Hear us on Your Website Engineer Episode 51!

Randy and I were return call-in guests on a popular WordPress podcast that aired Nov 23, 2011. Listen to us discuss cloud computing with Dustin Hartzler of Your Website Engineer on episode 51.

Your Website Engineer has served many thousands of downloads to the WordPress community and ranks within the top 10 when one searches for the term “WordPress” within the Apple iTunes Store. This episode marks Dustin’s 51st podcast on how to build your own quality website and runs for approximately 30 minutes.

In this episode we discuss our recent blog post Takeaways from Cloud Computing Expo 2011, and report back on cloud computing and cloud application concepts from the recent conference.

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Takeaways from Cloud Computing Expo 2011

Thanks to our wonderful hosting partner, Rackspace, beAutomated received free admission to this year’s Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara. I attended for 2 of the 4 days. While this conference is more enterprise IT focused, there were plenty of small business and software application takeaways.

Before beginning my notes, I wanted to express my delight in gaining confirmation that our niche business of building custom WordPress plugins provides immense value to businesses and organizations of all sizes. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) like ourselves accumulate years of knowledge that simply get lost within larger IT operations. ISVs provide affordable niche skills to clients who are concerned with turnaround speed. The value of custom core applications for businesses far exceeds anything that the cloud itself can provide, simply due to the nature of cloud software being contextual for a wide audience. Also, automation is considered essential for businesses of all sizes to control operating costs and enable superior, unique functionality that puts users in the driver’s seat. Finally, because change delivers business value, we’ll always have work in our industry!

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Introducing beCounted

Yesterday we released version 1.0 of beCounted to the WordPress community via the WordPress.org Plugins repository. beCounted creates a multiple item count up widget based on annual statistics showing the number of occurrences since the page was loaded.

The default statistics that come with beCounted are a set of mythological creatures, including dragons, mermaids, unicorns, and zombies. Administrators can add any number of statistics to this counter, can customize all of the styling, and can add a custom credit blurb beneath the counter display with the ability to add hyperlinks.

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Hear us on Your Website Engineer Episode 48!

Randy and I were return call-in guests on a popular WordPress podcast that aired Nov 2, 2011. Listen to us discuss project management with Dustin Hartzler of Your Website Engineer on episode 48.

Your Website Engineer has served many thousands of downloads to the WordPress community and ranks within the top 10 when one searches for the term “WordPress” within the Apple iTunes Store. This episode marks Dustin’s 48th podcast on how to build your own quality website and runs for approximately 30 minutes.

In this episode we discuss our recent blog post What’s in a Phone Number, an explanation of the differences between marketing requirements and engineering specifications for project management.

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