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I am making the switch to Magento.  In the process I'm sure I'll be learning a lot.  I'm going to be posting what I learn here for a couple of reasons:

1. for my own documentation, so I can look back and see what I did
2. for your instruction, if you run into the same problem I did I hope this helps.

Custom.css is not included by default.

Add the following line to your page.xml

<action method="addCss"><stylesheet>css/custom.css</stylesheet></action>

Then you will need to update your cache

Go to the Admin.  Click System >> Cache Management.  Select "Refresh" from the list and click save in the upper right. 

At this point, any changes you see in custom should start appearing in you site.

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Healthcare!  The mere mention of it can make the hair on the back of you neck stand up.  Recently, in my move to become self-employed, I dug into the topic.  Thankfully, I had a leg up by knowing that “Christian Medical Bill Sharing” programs exist.  The concept is pretty simple: Christians, who share convictions and beliefs, band together to help each other cover the cost of their medical bills.  As one brochure puts it, it is very similar to the Amish building a barn.  They band together to help each other in a time of need.   These programs are not motivated by profits, but by a desire to help their fellow brother and sisters.

There are several programs out there.  In the PDF below I compare the programs on several points that were important to me and my family.  The document makes no claims to being totally accurate, but I hope that it speeds you along if you are investigating these types of the share programs:

Download Comparison PDF

Eventually we had to choose a program.  We chose Samaritan Ministries.

Why We Chose Samaritan Ministries

Transparency

I loved the fact that we were going to send our money directly to the person in need.  While this creates more “bookkeeping”, it is also a much better way to stay connected to the reality of people and their needs.  Because we sent our monthly “share” to an actual person, there is a very transparent yearly fee that covers the administrative costs of managing the lists, helping members and sending out the newsletters.

Simplicity

Of all the programs out there, this one seemed the least like insurance.  Although other plans might be more “convenient” by paying you from the storehouse.  We thought the setup of Samaritans was simple and straight forward.  Costs and coverage seemed very clear.

Family Friendly

We liked their prospective on family.  My wife was pregnant while we did this investigation.  One program would not even allow a pregnant woman to join!!  Samaritan Ministries seems very straight forward about how they share maternity costs.  Even if you had a baby in the first couple months of joining, you would be able to share a portion of your maternity need.

Knew Someone Who Had Been in the Program

I knew someone who had used this program (only for a season of their life).  This certainly help lend credibility when trying to make a decision about “what program do I choose”.

I hope this post and document help you along in your decision making process.  Please feel free to comment or email with any questions you might have for us.

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Yahoo!  (I hope its not trademark infringement to get excited)  Pattern Tap has made it's way to the top of the del.icio.us home page.

We've been monitoring the web stats and are almost certainly going to this 2k unique visitors on the first day. 

And we didn't even put one of those del.icio.us icons on our page

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Several months ago I got an email from Nathan Smith.  I had met him at BibleTech and he wanted to know if I was interested in working with someone he knew on a PHP project.  Being ambitious I said sure.

Enter Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith is the brain child of Pattern Tap.  We've only known each other through talking on the phone.  What I know I love.  First off, he's a dear brother in the Lord who love the Lord Jesus.  That's an awesome first point.  Secondly, we share a lot of similar passions about web design and development.  These two factors make for great collaborative partnership even though we're separated by hundreds of miles.

The Goal: Pattern Tap

Matthew came up with the idea of having a place where design ideas could be categorized and sorted.  He needed me to make it happen.  Well, it happened!  Yesterday, at about 3 pm Pattern Tap was released into the wild (come what may). 

If you don't know what Pattern Tap is, visit the site.  You'll soon discover and interface design library that isn't just "thrown together", but rather, selected and catalog.  It takes me back to my days in grad school when researchers rolled their eyes at the Internet.  If you want to research, you knew you couldn't just plug your research topic into Google.  You had to go to the librarian and they would point you to where the really good resources were. That's Pattern Tap.  Matthew Smith and a band of fellow designers are your librarians cataloging the "good stuff" on the web. 

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Lets say your launching a new site to replace an old one.  You want to make sure that peoples bookmarks and search engine information does not return 404 page not found.  The typical way of doing this is to create a 301 permanent redirect on the old file.  In IIS6 this was a complete pain.  You had to click on every file in the IIS6 manager (before deleting the file) and setup a redirect to the new page.  Time consuming and not very good IMO.  

IIS7, and its integration with the web.config makes this process so much easier.  Look at the example below for an example of how to specify 301 redirects in your web.config file:

  <location path="ComputerLab.asp">
        <system.webServer>
            <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="Labs/" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />
        </system.webServer>
    </location>
    <location path="EmailSpamSolution.asp">
        <system.webServer>
            <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="Support/Spam.aspx" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />
        </system.webServer>
    </location>
    <location path="MicrosoftOffice2007.asp">
        <system.webServer>
            <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="Training/Help/Office2007.aspx" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />
        </system.webServer>
    </location>

Note: these additions go directly inside of <configuration> and NOT inside of <system.web> or <system.webServer>

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As a entrepreneur, web developer, husband and father of four, staying organized is not just a “good idea” it is and absolute necessity.  In this post I will unpack the productivity tools that I rely on to keep afloat in the flood of information.

Basics

Email is where it’s at for me.  It is the center of my productivity world.  Most of my work, in some way, touches my email.  I have used Outlook and Gmail extensively, and in my estimation Gmail wins!  For me the context threading of emails was a stroke of genius by the Google engineers, and that along with a host of other highly usable features has won my loyalty.

Gmail

Gmail is my information hub.  Here are a couple of things I do to keep the things flowing.

Filters & Labels

Filtering is the first line of defense.  When one of my contacts fits a category, the get a filter and a label so that I can keep all those correspondences together.  If I am on any sort of list does not require my attention, I filter off those emails so they never even appear in my inbox.  They are labeled, so i can easily get to them if needed.

For labeling I use the Folders4Gmail script that turns your labels into a folder like structure.  This method helps cut down the visual noise of the "Labels” sidebar.

Zero Message Inbox

Several months ago I adopted the stance of trying to keep my inbox empty.  This has been excellent.  When there is information in my inbox, my eyes constantly go over it, rereading subject lines, sorting through visual noise, wasting precious time.  The biggest aid to achieving the zero message inbox was the Remember the Milk plugin for Gmail (more on this in a minute).

In short, every email that comes in is either: Deleted, Archived, or made into a Task.  In some cases a label is applied where necessary.  The idea is to keep things moving and not to allow the visual noise to build up.  Read it and decide what to do with it, don’t postpone this decision (It’ll just take longer next time).

Remember the Milk Plugin

For a long time I mourned the lack of a “todo” list inside of Gmail.  Finally, Remember the Milk (RTM) came to the rescue.  To keep my inbox empty I am constantly turning email messages into tasks (RTM has some slick ways of doing this).  I make it a task and archive the message.  When that task comes up, the email message is readily accessible through the RTM interface.

In addition to assigning emails to tasks, I can create independent tasks which are dated so that I only ever have to look at “today” and “tomorrow” to know what I need to do.

Its not complicated, and it keeps my life a bit more simplified in the deluge of information that comes to my door step every day.

Todoist

Being a developer, I need a tool to help me manage the projects I am working on.  The best interface I’ve found for a sole developer to keep track of a project is Todoist. Todoist is a super simple, super slick task management application that has a couple of core features that I find very helpful:

1. Interface is simple and easy to use.  Simple keyboard shortcuts allow you to add, edit and organize tasks quickly.
2. Organization of tasks into projects
    
3. Ability to organize tasks into hierarchies. 
   

The third point is the real winner in my book.  Being able to quickly and easily create tasks and sub tasks really helps me to organize my development projects.  On top of this I can reorder the tasks.

What would really transform Todoist into a great web application would be the ability to interact with others.  For instance, others could assign tasks to me and vise versa, and then I could organize them appropriately.  I know this feature has been requested, so we’ll have to see where it goes from here.

In Closing

Above I’ve tried to outline the key tools that help keep me productive on the web.  Share your advise!  If you’ve got some processes which have really helped you be more productive, please share them in the comments below.

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 Street view has been added to Google Maps in Rochester, NY.  This adds a whole new level of helpfulness in finding places online. 

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If you’re working inside of an institutional structure chances are you occasionally have to deal with code that sucks.  I know I do!  We have some third party apps at the institution where I work.  I believe they were designed in the early 90s before anyone knew the word “standards” or “css” and have not been revisited.  While working on one of these code bases I had the idea of using jQuery to remedy my brow furrowing. 

Problem

No IDs or class names on the the template code.  The templates were static and I didn’t want to do a global find and replace to try and fix the problem. 

jQuery to the Rescue

With jQuery’s selector support, I decided that I could use that to add the vital css, classes or ids I need to make the layout work.  Example:

   1: $(document).ready(function(){

   2:     // standard document formatting

   3:     $("BODY DIV:first").css("width", "800px").css("margin", "0 auto 0 auto");

   4: });

Instead of injecting css directly, I could have added a class and added my styling in the stylesheet like this:

   1: $(document).ready(function(){

   2:     // standard document formatting

   3:     $("BODY DIV:first").attr("class", "fixthishoriblecode");

   4: });

There you have it.  As simple as including the jQuery library and adding some lines of JavaScript. [of course is javascript is turned off, this is not going to work.. but I didn’t say this was a miracle solution for fixing your bad code, just a patch]. 

If you’ve had to deal with these types of code bases, share your story below of how you fixed the problem.

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Look Alike

When Simon was in the bouncy seat last night I thought I was having déjà vu.  I looked up and there was a picture of Caleb from about the same time up on the boy’s bookcase.  I brought it down and put it next to him. 

It might be hard to see in the picture, but he was a spitting image of Caleb.

Home on Day 1!

Amy and I were not eager to spend time in the hospital.  After doing this three times already, we have come to realize that there is “no place like home.”  We were very pleased to get the cooperation of the midwife, pediatrician and nurses so that we could bring Simon home on the day of his birth (it certainly helped that he was born at 5:30am in the morning).   Amy spent most of the day sleeping and feeding and we were able to be home at 5pm and eat around our dinner table.  In fact, after dinner we went outside and the boys declared they were having a “birthday party” for Simon.  Caleb even asked to have cake (which I might have gotten if I didn’t think I would have fallen asleep at the wheel). 

Always learning about the system

Whenever we interface with the hospital system there are always some interesting things to learn.  For one, the nurse said that Amy was the first person to check in and out on the same shift.  I’m not for rushing out of the hospital if you really are in need of assistance, but it’s evident that the hospital would love for you to stay a bit longer than you need (in the words of our nurse “if we don’t provide you with services we can’t bill you for anything”).

While Amy was in the room, the nurse came in and asked Amy to “lean forward so she could check her back.”  Amy did so, not realizing why she was being asked.  The nurse was astonished to find no wound from an epidural needle.  The nurse informed Amy that 95% of births at their hospital are performed with epidurals, making it a matter of habit to check women’s backs.

It is interesting to correlate these two pieces of information.  Epidural = longer labor and hospital stay = big fat hospital bill to the insurance company.  I wonder how many people who choose differently if they were footing the bill personally? 

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First an introduction.  Simon Jacob Pollock was born on June 6, 2008 at 5:30 in the morning.   [This is where weight and height would be inserted.. but I’m not really sure why people give those stats, so I’m leaving them out.]  He looks just like a Pollock.  Below is his very first picture.

Now for the story of his name.

Simon’s name was not always to be Simon Jacob.  Just a day earlier it was to be Simon Clayton.  Clayton was a family name and so initially we thought it made a fine middle name for Simon.  The hours surrounding his birth would change all that.  On June 5th we traveled to be with friends who were celebrating the death of you their young son Jacob.

I say celebrated, and not mourned, because celebration definitely characterized the event.  The Fahmer’s believe, as do I, that a child who has not sinned is not subject to the demands of the Law and therefore the Wrath of God (not the case for the rest of us who have knowingly transgressed the commands of our loving heavenly Father).  It was a celebration because he is in heaven where he continually get’s to behold the face of the Lord Jesus and is free from the suffering that characterized his short life (138 days).

Jacob Fahmer was born with Trisomy 18, a life shortening condition (you can read his whole story here).  His life was short, by God’s own choosing, but it was not without value or significance.  He, like,all creatures made in the image of God, brought a certain reflection that is not limited by length of days. For one, the Fahmer’s life has forever been changed, by the gift of his life.  Secondarily, I believe (and you can read testimony for yourself in this post and in others on Jacob’s blog) that people have been caused to consider their lives and their God.   What other purpose and hope can one have?!  What else is lasting and enduring, than to have the effect of causing people to reflect on their standing with the Eternal God.?!

As we celebrated Jacob’s “home going” my wife began to experience the pangs of labor.  We gathered our children, said a few quick goodbyes and headed home (a hour and 15 minutes away).  On the way back, we could see that labor was beginning to set in. My wife’s contractions were becoming regular instead of fading away.  At one point I looked over to my wife and said “If we have this child tonight I want to call him ‘Simon Jacob’”.  My wife gave a quick nod of agreement.

Why the change?

I don’t believe in coincidence.  I believe that God orders our days, our death, and our birth.  It was not a mistake that my wife went into labor at Jacob’s funeral.  It was God’s plan.  It’s not just the timing of the event that leads me to see God’s hand, but also my understanding of God.  God brings life and death together.  He did it when His Son was crucified.  Jesus’ death brought forth eternal life.  The Creation testifies about this every day.  You have to be blind not to see that God has ordered death to life.  Plants & Animals that die and fall into the ground and nourish the next generation.  A simple walk through the woods could teach this to the attentive eye.  All through the Creation death and life are caught up together to point us to the revelation of Jesus’ death on the Cross and Resurrection three days later.

This is the story I want to characterize my life and the life of my family.  The story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  He is embedding that story in our lives, even through the simple “happenings” of life.  Jacob’s death.. Simon’s life have been tied together in a narrative that God is writing.  I am happy simply to see it, acknowledge it, and worship because of it.

Simon Jacob – because God brings life out of death.

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