Last week Gary Bloomer from the Tech Ranch, Shelby Nordhagen of NetNewMarketing and I made a trip up to Bigfork and Frenchtown to give our presentations on e-marketing.  It was so much fun!  The audience members were awesome!  They were really engaged and often contributed as much or more than Shelby and I did.  I should warn, however, that these seminars are pretty basic.  We have a lot of great information but anyone involved in the industry will likely know 95% of the stuff we cover.  However, if anyone reading this blog is interested in an introductory course on how to set up a WordPress site, search engine optimization, Google Analytics, AdWords, social networking or e-mail marketing should plan to attend one of our future seminars!  They’re a lot of fun, you can make fun of Gary and he can’t do a thing about it plus lunch is included.  Keep an eye on this blog or the official Orbit Montana site for dates and places starting again in the beginning of 2011.

I just finished working on a couple of projects that used GoDaddy as their hosting provider.  Please note the past tense.  GoDaddy is the most worthless hosting provider ever.  Not that their actual service is bad once the site is up, they appear to have plenty of hardware and bandwidth, but the getting the site up part is where they fall on their stupid faces.  Instead of using the industry standard cPanel GoDaddy decided to roll their own administration panel and incorporate it into their website.  I’m not against people trying their own thing, variety is the spice of life as it were, but reinventing the wheel by adding 18 different advertisements and making it oval is a pretty stupid idea. 

So let’s assume you have navigated the GoDaddy crap maze and found the area that allows you to create an ftp account.  Hooray!  You think you’ve won, but in fact GoDaddy has spat in your cereal and definitely not for the last time.  For some reason the completely automatable task of ftp account creation takes 30 minutes.  Why should something simple like FTP account creation take longer than say 5 seconds?  My guess is that the IT guys have been tasked with figuring out how to make bowel movements a sellable add-on and are too busy to work on trivial things like FTP account creation.

Thank goodness, FTP is finally set up, we have a bowel movement added to our shopping cart and we can start making our website.  Oh noz!  We forgot about the database we need to keep track of the number of kittens I kill while waiting for FTP accounts to setup.  But really, how difficult could it be to setup a database?  Assuming you can find the link to the database setup page you are required to create another user name and password pair for logging in to the database setup.  Once that’s done you can count on another 30 minutes to create the database and users.  Cheers GD!

Database is setup, we have FTP access, and finally we are able to get our site up and running!  Hahaha, nope.  GoDaddy doesn’t have access to some common PHP packages like Archive_Tar or the PHP FTP commands (those are the two that I know of for sure, I’m guessing there are probably lots of others).  Of course the fact that these packages are missing isn’t documented anywhere on their website so you get a silent fail and you have no idea why.  Not to mention that you can’t create folders outside of the web root, or change the web root location at all for that matter.  GoDaddy is a gigantic sore on the internet’s butt.  However, I did spend tons of time on their phone support line and never had a bad experience, so kudos on your support GoDaddy otherwise kindly go away.

August is officially over (according to Julius Caesar) so time again for another State of the Company.  The big news this month is that  we have expanded!  An incredible office opened up on the third floor and since things were getting a little cramped up in the tower we decided to get it.  Half of the new office is for Peter and half has been converted into an employee lounge of sorts.  It's pretty swanky.  Unfortunately I keep forgetting to bring my camera into the office so no pictures yet but as soon as I remember I'll update this post.

For any budding entrepreneurs out there considering whether to get an office or work out of a garage, definitely get the office.  Yep it's a little extra money a month (when we were first looking prices ranged from ~$275-$600 per month for single offices) but the ability to go somewhere outside of your house and focus on your work is priceless.

On the work front Kevin is still working diligently on his office management project.  In fact, due to a shortage of decent backup programs Kevin spent part of August porting Duplicity from Linux to Windows!  Woohoo Kevin!  While we are waiting on some items to be sorted out with the heat mapping project Peter has been working on a GUI for Git which sounds like it is coming along nicely although I haven't seen it yet so it could be a lie just like the cake.  Finally I have been finishing up the real estate search plug-in for Joomanager, making modifications to the Huffing For Stuffing site and working on my Orbit presentation. We are going to have a ton of great information at our Orbit presentations (the first two will be in Big Fork on the 22nd and Frenchtown on the 23rd) so come by if you can make it.  Also the next LAN party will be on Saturday October 9th at the Library.  See you next month!