentist who quintupled her business after publishing a free e-book called "Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex."
My daughter Patti is in London, England for three weeks as part of the USC Law program, and we are keeping her daugther Eva. We have been having nightly Skype sessions where she tells us about her day and she is even able to read bedtime stories to Eva. It is amazing and it is free.
Downloading and installing Skype is easy. Patti has a headset that cost around $20, and at both ends we have a Microsoft Lifecam VX-3000 camera which is excellent and easy to use. The Lifecam has a camera and built-in microphone. Patti can use Skype-out features to call any phone for $.02 per minute. Typicall she calls us at home to setup the call and follows up with a video call a few minutes later.
Skype is a must-have for anyone traveling overseas.
This month we ran our first advertisement in the 
