Liveblog on moving sites and managing domains.

The post @chriswiegman at WordCampATX appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

A liveblog of Dorian’s talk on collaborative website.

The post Dorian Speed at WordCampATX appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

In the WordPress world, a recent piece of news is WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg cancelling his $10,000 Kickstarter pledge for Pressgram, an Instagram-style iOS app that would allow you to save your photos to a WordPress blog (that you own and control) instead of a third-party service that you don’t. Matt cancelled his pledge because Pressgram’s developer John Saddington announced that Pressgram, while free, would not be open source. If you don’t know anything about Matt, know that he is a very strong believer in open source software so this move isn’t surprising (to me at least).

The question burning in my mind, though, is why isn’t it being released open-source?

John writes on Pressgram’s blog that, stated simply, it will not be released open-source because he said so. He, rightly, says that’s all the justification he needs to provide. I agree with that; it’s his effort so, assuming he’s not reusing any code that requires a certain licensing requirement, like WordPress with the GPL license, he gets to do with the code as he pleases. He does expand the answer to say that he wants to ship the code, so closed source it’ll be.

I don’t understand his expanded answer to the point of needing to write a post about it. I’d usually just leave a comment on his blog, but that isn’t an option in this case.

The explanation, as I read it, is that it takes longer to develop something and release it as open source than it does to develop the same thing and release it as proprietary. John mentions refactoring a fork versus starting from scratch, but you don’t have to fork anything to release a product as open source code.

I can only assume that he’s using code under some type of license that prohibits him from releasing it as open-source? If that’s the case, this makes more sense to me; although, that wasn’t mentioned at all under the rationale. He mentions in an afterthought that there may be issue with the iOS App Store and the GPL, which is a stronger explanation to me than the original, but there are other, more permissive, open-source licenses that perhaps could be a compromise pending the GPL/App Store issues.

Stated in another way, given the explanation, I don’t understand where he is coming from to the point of losing a $10k high-profile backer, except on the philosophical “I don’t want to release it open source”.

Can anyone shine light on this for me?

All of that said, I have nothing but respect for John. I’ve been a passive follower of his for some time now. My first WordPress purchase of any type (plugin, theme) was his company’s (8bit) Standard Theme. I’m just damn confused!

ADDED: To explain my point a little better, in light of John’s comment below, here’s what I’m thinking. I write some code.

php echo "I love my mom!"; ?>

I didn’t refactor anything. I wrote something from scratch. Now, I want to release the program. I can, among other options, release it:

1. Open Source
2. Closed Source

For open source, the code would look like this

php
/* ©2013 Brandon Kraft
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
*/
echo "I love my mom!"; ?>

For closed source, it could look like this:

php
/* ©2013 Brandon Kraft
You are allowed to use this program for personal use only.
No modification, duplication, transmission, distribution, something-else-tion are allowed
without the express written consent of Really Short Code Works
*/
echo "I love my mom!"; ?>.

My question is why some variant on the latter and not the former.

The post Why Not Open Source? appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

As a freelancer, one of the most stressful parts of the job is the lack of a safety net. When life happens, there is no one else in the office to take on a little more work to keep projects flowing through the pipeline. Support requests are delayed. Deadlines are impacted.

This weekend, the biggest unexpected incident in our little family happened.

Olivia, our oldest who is three, had been coughing at bedtime for a couple of days. Her allergist had suggested that she may have asthma a few weeks before, but we weren’t really sure what the symptoms looked liked in Olivia. We gave her medicine on Wednesday evening. Thursday, she progressively had a more difficult time breathing, requiring higher doses at lower intervals.

Finally, near 10 p.m. Thursday, she woke herself up coughing. We gave her the dose we had increased to and it didn’t work. Labored breathing, wheezing, coughing. We spoke to the on-call doctor at her pediatric allergist’s office. Time to move.

Olivia to Dell ER re breathing difficulty.

— Brandon Kraft (@Kraft) March 1, 2013

As a kid, I went to the ER a few times. In every case, we waited in the waiting room for sometime. I went to the military clinic, so there was not an urgent care option (at least back then), so the emergency room was the after-hour solution. It was always a wait. A long, long wait.

When you take a child into an ER complaining of difficulty breathing, let’s just say things are different:

Desk Person: “Hi, what can we do you for today?”
Me: “My daughter is having difficulty breathing. The on-call doc at her allergist told us to come to the ER.”
Triage Nurse (overhearing us, comes over from her station): “When did this begin? What medications has she been administered?”
Me: “This immediate set of issues began about 24 hours ago. She had been responding to albuterol via neb, but we’ve had to increase the dose to X and decrease the interval throughout the day to Y.”
Triage Nurse (listening to her chest): “She’s tight.” (To another person) “Take her back.”
Desk Person (handing me a pencil and a scrap of paper): “Her name and date of birth.”

And that was it. We were in a room.

Early into her hospital stay.

Again, as a child in a military emergency room, I didn’t have a high set of expectations in terms of user experience for the ER. This experience has taught me that if you need to bring a child to the ER or hospital and there is a children’s hospital within a reasonable distance, go there. One of the pros of purchasing our house where we did is that you can see the children’s hospital from our upstairs landing.

As soon as they gave her a quick assessment and hooked her up to an oxygen monitor, her RN opened up a package of bubble solution and started playing with Olivia, blowing bubbles throughout the exam room. You could see the uncertainty in Olivia’s face wash away.

They began treating her and, while her oxygen levels were always okay, it took quite a bit to get her breathing under control. As we went longer into the night, the doctor prepared me that they would admit her if the next attempt didn’t get her back to where they wanted to see her.

Olivia did well, in the beginning, partly because I failed to bring any toys or books with us, so she got to play on “Daddy’s Exus” (known to us as a Nexus).

It was hard to see Olivia there. As her treatments in the ER had to intensify, so did the monitoring. With the levels of medication they were giving her, there was a concern about her heart rate increasing too much, so she was on an EKG and an automatically-monitored blood pressure unit. Her oxygen levels were still being monitored and something else that I can’t recall now.

Poor thing was exhausted.

The hardest part, though, was when she finally fell asleep around 4:30 a.m. She was on her breathing mask, all of the various monitoring tools were wired to her. Granted, I’d been up since 6 a.m. the previous morning, trying to stay awake in her darken room. I was tasked with ensuring the mask stayed on her face if she moved. It was hard to be alone watching your child try to sleep like that.

Finally, around 6:30 a.m., the call was made to admit her. It took a few more hours to actually get her over to a room, but by the time they did, she was actually doing okay and didn’t require the constant mask or the monitoring.

She’s going to be admitted soon. Responding to meds at levels unsafe for us to admin and not for as long as she should considering dose.

— Brandon Kraft (@Kraft) March 1, 2013

The hospital experience, after that, was actually enjoyable. She was still in too bad of shape to go home, but she was past the worst of it. They let us explore the hospital and we found one of the playrooms open to patients and siblings.

The rest of the day progressed fine with slow, continual improvement. The call was made for one more night of observation since night time is the worst and she was showing displaying precursors to her last attack.

In the end, she improved and was released early afternoon on Saturday. In that time, I slept about six hours total, but she was happy, could breathe normally on a level of medication we could administer at home, and we were without the worry earlier in the week when this was an unknown, new thing for us.

Home. (@ La Casa de Kraft) 4sq.com/XhADJN

— Brandon Kraft (@Kraft) March 2, 2013

Now, that Sunday night rolled around, I went back into a normal mode. Processed more e-mails that were skipped, checked out the project lists, todo lists, calendar and whatnot. Since I’m with the kiddos during the week, weekends are important times for my work schedule and this one was shot. I don’t care, though. Olivia is far, far, more important than anyone’s website or business, my own included.

The pro of being a freelancer in this situation is there was zero question on if I was taking the day off. The con, though, is next week won’t have any down time.

In the end, I can’t complain to have the work and and I can only celebrate having Olivia home.

The post Someone Going To Emergency appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Version 1.1 of Genesis eNews Extended went out today with two features that will help you better customize your widget.

First, the available HTML tags in the “Text To Show” area has increased to include image tags and all other tags allowed by wp_kses_post (address, a, abbr, acronym, area, article, aside, b, big, blockquote, br, button, caption, cite, code, col, del, dd, details, div, dl, dt, em, fieldset, figure, figcaption, font, footer, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, header, hgroup, hr, i, img, ins, kbd, label, legend, li, map, nav, p, pre, q, s, span, section, small, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, textarea, tfoot, th, thead, title, tr, tt, u, ul, ol, var).

This is perfect for users who offer a free eBook in return for a sign-up by allowing you to include a picture of the eBook or those who want to put a more personal touch on their widget showing your snazzy headshot.

Second, the HTML tags allowed in the hidden fields area has increased. In addition to the previously allowed input, now div and label are allowed. The intended use case for this is for users who have additional form fields that are unique to their situation, such as MailChimp groups. This would allow them to not only add in checkboxes (previously allowed) but label and div tags needed for styling.

Additionally, the number of translated languages increased quite a bit, though the translations aren’t solid. Since Genesis 1.8.2. included most of the text strings, I added in those translations to the plugin. If you’re a polyglot and could improve the translations, please drop me a note below.

The post Genesis eNews Extended v1.1 Released appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

I recently read Redemption: A Rebellious Spirit, a Praying Mother, and the Unlikely Path to Olympic Gold by Bryan Clay, which struck me in light of Lance Armstrong and, to a point, the Manti Te’o girlfriend developments.

Clay is a gold-medal decathlete, winning in Bejing in 2008 and released this autobiography prior to his 2012 Olympic attempt. While I often have issues trying to read books by athletes, Clay’s book kept my attention and made me into a fan. He explains the decathlon enough to bring me up to speed enough to follow along and additionally helped me care about the outcome of this event.

In listening to the talking heads debate Lance Armstrong’s confession to Oprah last week, a common thread was the reminder that athletes are not role models. Lance has done great things with LIVESTRONG and had to worked hard for those Tour victories (as everyone was using PEDs, so he still had to beat other cheaters along the way). Nevertheless, he cheated. Likewise, there are plenty of athletes who stellar performance on the field was not dependent on illegal drugs, yet personally throw their money away on pointless, fruitless work that helps no one.

As a decathlete, Clay doesn’t have the fame of Lance or virtually anyone in the NFL. Save for the trials and the Olympics, his only chance for television is likely on ESPN8. There aren’t lines of folks waiting for his shoes to go on sale. His story, though, is inspirational as a story of someone who found his passion in athletics, worked hard, and rose to meet his goals.

[Disclaimer: I was given a copy of the book for free in exchange for a review. I was not required to write a positive or negative review and the opinions stated herein are completely my own. Being given the promotional copy of the book had no influence on this review.]

The post Book Review – Redemption appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

I did it.

WordPress, as many of you know, is an open-source project. The WordPress community maintains it. Anyone can report a bug directly into the development tracking tool (Trac), anyone can submit a patch. It’s great. I’ve been wanting to contribute to core (as the “core” WordPress software is known, as opposed to plugins, themes, etc) for a while now. For various reasons, I haven’t dug in, found/claimed an issue and solved it.

Until now.

I am the latest contributor to the WordPress core.

Contributors in the past has done great things. Koop made the new media manager happen. Nacin and Mark Jaquith have made WordPress do half of the things it does now, if not more. I don’t mean to brag or belittle their contributions; however, I think I top all of that.

Get ready to see the most important contribution to core in 2013 and likely for years to come:

I understand if you don’t understand something this complex.

Yes. I made my entrance into the fraternity of core contributors by changing the copyright date in a file that no one has likely read since it was edited in 2011.

So, I was being a hyperbolic…

Obviously, I realize my contribution is extremely, extremely minor in the scheme of things, but that’s partly the point. The WordPress universe is wide enough that anyone who wants to become a contributing member of the WordPress community can do so. Whether it is something like helping out in the forums, reporting a bug against core, a plugin, or a theme, organizing a WordCamp or local MeetUp group, helping with unit tests on new code, writing a plugin, to contributing patches (of whatever size), or rising up to being the next Nacin, there is something that you, at any level, can do.

I’ve helped a little in the StudioPress and WordPress.org forums, I’ve written a plugin and helped with another, reported a couple of bugs (both weren’t bugs in the end, but not the point) and now made a tiny improvement to the codebase. For me, my next goal is to a make a more substantial contribution to the codebase within the next couple of releases. After that, there will be a new goal.

I’ve made the WordPress community better and so can you. What’s your goal in the community?

The post I’ve Made WordPress Better (And You Can Too!) appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Two new releases in the plugin department.

I released Genesis eNews Extended 0.1.6 over the weekend. This enables, for all users, the ability to add fields for first or last name. If you downloaded the beta version (0.2-beta1 or similar) there are no changes. I downgraded the version number as my roadmap for 0.2 was too heavy given a desire to release new code often. The plan for 0.2 is to release near the Genesis 2.0 drop date in Spring or Summer and include HTML5 functionality, like e-mail field validation.

This site uses the new field, so subscribe to my site and tell me your name!

Check out the plugin’s page for more details or follow development on GitHub.

Additionally, Jesse Petersen had the great idea for a new plugin for those using the Genesis Minimum theme. The Minimum theme has a huge banner image at the top, which previously the Featured Image uploaded to your post determined the banner image. This works great except that same image would be what gets pinned on Pinterest or thumbnailed on Facebook or shown in the “grid” on the page. It is rare that an image looks great as the banner and as a thumbnail.

Jesse, along with myself and Robert Neu with contributions from Nick the Geek and Bill Erickson, put together Genesis Minimum Images Extended. This adds a new metabox to the post editor for you to upload a banner image. The traditional Featured Image would be used in all other featured ways. It’s a simple idea, but can greatly help you fine-tune your Minimum-powered site’s visuals.

The roadmap is to extend this concept to other Genesis themes. We may even have a mostly functional version that works with the Streamline theme…

Follow the fun on GitHub!

The post Genesis eNews 0.1.6 and Genesis Minimum Images Extended appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Version 0.1.5 of the Genesis eNews Extended plugin is now public. This version features an option to let the confirmation screen open in the same tab. Check it out using my subscribe form. This setting will work for all non-Feedburner lists.

Why not FeedBurner? FeedBurner assumes a new window. The confirmation screen includes a “Close Window” link and it doesn’t smoothly transition you back to your own site. Why let folks take people off of their site without a way to get back? Other services, like MailChimp, allow you to define your own page as the confirmation, which is what I did. In this case, visitors don’t have to worry about the MailChimp name or what they’re doing on this site.

By default, it will use a new window, which is the previous behavior and what mimics the original widget.

Additionally, there ia a, um, hidden feature. The source code adds optional first and last name fields for those who wish to track names of their subscribers as well. If you un-comment five or so lines (two separate places), you can take advantage of this now. I don’t anticipate another release before enabling these new fields, but for full disclosure, an upgrade will remove any custom coding fun you have.

Why is it commented out? In short, this is a big change for the widget. Up to now, we’re assuming the styling conventions used by StudioPress. If you’re using one of StudioPress’ themes, you can use with widget without having to know/edit any CSS. Adding new fields would change that for users wishing to use them. For example, my site now has a small envelope icon in the e-mail field. You likely wouldn’t want your name field to include that icon–that requires some custom CSS somewhere along the way.

My original idea was to enable the fields and simply tell people to edit style.css to make it work. As I’ve fielded support for the plugin, though, I realize that many folks (at least, those who are seeking support) are generally using stock themes and may or may not have a strong sense of CSS styling. Honestly, I’m debating a) just having the fields in there and require style.css changes, b) having a settings screen to add custom CSS that would be applied to the subscribe area or c) some other solution.

In the mean time though, if you’re skilled enough to enable it, it’s there.

Have fun and enjoy!

The post Genesis eNews Extended v0.1.5 Released appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Over on the StudioPress blog, you’ll read about Genesis 1.9 depreciating the native FeedBurner e-mail subscription widget and recommending Genesis eNews Extended.

I love StudioPress’ themes—they look great, have solid logical structure for customizing, and a great community surrounding the product.

Earlier this year, I ran into a problem. I wanted to use their stock themes in a couple of different places and loved the way their Subscription widgets fit into the theme. I use MailChimp—not Feedburner, the only supported option. The suggestion in the community forum was restyle in CSS, which is fine. I was helping a few different small groups get sites off the ground and restyling each of them was taking more time than I thought it should.

The end result: a Genesis eNews Extended plugin. The plugin is really simple. In addition to supporting FeedBurner (ver 0.1.3), the plugin works with virtually any mailing list service. MailChimp, FeedBlitz, Constant Contact, Aweber, and so on. You give it the info it needs and it outputs a form identical in markup to the native Genesis eNews widget—thus matching the subscribe fields in their theme demos.

Last week, the founder of StudioPress, Brian Gardner reached out to me and we discussed my plan for the widget and my willingness to help. In all honesty, I told him, I had been planning to ship it over to them as a core patch, but never got around to doing it. With their plan to focus more on the core product, suggesting the eNews Extended plugin made perfect sense.

If you’re dropping by here for the first time, welcome. Go ahead and try out the plugin. There’s a subscribe form on the right powered using it. While keeping the plugin lean, I hope to continue to make it more useful for the Genesis community. The plugin, actually, is framework-agnostic. You can use it anywhere on WordPress, but the biggest perk of the plugin for me was not having to worry about CSS on Genesis themes. If you have any thoughts, drop me a line.

A quick note regarding support. While I’ve been known to reply to an e-mail here and there about the plugin, please direct all support requests to the WordPress.org forum for the plugin. Over time, between the forums and the tutorials, most users will find the answers they need without having to wait on me. My wife and I are expecting a baby any day now, so I’ll be off the grid some very soon.

Thanks for the Genesis community for the support and I look forward to meeting more of y’all as you begin using the plugin.

The post Genesis eNews Extended Announced appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

15 years.

For those who only know me from the interwebs and only care about either freelancing or web development, indulge me today. If you’d rather not read a personal story, feel free to move along. The next post will be on message, I promise. You can delete the e-mail now. No hard feelings.

15 years ago is etched into my memory. Exact times, voices, feelings will be forever present in my memory in a second’s thought. 15 years, when I was 12 years old, my father passed away. The tl;dr version is that he had a medical condition that slowly took him away from us, although at the time, I hadn’t the slightest clue it could take his life. I still struggle with the memories of the days before his death; what would be the last interactions I had with him. Those moments are truly the most regretful moments of my short life.

I don’t recall September 18th. He was in the hospital, which was no longer out of the ordinary. We had to take him to the emergency room on a somewhat regular basis. He’d spend 24, 36 or so hours in the hospital and we’d continue on again. Dad just needed a refill of blood again. No biggie.

September 19th, my mom woke me up around 1:30 a.m. The hospital had called at 1:24 a.m. We needed to get there. My mom was a wreck. She called my grandfather and siblings. Her nerves wouldn’t allow her to drive; my grandfather was coming to take us.

1:52 a.m. The phone rang again. We had only one phone; it looked more like a desk phone that belonged in an office than something on the “window sill” between the kitchen and living room. Mom answered it. Moments later, she slammed the phone on the table. She ran into the dining room, throwing herself to the ground and letting out a cry I’ve never heard in real life before or since. I picked up the phone—still off the hook—and spoke: “Yes?”

“Mr. Kraft has passed away.”

I said thank you to the nurse as I heard the call waiting click. What else would you say? My arms and legs went numb. My stomach dropped. Time to call my siblings. Time to find Mom.

At 1:48 a.m., everything in my world had changed.

I’m not sure how without coffee I managed to be awake for the next 24 hours, after only getting at most three hours of sleep before getting the call, but nevertheless, between the hospital, the funeral home, school (dropping off a paper I printed for a friend without a printer at home), random errands, and my sister’s house, it wasn’t until the morning hours of September 20th I was able to rest.

After all these years, I remember the conversations taking place as the family discussed the details of the obituary. I remember exactly where in the “casket showroom” was the one that I thought would be best and suggesting it to my mom. I remember finding an unused office in the funeral home with a phone. I would just call “the weather line”— 940-692-9999 for those who are curious what the temperature is in Wichita Falls at the moment—over and over again.

No one close to me had died before. My paternal grandmother had died years before, but I had only met her once and didn’t go to the funeral. There should be a manual of things to know if your first experience with death is with someone so close. Little things like the casket isn’t opened at the church. Folks were telling me to say goodbye at the funeral home, but I didn’t get it.

The Mass—my first Mass as far as I’m aware—had two moments that left a mark on me. It was held in the Parish Hall since the church itself was under renovation. They had placed some movable stairs at the front up to the stage, where the altar was located. The pallbearers placed the casket too close to the stairs so Fr. Koch had to slightly push the casket out of the way. Secondly, I remember the Our Father. I don’t know if I had ever paid attention to it being recite en masse before and the “s’es” stood out (“forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive those who tresspass against us”).

The 21-gun salute. The flag being presented to my mom.

The one positive highlight, if you will, was from showing around my aunts and uncles. My dad was the oldest of ten surviving kids and seven of them (if I recall correctly) were able to come down, mostly from South Dakota, for the funeral. They didn’t know what my dad did for the Air Force (after retirement, as a civilian, communications instructor), but they were curious. Just imagine this scene. Two black Suburbans completely full pull up to the gate of the Air Force Base. Little 12-year old Kraft in the first car’s passenger seat. When we stop at the sentry, I reach over to hand them my military ID. I explain that we’re going to head on base to visit my now-deceased father’s shop (“the shop” is what he called his office) and I was going to escort the occupants of this vehicle and the one behind us—his brothers and sisters—for the tour.

The sentry paused. Asked me if I knew where I was going. “Yes, sir.” I told them the building number. Were we expected? No, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be an issue.

After a second, he waved us through. My uncle (and Godfather) who was driving was impressed.

I digress. Last year’s post, specifically “Knowing exactly the pain of having a father you know and love taken away from you irrevocably far before you’re even mindful of the possibility, my greatest fear for Olivia, Catalina and our future family additions (should God so choose to bless us with more)[Eds. Note: #3 is due in less than a month.], is for them to experience that pain themselves.” still applies. This year, though, realizing that 15 years has passed and how crystal those moments still are is what has struck me.

Sadly, they are clearer to me than memories of him alive.

The post On This Day, 15 Years Ago appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

A little primer about me. Some time has passed since I’ve given tender loving care to the website and a number of readers have recently signed up to receive my daily (er, rather, daily-when-I-write-something) e-mail.

This blog is about a stay-at-home dad of two three girls who also runs a web development shop.

On the stay-at-home day side of the coin, there are challenges raising a family, tough decisions that have to be made all while going against the societal grain of the dad being at home. In the short time I’ve done this, I’ve seen a whole gambit: the folks who go overboard telling me how great it is that a dad is taking this role in his daughters’ lives, to being asked when I was going to get a job again, to trying to interact with all of the moms at the playground (preview: sometimes, it feels like a middle school dance), and so on.

On the web development side, I’ve built websites, in some form, since 1996. Currently, I focus on WordPress as a development platform and almost exclusively with the Genesis theme framework. I write here about the challenges of starting/running my small business, web development ideas, cool new things online and generally about the craft.

The intersection of the two lies in the balance. Seemingly, everyone needs a website. There is enough work to keep me busy 60 hours a week, but the primary responsibility is to the 168 hours a week job of bringing up the kiddos all while maintaining a healthy emotional and spiritual life, sanity and living a fulfilling marriage.

As you read these pages, ideally, the joy of both will be easy to see. Being a stay-at-home parent doesn’t have to remove you from the “adult” world and working for yourself doesn’t have to consume your being (my default).

As always, drop me a line anytime.

The post Return of the Kraft appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Just a quick note to everyone about my comings and goings recently. I began working more purposefully on freelance web development and it has been a “built it and they will come” outcome. Much more work than I expected has come by way, to the point of having to simply turn down projects outside of my niche and schedule projects to begin months down the road. A great issue to have, but something I didn’t expect this early.

Additionally, I gave a talk at a recent WordCamp (a conference for the WordPress content management system) and been appointed to serve on a diocesan committee. More details on all of this soon. I’m still alive and breathing!

The post Busy Life appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Originally published over at SavePlayers.com

The Austin American-Statesman is reporting tonight that Players has been sold to the McCombs School of Business Foundation, which sold it to UT.

My earlier information, apparently, wasn’t quite accurate. The owners weren’t interested in selling at the approved, appraised value, but UT was willing to pony up more money to close the sale.

By law, UT could not have paid more than $2.5M for the property as the university isn’t allowed to spend more than the appraised value. They were able to skirt this law by having the Foundation purchase the property above value, then sell it to the university for the appraised value. In other words, the McCombs School of Business Foundation donated $1.5M to make the sale occur.

The official word is there has been no use determined for the site, although my source said that the entire block would be, eventually, used for a business school asset.

The gritty: Players sold for $3M, plus 10-year, rent-free lease valued at $1M. Under the terms of the lease, UT can terminate the lease (thus closing Players) with 6-months notice, however, would have to pay $100K for each year remaining of the original 10.

After two years, Players can terminate the deal themselves netting $100K for each year left on the lease.

Personally, I’m not sure what I think will happen. Assuming my original info regarding the length of lease for the other properties on the Whitis/20th/Guadalupe/MLK block is accurate, I could see Players staying open, at least, that long. At the same time, I can’t imagine UT would leave an empty gas station at MLK/Guadalupe abandoned for that long nor building something unless it was a component piece of a larger project.

In short, we have at least until October to enjoy Players or 2022 may be the end of the line or anywhere in between.

The post Players Sold appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

A year ago, we cut the cord. We struggled with this decision. We used cable as a crutch to help entertain Olivia when making dinner. We watched TV during any downtime and, with the DVR, we only watched shows we “wanted” to watch. Our first home, our condo, provided free cable through our HOA dues, so we took advantage of it.

One house later, the HOA didn’t cover the cost of cable and it is rather pricey. We were less than satisfied with the amount of TV we were watching, but if we decrease it, would our usage justify the price? With Catalina here and her uncovered medical bills arriving, we couldn’t justify it anymore.

Looking back a year and a few days, it was an awesome decision. We were given an Xbox 360 as a present and were impressed with the ESPN3 app. When our trial ended, we sprung $50 for an annual Xbox Gold account. Months later, we added on Netflix for $8/mo. The combo means we can watch a good amount of sports programming and entertainment programming for about ~$12/mo. That price makes sense.

I used to watch PBS as a kid. Sesame Street. Mr. Roger’s. Carmen Sandiego. With the Disney Channel, I forgot what free programming existed over-the-air. When we dropped cable, we started exploring KLRU, the local PBS station. We were impressed with what they had for kids of all ages. Personally, I discovered the subchannels. For those of us who had cable before the analog-digital transition, we were used to having a single channel for each station. With today’s digital technology, KLRU now has four different “subchannels” broadcasting. KLRU (the mothership on 18.1) is your normal PBS station, Create (18.2) is mostly (only?) do-it-yourself cooking/crafting/handyman shows. KLRU-Q, 18.3, has a great deal of adult PBS content and 18.4 is a Spanish channel that is much, much closer to PBS than what traditional Spanish television broadcasts. In other words, something I’ll let Olivia watch since I don’t have to worry about a random soccer highlight including the broadcaster surrounded by 30 bikini-clad women jumping around him.

The local channels are decent. Most of the shows we watch now were already on those networks. There are some nice things like a couple “weather” subchannels and one local station has actual music videos playing 24/7 on one of their subchannels (granted, the music is all about 20-years old). UT’s student television station that we’re close enough to campus to pick up including Bloomberg on one of it’s subchannel, so we have 24-hour news too.

Add on Netflix and ESPN3, we’re doing just fine. We miss the occasional UT football game on FX, Fox Sports Net, or LHN (who actually gets that one, though?), so it is a good reason to make plans with our cable-friendly friends/local establishments. Taking the leap to cut cable was more our own fear that we would miss something, which does happen, but doesn’t make the world stop spinning.

The post One Year Without Cable appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Crickets… I’ve heard them on the site too. A little unannounced communications blackout, if you will. Forgive me.

Vanessa and I are going to for kiddie hat trick. We’re expecting another little one adding to the fray at La Casa de Kraft, with an ETA of October 15th. It was too difficult to write about the joys and pitfalls of fatherhood, freelancing while at home, etc, without mentioning the upcoming addition.

For those keeping score at home, when our fourth anniversary rolls around in early October, we’ll have two kids plus one knocking on the door. We spent our first anniversary with a ~1-month old. Our second, Vanessa was pregnant with Catalina. Our third was “quiet” with Catalina being ~8-months old.

We didn’t plan our first girls, per se, but none of them were we planning not to have a kid either. Without going into detail, our basic approach has been when we discerned that we weren’t in the right place to have a child, we would hold off, but we’re not there.

Olivia doesn’t like the idea of the addition, but she’s not liking how fast Catalina is growing up either. Yesterday, she starting chastising Lina for pushing a doll stroller—”Lina! That’s dangerous! Only Mommy, Daddy and Olivia push it!” She’ll adjust though!

In the near-term, nothing else is changing. Vanessa will continue at SJD. I’ll continue to stay at home and freelance. Now that we’re able to share this now, we’ll return back to our scheduled programming.

The post Hat Trick appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

[My latest piece over at Austin Catholic New Media]

I’m a big geek. While some guys like to fix cars, build things with wood, or tinker with things like that, I tinker with the Internet. I like digging into the guts of computers, specifically, what makes the web work. One of the reasons the Internet works is open-source software.

Open-source software, by definition, means that anyone can look at the guts, make changes, pass it along in an effort to improve the program. This is opposed to most of the software you buy in store. If there’s a problem or improvement, the best you can do is tell them about it and hope they get around to it.

I realized that open-source software is very “Catholic”. I don’t mean that the actual software or the people behind it are Catholic or that in and of itself, it promotes Catholicism. I mean that open-source software makes sense from a Catholic perspective.

photocredit: flickr/hackny

As Catholics, we constantly strive to improve ourselves and to offer help freely to others who are trying to grow closer to God as well, just as geeks across the world freely help improve these software projects. The majority of these software developers are either donating their time and talent, or their companies are providing their labor, and contributing it to the broader community.

Ubuntu, an open-source distribution of Linux (don’t worry if you didn’t follow that), is named using the Zulu word that can be translated as “I am what I am of because who we all are”. We are a communal people. We work in community and we would be no one without those around us.

One of the possible wrinkles of open-source software is that all of the flaws are public. Virtually all open-source software have bug tracking sites. These are websites where anyone can report a problem with the software. I’ve seen some bugs as seemingly minor as a misspelled comment in the code—something an end-user would never see—yet, the world can see that whoever wrote the code originally didn’t proof-read.

That’s realistic though. All software have bugs, but these are just easier to read about (and thus potentially fixed). That’s the way we are too. We’re flawed. Some of us can hide it better than others, but we all are broken in our own ways. While I hope none of us have websites dedicated to tracking our faults, being able to take inventory of where we have failed and what we need to improve is important. The Gospels tell us we that we are our “brother’s keeper”, we need to hear from others our “bugs” and report them to others. Software doesn’t require us to use our social grace to make sure these “bug reports” are delivered and heard in the spirit of charity, but I digress.

Open-source software, while accepted in many circles, are shunned in others. A friend of mine works at a branch of a large, government-sponsored engineering agency (trying to figure out how to describe it without giving it away…) and while he is a proponent of using well-established open-source software, many of the older engineers reject open-source on face since it isn’t from a company that can guarantee support. While there are plenty of ways to counter this claim, the point is some people reject it outright without giving it a fair shot. Being Catholic is the same way. People will reject us and our opinions at times just because they know we’re Catholic or realize that our opinion is obviously Catholic.

It isn’t fair to the software or to us, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

I’m a Catholic geek though, so I wear those lenses when I look at software (or things in general). What do you see or use in your daily life that seems to be “Catholic”?

The post Is Your Software Catholic? appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

[My latest piece over at Austin Catholic New Media]

Rita wrote a beautiful post about the passing of Austin’s own Leslie and how, despite virtually everyone’s uneasiness when meeting him for the first time, he had some impact on many in Austin. My wife and I had a brief conversation with the priest who administered Leslie’s last rites and celebrated his funeral. On the way home, my wife observed that part of the church’s beauty is our acceptance of anyone who wants to come back home, no matter their life circumstances.

Long before I was born, my family fell away from the church. The reasons are for a different day, but it took many decades for parts of the family to come back. Despite being away for many years, the path to return was simple. Celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation and start practicing the faith again. That’s it. There wasn’t an inquisition about why he or she left, no list of prereqs we were required to make up, and no barriers beyond what we ourselves have constructed.

Scripture gives us great imagery to support this. The Prodigal Son returning to the open arms of the Father, despite his unworthiness and squandering the gifts already received. The Good Shepherd risking it all to find and bring the lost sheep back to the flock. Jesus Christ giving up everything to reconcile all of us sinners back to our Creator.

Read the rest at Austin Catholic New Media

The post We Are Too Important appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

As my extended social network learns that I’m staying at home with the girls, I’ve been increasingly asked for advice on how to make it work financially.

There is no one-size fits all approach to this issue or else, I believe, more people would stay at home with their kids. The easy answer would be to have a spouse that makes plenty of money, but our society isn’t setup like that anymore for most people.

We had a nice financial setup before having kids. We both worked non-profit jobs, so we weren’t filthy rich, but we (looking back on it) had few expenses. When Olivia was born, Vanessa was making a few thousand more than I was making and Vanessa was going to stay at home. Instantly we took a 50%+ paycut.

It was a shock. Our retirement contributions stopped. Our emergency savings contributions stopped. We rolled back our charitable giving. That accounted for a 30% of our pre-kids “spending” each month already. We used to eat almost all of our meals outside of the house. Most dinners were on a walk on South Congress and most lunches were at the places near our workplaces. Half of our lunch budget was eliminated since V was at home. Dinners, for the first few weeks, were supplied by our friends coming over to meet Olivia. After that, we simply didn’t take Olivia out, so, while we still did take out too often, our dinner spending decreased too (drinks—alcohol and otherwise—and tip add up!).

Spending Less and Making More (photocredit: flickr/68751915@N05)

That stabilized us without us actually having to really think about our spending or change of lives much. Or at least more than having a kid would do in the first place.

Our spending had some non-negotiables. Vanessa was debt-free coming into the marriage, but I had a car payment (now paid, but deferring the payment amount to savings for our next car), a decreasing credit card balance (mostly paid) and student loans (will be with us to the bitter end).

Fast-forward to today: I switched jobs, we bought a house, had a baby without insurance-that-covered-maternity, between the three, depleted the bulk of our non-retirement savings and we switched up who stayed at home.

We have four mouths to feed, a house to keep and one non-profit salary. It doesn’t add up.

Cutting Expenses

There are two approaches to financial improvement. One says that you just need to spend less than you make. The other says you need to make what you (want to) spend. Frugality can take you a long way, but at some point, you just need to make more money or make large sacrifices.

We spend less now. We eat out less and have started eating out virtually only when my in-laws are in town (they pay!). We drive less (V’s commute is shorter than my daily mileage in insurance). We cut cable. We experiment on A/C settings and don’t water the grass as much as our neighbors would probably prefer to keep the utility bills manageable. We don’t have smartphones with data plans. We’ve changed auto/home insurance companies to the lowest cost at the same quality ratings. We haven’t renewed magazines. Basically, we look at our statements each month and ask “did that expense need to happen?” If not and the “want” isn’t a high priority, we eliminate it in the future.

Making More

I like this idea more. I’m fine cutting back quite a bit, but at the end of the day, I don’t want to have to act out of financial fear when a great opportunity presents itself.

You should see our taxes. In addition to your 1040, you have to file a Schedule C for any business income/expense from a sole-proprietorship. You have to file a separate Schedule C for each business you’re engaged in.

Vanessa writes for Busted Halo as a freelancer/independent contractor. It’s not a lot of extra money, but helps quite a bit.

My in-laws own a condo in Austin (where we used to live) and now is rented out. They don’t want to deal with it, so I’m the “property manager”. I collect rent, field maintenance requests, coordinate normal upkeep, draw up the contract, check out the renters, etc. In return, I get a small monthly stipend from them in that capacity. Again, it’s not a lot of money, but it’s something.

Technically, I’m still getting income from working in insurance. My setup with the company was that they would front me some money in the beginning to keep income (albeit lower than usual) coming into the house while I’m building a client list. My continued commissions are to them to pay off the advance, but still another Schedule C and increases our taxable income.

I’m building my freelance and consulting business. While I started Brandon Kraft Tech Services as a way to formalize/legalize when friends would pay me to host their websites or other really minor things, it has been growing organically to where all of my new projects contracted this calendar year are with folks I didn’t know before them contacting me for service or a RFP. While I’m still narrowing down my niche within the field and haven’t begun “branding”, this is the future. I’ve seen plenty of people with, what appears to be, less skill making a living off of this work and I’ve met plenty who are incredible at what they do that inspire me to expand my skill set (and they make far beyond what I’d like to make someday).

What About You?

Our extra sources of income are random, but they’re what we are able to do without a large investment. I’d like to get further training in XYZ that might cost serious change in classes and materials, but not there yet. For you, what are you good at that could be a marketable skill?

One friend asked about how we did it as she’ll be leaving her job as a bilingual classroom teacher. Besides tutoring, a teacher can’t do much, right? To me, I see her being able to be a translator and contracting with small companies or non-profits to translate materials into Spanish.

The woman who made our cupcake for our weddings is a stay-at-home mom of a flock of kids. She doesn’t own a bakery, just (if I recall correctly) rents space in a commissary kitchen when needed. We met her at a little coffee shop that sells her cupcakes to try out the samples (which, I assume she made at home since it would be a much smaller operation and a little different than a true commercial effort. Check with your local government on those rules though). Her niche is cupcake delivery and special events.

If you’re crafty, sell on Etsy. If you’re techy, do what I do (but not what I do… I don’t want to compete with a reader!). If you’re an educator, find out a different way to educate. If you like to bake, start a baking business.

Be careful and purposeful. You can easily throw away a ton of time and money trying to make something work, so have a plan. Get advice from the SBA and others. It’s not easy, but if staying-at-home is a goal for your household, it is worth the effort to figure out if that’s a reasonable way to get enough money in, after reducing expenses, to make it all work.

The post Making Ends Meet appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Tonight while Olivia, age 2, was drinking her milk after dinner.
Olivia: Is this almond vanilla milk?
Me: Yeah, almond vanilla. It’s your milk.
Olivia: It’s yo’ momma’s milk! Oooooh snap!

She leaned back and put her hand to her mouth during the “Oooooh snap”. Perfect delivery. I don’t say anything like that often, very rarely actually, but she picked it up and delivered.

The post Quote of the Century appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Today is a red-letter day. Yes, it is the 176^th anniversary of our Independence, but more relevant and important, today is my 10,000^th day of life.

A bit more arbitrary than a birthday, sure, but a milestone nonetheless. I remember watching a movie when I was around 11 years old about how your 10th birthday is a big deal since it’s when you “add a digit” to your age. We’re in double-digits for a long time, so the 10th is a big milestone too.

10,000 is even more so! I’m haven’t added a digit to my days of life count since I was Olivia’s age (her 1,000th day is coming up in May on my Mom’s birthday) and won’t add another one until the USS Enterprise is responding to a distress call from Vulcan (in the new timeline for you Trekkies).

While about 6,500 of my first 10,000 days were spent at home preparing for the roughly 22,500 days of adult life, I’ve had 3, 500 days to get this far in life. I’ve wasted plenty of those days. What will I be able to do with the next 10,000 if I’m purposeful with them?

Now, I will go, purposefully, and keep pushing forward on getting a client site built.

What's your 10,000th day of life without some fun wordart?

The post 10,000 Days appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

[My latest post on Austin Catholic New Media.]

Alright folks. One week down. How is everyone doing? Been perfect so far?

I admit, I already had a Lenten slip-up. This year, for better or worse, I didn’t mention what I was offering up for Lent on my personal site. In retrospect, I usually fail at it, which not only means I’m unintentionally bragging about what I’m doing, I’m being hypocritical too. That being said, we are a communal faith and we have each other to help us remember God’s grace when we are tempted or fail to live up to our standards.

In that light, let’s check-in with each other.

…

The post Have You Cheated Yet? appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

I have a confession to make about Friday’s post.

I had just finished reading Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. In his recent second edition, he postulates that the reason the gender gap is increasing in many Christian denominations is that many churches are overly feminized. Yes, the vast majority of pastors in Christian churches (and all ordained ministers in Catholic churches) are men, but the participants and those involved in lay leadership are majority women across the American Christian fold. Further, the lack of male participants will result in the death of a church, citing statistics that the higher the gender gap, the quicker a church’s attendance declines.

I found his book extremely interesting. Murrow connects today’s praise and worship music and the phrasing of having a “relationship” with Jesus Christ as one “male repellant”. His reasoning: What man wants to have a “relationship” with another man? Do men talk like that to each other? Did Jesus talk like that to his own Apostles? While we are called to an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, can’t we find a different way to phrase it, at least some of the time? The book has many examples and his reasoning for how they came about.

He cites that, while we shouldn’t go fire and brimstone exclusively, much of our discussion of Christ is based on Jesus the Lamb while viewing Jesus the Lion (e.g. throwing out moneychangers in the temple) as the anomaly of Christ. Murrow’s claim is that Jesus was “a lion” as much, if not more, than he acted as a “lamb” and that the overall Christian church has decreased that message to, for some, a footnote.

Murrow’s solution isn’t to make churches a den of masculinity, but to reduce the “repellent” aspects some and increase opportunities for men to feel useful. Men like to work with their hands and do stuff. For many churches, the only ministry some men feel useful is the usher or parking lot attendant. (I’m not saying women don’t like to work with their hands. I’m not trying to make any inference about how women feel included in the church community; just my thoughts on getting men more active.)

This book was written for the broader Christian church, so many aspects of it aren’t applicable across the board. From the Catholic position, many of his points about worship services simply don’t apply to Mass or, if they do, aren’t things we’ll change as they’ve been like that for hundreds of years if not thousands. Nevertheless, many of his points do make sense to me and could be applied to the Catholic practice in some way.

As I mentioned in the comments of Friday’s post about chicken broth, sometimes being Catholic is a bit too easy. When looking at the guidelines of excluding meat on Fridays (and Ash Wednesday), if the sacrifice is easy, what’s the point? Yes, there is something to be said to be reminded of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, but as a penance, is it effective?

My thought, regarding meatless Fridays and chicken broth, is especially in today’s world where we have a world’s worth of culinary styles at our fingertips, it isn’t that hard to find recipes that completely exclude meat and meat-based products. This is ignoring that for a long time in our history, the Lenten fast was for all of Lent and excluded all dairy, eggs, etc. In the Eastern rites and Orthodox Christianity, this is still practiced (to some degree at least, not researched). They have specific time periods labeled “Meatfare” and “Cheesefare” as the farewell to meat and cheeses for all of the Great Lent.

One reason the Knights of Columbus do so well generally speaking is it pushes men to do more. It gives them a structure that lets them do good work doing work they feel they can do as men. Not saying women can’t do any of it, but something that feels natural for a guy. While men can sit in a room and make rosaries just as well as women, in our society, it doesn’t feel as natural for a guy.

Likewise, I think one reason, at the University Catholic Center, why the men’s Catholic fraternity (Lambda Omega Alpha) has done a better job of recruiting than the Knights is the pledge process. The fraternity’s pledge process gives young men a challenge (to make it through) and a stronger sense of exclusivity. Truthfully, I don’t know if they have ever rejected a candidate for membership who participated fully, but the standard is set that you are expected to rise to this challenge.

The Knights process is easier. Frankly, if you want to join, you talk to someone, we vouch that you’re Catholic (typically by you saying so) and you can attend a ceremony to join. The Knights, even college Knights, shouldn’t adopt the fraternity’s approach; however, there are aspects of the “challenge” that could be adopted.

There’s more to the recruitment issue than the process of joining alone, but we’ll exclude that for now.

My point is that all people need to feel at home in the church and a diversity of opportunities and language need to be used to create that atmosphere.

With “challenges”, there are issues. Friday’s chicken post was examining a point of canon law. There needs to be a fair balance between requirements and expectations.

My mom called me last night to ask me a question. She had gone to confession a couple of weekends before Ash Wednesday. Does that count for Lent? She understood the expectation to be that she had to go to confession during Lent and that, now, some folks are saying that we need to go twice a year, at least, during Lent and Advent.

Truthfully, there is little required in this category. We are required to take communion annually, during the season of Easter unless fulfilled another time of the year for a just cause (Canon 920). You can’t go to communion if you are conscience of your own grave sin (Canon 916). You are required to confess your grave sins once a year (Canon 989). Thus, the “Easter Duty”, as it has been called, is strictly to receive communion during Easter, in the state of grace, which infers that you should confess your grave sins just prior to communion, which Lent is the time of penance and preparation for Easter. Therefore, going to confession during Lent is assumed to be required. (Other legal documents and extremely laudable practices notwithstanding.)

So for my mom, frankly, yes. Her pre-Ash Wednesday confession “counts” and, save any grave sinfulness, she’s fine to receive communion, as required, during Easter.

But note, that the expectation is to go to confession during Lent, if not twice a year, if not more.

Should we expect more of our faithful? Yes.

Should we require more of our faithful? I don’t know and I’m not in any position to change any of this, so it doesn’t matter.

With Friday’s post, I truly think accepting chicken broth is an invalid reading of canon law, but in either case, we should expect folks to exclude it. We shouldn’t require Liturgy of the Hours for everyone, but we can expect families to adopt some part of it, perhaps Night Prayer.

Why Men Hate Going to Church is a good read for those engaged in ministry. The book shouldn’t be taken as Gospel, but as a reminder to reexamine our churches to ensure that we are reaching all of our members and capturing their hearts and minds. For many men, the challenge will bring them.

Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of the book in exchange for a review. I was not required to give a positive review.

The post The Challenge: Why Men Hate Going to Church appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Can you use meat-based broths on Fridays in Lent?

I vote no.

Rocco of Whispers in the Loggia asked the question this morning if chicken broth sans the chicken itself can be used today (as a Friday in Lent). A reader pointed him to Jimmy Akin (another Catholic blogger) who said yes.

I’m not a canon lawyer, but you don’t need to be to get a reasonable answer. The beauty of the Catholic faith is 99% of the teachings, rules and regulations simply make sense if you accept the premises and the authority of the Church to decree certain things, such as the whole notion of Lent.

First, the canon law argument. Mr. Akin tries to claim that since the 1917 Canon Law prohibits “meat and soups of meat, but not” milks, etc and that the Apostolic Constitution Paenitemini of Paul VI (which establishes the rules in force) simply says “use of meat, but not…”, we are no longer bound to avoid soups of meat. Wait… No, sir.

photocredit: flickr/pswansen

I don’t know how you make chicken broth, but in my house, we take leftover pieces of chicken and leftover pieces of vegetables, place them in water and leave it heating on the stove a long time. Then, we extract the solid and the remaining liquid is the broth. I’m just a simple layman, but that seems to be using meat.

Paul VI, of blessed memory, stated that milk, eggs and condiments rendered from animal fat are acceptable. Thank you, as I have zero idea what is in any of my condiments. Wouldn’t it be easy to add broths if such an exemption was foreseen?

Is it that we have divorced the process of making chicken broth since majority of people grab a box or can from a shelf and call it a day?

Penance isn’t supposed to be easy. It isn’t meant to only be done by the superhuman either. Across the board, things in life that make us better are hard.

I want to lose 25 pounds. I’m not going to do it by only walking around the block until it becomes hard. (That may be a start depending on your life circumstances). I can go out right now and run four miles. Run all of it. Damn slow, but I can do it. If I seriously expect results, I need to push myself.

I want to earn a Master’s degree. I’m not going to do it by only reading material I find interesting until I get sleepy at night. I have to work at it. Study both the interesting and the dull. Write the thousand words that come easy and the thousand words that does not. My friend Nate had, seemingly, 19,000 lasers break on him during his PhD research. Was it easy to continue? No. But Dr. Nate did.

I want my family to continue to grow in a house full of love. I’m not going to do it by only doing what is easy around the house. A grocery store trip, two baths for a two- and an one-year-old and cooking dinner in the same 90-minute window isn’t easy.

I want to become closer to God. I’m not going to do it only by going to church on Sundays when I happen to wake up early enough.

Do you see the pattern? Penance is supposed to be attainable, but should require us to stretch. Someone who is vegan has the meatless Friday gig down, but perhaps they should voluntarily give up soy on Fridays. The point of the Friday penance isn’t not eating meat—it is to grow, to be drawn into conversion, to change our hearts. Paul VI says as much in the first chapter of Paenitemini.

At the same time, if you forget it’s a Friday of Lent or started making a recipe and mistakenly missed that it included a meat broth or ordered a meal at a restaurant, then remembered too late to reverse the action (e.g. stop cooking without wasting the food, change the order before the cooks made it, able to use a veggie broth instead, etc), then just eat the food. My personal thought is the waste of food is not the intention of the penance. Learn from the mistake, pay more attention next time and include it as part of your Lenten confession package.

Call me old-fashioned or oppressive, but leave the broth in the pantry today, okay?

The post No, Put the Chicken Broth Back! appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

I bought a Kindle last October and loved it instantly. I’ve read a number of books, including the few reviews on this site since then. In fact, all of the books I’ve read since October have been on the Kindle.

Until now.

photocredit: flickr/tompagenet

I love books. I love having a bookshelf full of books. I admitted to myself when buying the Kindle that I would still buy the physical book if it was something that anticipate wanting to add to the physical library. In this case, I purchased The Emerging Diaconate by Deacon William Ditewig, PhD. My interest for the diaconate and my thoughts on this book are for another post, but I thought that I’d want to keep this one in physical form.

I realized I enjoy reading on the Kindle much more. With the Kindle, I can’t flip forward a few pages to see how long until the end of a chapter. I saw this as a defect; however, it is a benefit. While reading the book in the quiet of our room while the girls were sleeping on our retreat, I would be ready to take a break. While reading the previous book on the Kindle, I’d finish that “screen” and the remainder of that paragraph, put the book down and go. With the physical book, I wanted to reach the end of the chapter.

My reading comprehension crashed. My goal wasn’t to read anymore; it was to finish the chapter. I could say that I read the last two pages of the chapter, but I failed to retain any of it. I caught myself doing it again on Monday night. When buying the Kindle, I thought that I would read more, but I never thought it would help me to be a better reader.

That’s a sign of a great piece of technology. It may have flaws and critics will have issues, no doubt, but it enhances something to make your life truly better.

For Lent, I am hanging up my iPod Touch.

I’m still using the same one that was a Christmas gift in 2008 and it has served me well. While working as an insurance agent, I loved being able to update my electronic calendar on the road. I’m not certain it enhanced my scheduling experience, though. I remember apologizing many times while waiting for the iPod to load my calendar. A paper calendar may have actually been more efficient.

Now though, why do I need an iPod Touch? I get away with checking e-mail and Twitter throughout the day, but I don’t need to be consuming that content at that moment. Olivia comes up to me and says “Daddy, stop checking e-mail!”. Usually, I do it when she’s playing by herself and I seemingly have nothing to do in that moment. Truthfully, I’m trying to do two things well at the same time: be with my girls and keep up with the outside world.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have dedicated blocks of time to do that? Do I carry a book with me everywhere and read a paragraph every time there is a two-minute lull? No offense, but do the 500 people I follow on Twitter actually say anything that I have to read right that moment?

Would I be a better father by being present when I’m present? Would it stretch me to have to figure out how to do activities during the day that entertains/educates both me and the girls? I bet they get bored too sometimes and don’t have the luxury of pulling out a magic device that always gives me something new to look at.

What about you? Are you using Lent as a chance to take away what doesn’t enhance? What helped you decide what you will be doing for the next 40 days?

The post Kindles, iPods and Lent appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

We took a retreat this weekend. The whole family. All four of us.

I like the idea of taking a retreat annually, but have fallen out of the habit. In 2007, I took my last silent retreat at the Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House north of Dallas, TX. I attended a Christ Renews His Parish (CRHP or “chirp”) Retreat in 2010. This year, presented by the ACE Advocates of Austin and Dallas, the retreat focused on the topic of servant leadership.

The need to retreat is essential, whether or not you are religious. A retreat is a great time to step away from the typical grind and reset or recenter yourself. Like a vacation with purpose, the retreat allows you to slow down, enjoy life and remember what direction you want to follow.

photocredit: flickr/haveclipperswilltravel

In religious life, retreats are required. Canon law requires the bishop to ensure candidates for ordination have taken a recent retreat, bounds the religious to take an annual retreat, and dictates that the parish priest’s retreat is not to be taken from their “vacation time”.

In the business world, the presence of retreats is growing. More and more organizations—non-profit and for-profit alike—are taking their staffs or a subset on retreat to rediscover their mission, their goals and objectives and to formulate strategies to realize that mission and achieve those objectives when they return to the office. Businesses are realizing that they can be more successful when they step back for a moment to take in the bigger picture.

Individually, we tend to ignore this. I let three years pass without a retreat and I only went on the CRHP retreat because a member of the Knights that I needed to meet with regarding his insurance said he wouldn’t less I went. (While I don’t encourage this tactic, I knew I needed to go on a retreat, so it worked.)

We’ll go on a retreat when it is required or suggested by a community we are closely associated—work, civic and church organizations and so on. But we tend to ignore our own personal need to seek out the type of retreat that would enrich us at that time and take it.

The Jesuit-style retreat is my personal favorite. Primarily alone. Silent. Large blocks of time to simply reflect. Private. The content fixed. Each retreat is virtually the same as the previous one, although where you go with it differs. The retreat director guides you, but the journey is up to you. The Awakening-style doesn’t do much for me (but does for a lot of people). High-energy, music, small-group orientated with sharing. CRHP was similar to this. That being said, the experience was still enriching and recentered me on being a strong husband and father.

With so many options for retreats, the selection to choose from can stop us cold. There’s an all-men’s retreat by this organization, there’s a couple’s retreat here, the Jesuit center has a retreat every other week available, someone is always telling me that I simply must go on CRHP. It’s easier to do nothing than sort through everything just to figure out where to reserve a spot.

Even when some retreat styles are better for you than others, the important part is going on a retreat. I could have waited another four years before planning another retreat at Montserrat until I felt okay leaving the family for a Thursday-Sunday retreat, or could have found a million reasons to not attend that CRHP retreat, or have put up a thousand roadblocks to taking the entire family last weekend, the important step is actually going.

Something is better than nothing. In experiencing something new, you may discover something that enriches you in ways you never expected or experienced from that style before.

Back to this weekend: As a family, though, wow. The idea of the husband and wife going on a retreat and leaving the kids with Grandma made sense to me, but the whole family? Never occurred as feasible and I told Vanessa as much when she brought up the idea.

It worked. The retreat was at a beautiful camp outside of Marble Falls, TX. The organizing team split the working sessions amongst themselves to run child care in the retreat site’s rec room taking in all ages from our one-year-old to guys who appeared to be around 12. The adults were able to experience the retreat, the kids were able to play (for our girls, more than we do at home) and we were all able to enjoy time with each other outside of the typical weekend routine.

While not a very contemplative time, the retreat gave us pause, recharged the batteries and allowed us to look above the clouds in order to be reminded of why we’re doing what we’re doing in life. Being married with kids makes it more of a challenge to find and attend a retreat, either alone or with the whole group, but is even more a necessity.

The post The Need To Retreat appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

I’m typically horrible about Valentine’s Day. Vanessa and I agreed early into dating that we weren’t going to do anything for the holiday. For her, that meant nothing big, but acknowledge it somehow. For me, that meant nothing, period.

photocredit: flickr/catbeurnier

This year, I decided to do a little. I still maintain that the holiday is primarily an attempt by the greeting card, chocolate, cheap stuffed animal and restaurant industries to get some positive sales numbers early into the year so the Christmas buying season has some padding. However, trying to do just a little something more to show your wife you love her is not a bad idea.

I executed a two-tier plan. Which approach would be more appreciated?

From the heart…

I crafted Vanessa’s redesigned site over the summer. She loves it, even though she doesn’t have the time to do much with it. She has mentioned in the past that she would like to post reviews of recipes that we try out on her site. While she could just write a normal blog post, put it into a foodie category and tag it up a bit, I wanted to make it easier and thus more likely for her to convert “I’d like to write…” to “I do write…”.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working bit-by-bit on a recipe review system within WordPress for her. <geek>A custom post type with a few custom taxonomies.</geek>  She’d fire up her browser and navigate to her admin panel. Click “Add Recipe Review” then just answer the questions. Where was the original recipe at? What modifications did she make? Her review, her rating, a picture, etc. A custom category set lists the various meal times and holidays to select when within the day and within the year (if applicable). Lastly, a custom tag set allows her to enter each ingredient that she chooses, so later she can easily search all of the reviews in the system based on one. For example, when Johnson Backyard Garden is selling 20 pounds of tomatoes again, she can easily pull up all “tomato” reviews and plan how to use the 20 pounds worth.

I was able to finish the backend and get the frontend functional enough in time to show her today.

Once we get it looking like she wants and she has a few reviews in the system, we’ll show it off. Likewise, I’m thinking about packaging it up as a WordPress plugin.

From the wallet…

During my last HEB trip, I picked up a couple of stuffed animals (based on what Olivia and Catalina would like), some hand-dipped chocolate- and nut-covered strawberries and some chocolate-covered cherries. This morning, before finishing this post, I arranged it all on the table so she’ll see it as soon as she comes downstairs.

No real thought into this until I was at HEB.

What about a note?

One of Vanessa’s friends has a boyfriend who writes some type of love letter/note everyday. Everyday. If you or your significant other does this, wow. I love Vanessa. Without doubt, I give myself completely to her and she is my world. I struggle, though, figuring out a unique way of saying that in a note. I have this mental block against writing a love letter that says the same thing as something I told her previously or written to her before. Ladies, I’m sure you can give me a little guidance here on if that matters or not, but let’s just say I’m not the poetic love note type.

Which won?

That has to wait. As I finish, she’s upstairs getting ready. We shall see.

Either way…

Whether it is February 14th or May 19th or November 28th, showing our significant others and our families that we love them, care about them and want to treat them is always a good idea. While I’m all for bucking the cultural overindulgence of a small religious feast day-that-is-no-longer-generally-a-feast-day into the de facto day of love.

The post Heart or Wallet? appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Friday was Catalina’s first birthday! In our household, you’re a baby until your 1st birthday, then a “little toddler” until your 2nd birthday, then a “big toddler”. Olivia is excited about Catalina becoming a little toddler.

photocredit: flickr/spool32

Last night, I asked Olivia what was the best part of Catalina becoming a little toddler. She replied “I teach her things.” What things? “How to get up and walk around!” I guess she’s been saving that up until she felt Catalina was worthy of such an honor as walking.

I realized recently that I’ve been home with Catalina for the majority of her life. It gave me a moment’s pause. With parenting, I am naturally gifted in many ways and naturally deficient in others. I haven’t focused much on my deficiencies since Vanessa balances me out well.

I realized, though, that Catalina sees my deficiencies more than she sees Vanessa strengths.

Businesses and organizations have cycles they can re-evaluate. Either the academic year or the fiscal year provide a natural time to prune away ideas that aren’t working, seed new ones and generally review strengths and weaknesses. At least until kids are in school, there isn’t a natural period for review at home.

While she won’t remember this birthday or what I’ve done wrong in the last year, I’m hopeful that she’ll see the results of the review into the future.

What’s the Review?

I review a few different areas of my parenting of Catalina, which naturally will branch out to include Olivia and my life as a whole.

Spiritual

Do I pray with Catalina? Do I pray for her? How often? Her favorite book is this little nativity story board book. She’ll hunt it out of her bookshelf every day and is the only book I can start with when reading to her before nap or bedtime.

I’m sure there is something about the color scheme or the illustrations that attract her, but nevertheless, it is attractive to her.

Social

This is two-pronged. How much do I socialize with Catalina? Do I play with her? Do I “talk” with her? She’s still really young, but if I don’t pay attention to building a social bond with her, eventually, it’ll be difficult for me to “break into” her life. I figure to be conscience of it now and she’ll always know that Dad is a type of friend too. (A parent who isn’t afraid to discipline first, but a listening ear as well).

The second aspect is external. Do I let her play with other kids at the park or do I tend to keep her to myself? She has Olivia, so she is better than older kids than Olivia ever has been. She doesn’t quite know what to do with kids her age or younger—she is a bit rough. Outwardly, when other parents give me that look at the park, I say to myself “if your kid wasn’t a wimp…”, but realistically, I try to teach her to be gentle.

Physical

I like video games. I like computers. While I enjoy biking and other things outside, my default activities are typically stationary and indoors. With Catalina, how much physical play do we do? How does it rank in our schedule? Once a week? Once a day? Once an hour? I was lax last week and let the girls watch an entire feature-length movie at one setting. I meant to do a little work during that time, but I hadn’t seen it and ended up watching it with them too. At least at this age, I don’t want to make a 90-120 minute movie a typical activity.

Intellectual

Are we teaching her new things? Are we trying to advance her mental development? With Olivia as her best friend, Olivia helps a lot in that Catalina wants to catch up and be like her sister, but that doesn’t remove any responsibility from us. How often do we read together? How often do I do the age-appropriate tasks, like pointing out everything in a room and telling its name or colors or some creative problem solving with a puzzle?

While I bill this as an annual review process, it’s continual. I wish I could say I had a nice schedule when I consciously do this, I don’t. I end up doing it the week after Vanessa has an holiday—after Thanksgiving, Christmas, a random three-day weekend. The break in the routine is just enough to get me out of the mold.

It’s easy to forget how fast your kids are growing up, at least at this age. Their favorite toys yesterday are too young for them today it seems. The toys you had put away because they were “too old” for them or because you didn’t think they could safely navigate it yet are quickly within their skillset.

Parenting only two who are only one- and two-years-old themselves, I know there’s more I don’t know than do. How else do you review your parenting to make sure you’re being as effective as possible?

The post Parental Review appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Yesterday, the Board of Regent for The University of Texas System authorized UT-Austin to purchase Players, the beloved burger joint.

photocredit: Austin Chronicle

In 2005, the University attempted to acquire Players too. At the time, the price offered by UT was too low for the owners of Players and UT was authorized to use eminent domain to seize the property. The rub: UT was planning on seizing it for a parking garage for a hotel. A petition drive started with some virtual signatures and mostly physical signatures (remember, this was Facebook wasn’t facebook.com, it was thefacebook.com and looked like this. Long ago!)

The media loved the story. I was on the Bobby Bones Show. The Statesman ran a story about the effort. TV news outlets reported it. We made noise. There was support in the Texas House and a bill won overwhelming support against the University using eminent domain.

I haven’t spoke with the owners since news broke yesterday. If they don’t want to sell, we’re going to help them. Save Players is back.

[ Website ] [ Facebook ] [ Twitter ]

“But Kraft, it’s just a burger place. There’s nothing particularly unique about it.” True, absolutely true. However, it’s that third space. For most of us, we have a first space (home) and a second space (work/school). We need our place to go to where we can relax and socialize. Players is that place for many folks in Central Austin. Virtually on campus (or else UT wouldn’t want it), it is easily accessible to the southern half of campus. From living in Jester to working at the University Catholic Center, Players was the place to hang out, meet with friends, watch the game and get a bite to eat. Picture “Cheers” but on a college level.

After 2005, it was Cheers to me. Everyone knew my name!

But seriously, as often as not, someone I knew would already be there whenever I went there to eat. My fraternity, en masse, ate there after all our major functions. We had one of our 15th Anniversary Reunion activities there for crying out loud. They are locally owned and are part of the community. Players introduced me to Live Oak’s Big Bark, which led to my discovery of local breweries. I wouldn’t be a member of Black Star Co-Op if Players didn’t open my mind to local options that you’ll never see with a Super Bowl ad.

In the end, it truly doesn’t matter. It’s just a burger place. It’s part of the drumbeat of progress. But what do we lose? What would campus be like if the bar at 21st and Speedway held firm? On that ground now stands the PCL, the main library. Yes, north of campus there are burger/beer joints. There’s one further up on Guadalupe. What do we lose when everything in socially-acceptable walking distance to the majority of on-campus students is a chain establishment?

Austin is the big city that still wants to be a small town. Sometimes, that’s bad. Look at our transportation/transit situation if you need evidence. That small town vibe, though, is what makes small towns unique and why half of the planet loves Austin. Austin can’t keep blinders on—as we’ve done with transportation—but we can’t afford to make everything between UT and the Capitol sterile.

No one ever says when visiting Austin “I can’t wait to eat at the MLK McDonalds! Brings back all these memories!”

The post Here and No Further appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

When UT tries to take away my Players’ combo with cheese, no tomato with a strawberry shake, they have gone too far.

The post Save Players! appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

I’ve been working on advancing my freelancing to the next level lately. I’ve received work, so far, through word of mouth and each project is a negotiation. Becoming a freelancer was not my intention; just to pick up a few side projects here and there. As I’ve started putting myself forward as being available for projects, I’ve received more response than I expected despite the lack of marketing effort.

Building the Business photocredit: Rebuild Lakeshore

My personal dream, professionally, is to someday have a strong enough income off of this site and freelancing to be the sole (necessary) income. Since the vast majority of my work could be done anywhere with an Internet connection, the idea of being able to take extended trips to visit family or friends without always having to close up shop or take vacation days is very appealing.

Monday, I had a great site visit with a client. She was fun to work with, I enjoyed my time, it was an actual paying gig (instead of the too-easy-to-agree-to “can you help a friend” volunteer thing). The rest of the day, I started thinking of the various aspects around the business that I need to do. Brandon Kraft Tech Services’ website, brandonkraft.net, obviously is incomplete. I don’t have a logo or business cards. I need a standard pricing chart and whether I’ll publish it or hold it internally. All types of fun things.

The freedom is exciting and terrifying. While working for the Knights of Columbus, I was, technically, self-employed. I could use virtually any method I wanted to secure the sale—use or not use their sales material, create my own (with approval of compliance), make appointments whenever I wanted—but, in the end, I had a plethora of materials already in place. While I could have designed my own, I had a basic business card design, logo, standard (and fixed) pricing and so on. Now, I can do everything to grow the business or shoot it in the foot.

Thankfully, there is a community online and in Austin for support. Kathryn Whitaker, who herself is a stay-at-home parent running a successful freelance design firm, is an inspiration. The web developer circles in Austin are vast, especially compared with most cities. While I made all the choices, I’m not going it alone.

The same goes for parenthood. We’re making all the decisions. Plenty will be a good and plenty will be bad, but there are great physical and virtual communities that allow for the village to help rear a child.

The key for me is to not get overwhelmed. Being a parent has taught me to take each day at a time. Grand, masterful plans that are works of art, are only as good as their effectiveness and practicality, which means their flexibility. As a parent or as a new freelancer, you can only do so much. You have to craft plans and strategies, but overall, just focus on the task at hand and have a good idea of which direction the next battle will be.

The post Logos and More appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Companies have reputations. The majority of companies want to be seen as a leader in the marketplace and a global agent of change. Other companies are content—or strive—to be bottom of the barrel.

Two extremely popular Internet services companies top the list of companies of the latter. HostGator and GoDaddy.

photocredit: flickr/striatic

I started out with HostGator many, many years ago. I had an absolute horror of a nightmare with them. The story is for a different day, but in short, imagine if your website and e-mail were suspended during the middle of the night due to high usage without any explanation of what, specifically, had high usage, inability to access server logs to track down the problem and no recourse except to start paying for a monthly plan five times more expensive. Their CEO was in on the conversation thread and was unapologetic that my little blog in 2007 when no one read it was too popular for them to handle, but in the end, I was offline for three days—e-mail included.

I stuck it out with them for awhile.

I used to have all of my domain names registered with GoDaddy. Previously, I had a single domain (brandonkraft.com) that, because I didn’t know any better, registered with the original registrar, Network Solutions, which was expensive by comparison. When I started picking up more domains, GoDaddy was the default that everyone mentioned. I’ve heard horror stories, but thankfully, never experienced my own.

I stuck it out with them for awhile.

I left both companies, in the end, not due to their customer support, the quality of their services or anything else related to anything to do with their actual business.

I left both because of the personality of the business embodied in the CEO.

HostGator’s CEO pulled a stunt in 2007 after the company moved to Houston to have himself and some of their employees act as homeless people for a few hours. That was enough to push me off. I stayed with the company through a three-day outage, but their CEO blogging on the company blog about him and a few employees being “bums” for a few hours was too far for me. I pulled my website, the University Catholic Center’s website and a couple of other clients off their services as soon as possible. We moved to Nexcess and are still very, very pleased.

GoDaddy… Just look at their Super Bowl ads. One showed their female spokesmen body painting another, mentioning at the end how they missed a few spots followed with something like “See the unrated conclusion online!”. The other one I saw was the old “heaven is like a room full of underwear models” ploy, which also ended with the “see the unrated conclusion!”.

Their CEO took fire for going on an African trip that included shooting elephants and the company as a whole took intense heat for support SOPA, which led to tens of thousands of domains being transferred away from their services.

I left GoDaddy sometime ago and ended up starting my own reseller registrar service, partnered with Tucows (http://domains.brandonkraft.net) primarily as a way to best assist clients while allowing them to have full ownership of their domains while knowing that the profit going to the seller (e.g. me) won’t be used for sexist Super Bowl ads, elephant-killing safaris or Internet-killing legislation.

In both cases, the lack of leadership displayed by these companies is why I decided to terminate my professional relationship with them. Technically, they could have been the best, but it wouldn’t have been enough.

The CEOs might be able to lead a company to be profitable, but are they a leader in society? Are they advancing common good? I don’t need them to go out of their way to do anything besides not do things that make the world worse. Nexcess hasn’t done anything, I’m aware of, that has brought any attention to them beyond their technical services. I’m fine with that. They’re not making the world worse.

When you’re a leader, you’re inviting others to follow you both within your specific realm and as a person. You need to embrace both of those roles and manifest that.

Within the home, if I put food on the table, get the girls bathed every day, put them to sleep on time and, in every physical way, serve their needs, but am a jerk to them or their mother, I’m failing as a father. Within a company, if the balance sheet looks good, but my employees hate me for being a mean, insensitive jerk who drives them into the ground relentlessly until they quit, I’m failing as a business leader.

As consumers, we have to pay attention to the companies we patronize. Sometimes, it is easy. Plenty of people boycotted Taco Bell during their tomato labor issue, but it goes beyond that. What do you believe? Is a company violating what you consider decent? CEOs and leaders are accountable for their actions, but the followers are too.

In conclusion, leadership is a two-way street. Leaders have to be accountable for what they bring to the table and followers/consumers are accountable for who they choose to follow.

The post I Didn’t Like GoDaddy Before It Was Cool appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Last night, around 11 p.m., the Austin Police Department proceeded in an enforcement action of new policies established by the City of Austin concerning usage of the public areas of City Hall. In layterms, they evicted the protest.

photocredit: flickr/aaabbbccc8d

I’m torn on this issue. The first amendment freedom of assembly is extremely important. We, as citizenry, have the right to protest peacefully and that is an absolute cornerstone of the American democratic process.

But, I’m a pragmatist. A protest designed to be indefinite, seeking vague goal (“end corporate greed”) with an unclear reason to protest at City Hall seems silly to me. After reading their own brochure, I don’t understand what, specifically, they’re trying to protest.

I watched part of the eviction by way of OccupyAustin’s livestream team. One women, very upset, was decrying being evicted from “the home they have known for four months.” I’m not part of the 1%. Hell, I’m not in the top 50%. That plaza is my city hall too. It is as much “my home” as your home. This group has monopolized a very visible public plaza for four months. I care about the abortion issue. Could I have organized a protest at City Hall to attempt to impact decisions within the competency of the City around the anniversary of Roe v Wade?

I care about transportation issues. Could I have staged a “bike-in” at City Hall during that time? I care about electricity rates being fair for both Austin Energy and consumers, especially those struggling already. Could I have staged something at City Hall during this time, as Austin Energy (owned by the City), is debating rate increases?

Many will say yes, but it would either be mixed in with Occupy or, by virtue of the limitation of space, be smaller than it could have been. These are issues that the City not only can take action on but is the entity to take action.

Should the City have ordered their removal? I don’t know 1st Amendment law enough to begin to answer that question. I don’t know how absolute Freedom of Assembly is within our legal precedents. Can a protest use a public space permanently? Do I have a legitimate claim that they are restricting my ability to (effectively) protest by hogging City Hall?

What do you think? Leave a comment!

The post Occupy Austin appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

Sometimes we just have to create order out of the chaos, if it is minor and seemingly meaningless.

If you know me personally, you know there is much physical chaos to my environments. I like the idea of organization, but I miss the boat when it is time to execute. Being married to Vanessa has helped with execution, but I still need to take a timeout once a week when I realize that my desk became a mental distraction.

photocredit: flickr/CarbonNYC

Olivia is putting away her toys and books each night more and more often, but not yet every night. When I put them away, I become very anal. The train cars must be “parked” in the parking spaces on the city playmat. Each toy veggie must be reassembled and go back to the grocery bag to which they belong. This bin is for wooden building blocks. This one is for the plastic blocks. The boxes slide onto the shelves like this, not like that. Until very recently, each night, I would reassemble and correctly order this alphabet puzzle that has a letter on one puzzle piece and a picture of an item of that letter on another.

Within five minutes of either of the girls being set on the playmat in the morning when making breakfast, the chaos has returned and any semblance of order has been eliminated.

The girls will eventually not pull out every toy for the sake of doing so and they’ll eventually understand the desire for organization and order, but Daddy needs it now.

When Olivia puts away the toys, she can do it anyway she sees fit. When I actively help her, I guide her toward my organization, but am not ruthless about it. As long as some sense of order is achieved, we met the objective.

Being home all day, chaos is the primary state. After breakfast, the floor under the dining room table always magically has attracted crumbs, if not larger pieces of food. The changing area always seem to have a wild sock or wipe that Catalina pulled out of the box lying about. The bookshelves always seemingly reject half of the books and forcefully removed them. But, for a few short hours, we reached perfection.

We can’t micromanage our families. Our desire for organization and order, on some level, will have to be flexible and adaptable. The girls would revolt if I tried to get them to fit into my little mental boxes at every moment. But, there will be those mornings that they awake to find every toy put back into an exact place in an exact position.

The post Order For A Moment appeared first on Brandon Kraft.

This weekend, I migrated this site from Nexcess (on a reseller account that I own) to WP Engine. First, I still love Nexcess. They have served—and continue to serve—me extremely well. I’ve been with Nexcess since 2006 with zero problems, issues or complaints. I’m maintaining my account with them. They’re still hosting everything not at www.brandonkraft.com for me and are still hosting my client sites. I’ll write a review of my great experience with Nexcess later—this isn’t a comparison, except the speed test.

photocredit: flickr/brunogirin

WP Engine made me an offer to try them out and I’ve heard too many good things to not explore an Austin company dedicated to hosting sites built upon the same content management system that I primarily work with now.

Touchy-Feely Stuff

I made the switch to WordPress in late 2010 from Moveable Type. I should have made the switch years before, but hindsight is 20/20. A major reason for the move is the WordPress community. It is huge! MT’s community seemed to dwindle down to just a handful. With the WordPress community, if you need peer support, a plugin to do something, a theme that looks somewhat like you already want it, there’s a very high chance someone out there has already experienced the same need and either wrote about how to fix it, or wrote a plugin to automagically do it.

WP Engine is neck-deep in the WordPress community. I’ve read on their blog that they’re going to WordCamps (little conferences across the country/world for WordPress folks, mostly, in that community) across the map. They fully sponsored WordUp Austin, an advanced-level WordPress developer gathering. They are building a dashboard for people, like me, who either own or administer multiple WordPress installs to allow easy access to all of them.

Giving back to the community is a strong selling point to me. No web developer would be in business if they weren’t standing on the shoulders of those who went before them and freely offered their work to the public. If all those before us sold everything under licenses or kept proprietary within a company, the web would be much more sad.

Features

This isn’t fully inclusive. Check out their website to see more about what they offer. They offer managed WordPress hosting. Daily backups are automatically created, in addition to being able to set “restore points” (think Mac’s Time Machine or Window’s System Restore) so you can very quickly “undo” a massive change that goes all to hell, which shouldn’t happen with their staging server.

For my non-geeky friends that made it this far (bless you), when you make changes to your website, it is always recommended to try those changes out on a second version of your website that isn’t facing the public. Before, for me, it would mean either transferring my blog to a WordPress install running off my home computer for design changes or another install on my server for technical changes. While a good idea, the work of setting that up always seemed worse than the glitches that might occur or the damage if my site was offline for 20 minutes to fix something. Client sites are different, but for me and my blog, 20 minutes isn’t the end of the world.

WP Engine, though, allows me to create a second “staging” version of my website with one click that is an exact replica of my site. I can throw anything at the staging site. If I like it, I can merge the edits back or if I screw it all up, one click to recreate the staged version.

Awesome.

What makes WP Engine different than a traditional non-WP-engineered hosting provider is how they’ve built their internal network to support WordPress. The old server had the static files (images, etc), the database containing the content and the WordPress software that puts everything together all on one single machine. If I had a traffic spike, that one machine is taking the entire impact. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about WordPress from those not using it is, if you get too popular, your website will buckle under the pressure.

WP Engine has their clients covered. Without diving too much into the geeky stuff, they’re distributed the various aspects of your WordPress site over multiple servers with the ability to easily add more to assist if your website gets popular. If you’re ever went to a site off of Lifehacker, Drudge, TechCrunch, etc and it failed to load, they’re on a hosting provider that didn’t allow them to scale up to meet a quick, seemingly random, and massive increase in traffic.

Included with all services, they offer a content distribution network (CDN). I had one setup on Nexcess that I built using Amazon’s CDN CloudFront system, but had to pay extra for the usage. Avoiding the geeky stuff again, a CDN put the static, unchanging parts of your website on servers throughout the world. Since images are typically changed very rarely and are some of the largest files related to your website, it helps speed quite a bit if a visitor from Europe can get the images from a server in England instead of waiting for the image to cross the pond from Texas.

Their customer service, so far, appears to be top-notch. I have yet to have any critical issues, so I haven’t tested them in a crunch. When activating the CDN when I was ready to go live, they noticed an issue. They opened a ticket and had an engineer working on it before I realized the issue existed.

When grilling them about hosting my site, I spoke with Trafton, their developer champion, on the phone, for nearly an hour throwing every question I thought of his way. He was happy to share their philosophical approaches, their technical approaches, their upcoming and secret features and more.

Whatever, I don’t care… just tell me about site performance

First, with managed hosting, they strive to take care of you. I had a script on my server that was outdated. It was for a plugin I’m not currently using, so I hadn’t reviewed it for a security concern announced to the WP community. Their servers automatically found and patched the defected script. While that action didn’t speed up the site, it make it harder for a hacker to break in and either screw up or take down my site.

Speed.

WP Engine is really excited about speed. I mean, their name is Engine, which produces speed. I ran every variation of speed test possible, mostly through webpagetest.org, looking at total load time. In 48 of 50 tests, WP Engine was faster. In the two that were slowed, it appeared to be due to offsite objects (an ad, a script being pulled from Google, etc) that were being delivered slower than the other tests.

I geeked out with my old social stats textbook to crunch some of the data while running three variations of the test: previous host without a caching plugin, previous host with a caching plugin and WP Engine, which doesn’t allow caching plugins since they handle it themselves already. For the sake of comparison, I used only one connection speed for the summary results, which are typical across the board.

• Without a caching plugin on the previous server, my site is downright slow, by my standards. Approximately, 7s for complete load on the first visit.
• With W3 Total Cache on the previous server, my site is significantly faster at approximately 4.90s for a complete load on the first visit.
• With WP Engine, the site is slightly faster at approximately 4.5s for a complete load on the first visit.

Without question, either use W3 Total Cache or host with WP Engine. But check out the comparison on the return visit. This test assumes a user has visited your website, fully quit their browser, opened their browser and visited your website. It is meant to simulate a return visit after a prolonged absence.

• W3 Total Cache actually took longer, approximately 4.95s for a complete load.
• WP Engine served it up at an incredible 1.8s for a complete load.
  

Without WP Engine, my returning visitors, whom I love so dearly, would have waited 275% longer for my site to load.

The Negative

The only major negative, which is positive too, I’ve found is that they only handle WordPress. If you have other apps running on your site—a Gallery photo sharing site or your e-mail still hosted on your server—they cannot be your only host provider. On the positive, it means they direct all of their energy toward making WP awesome. On the negative, you might not be ready to cut the cord on your previous host.

Summary

If your web presence is built on WordPress, WP Engine is a fantastic hosting provider. They have absolutely defined the niche of the market they wish to dominate and their driven to give you the absolute best hosting experience for your WordPress-powered site. While not the least expensive provider on the market (plans start at $29/mo), they will deliver results that will far, far outmatch anything the screwball host providers can give you.

I strongly recommend checking WP Engine out for your needs. Tell Trafton I said hello.

Update: Their feature list keeps increasing. Now included in all plans is Git deployments and “LargeFS”, their connector to Amazon S3 allowing them, on the backend and seamlessly, shuffle media to S3 so you aren’t tied down to their storage limits or having to manage that yourself. Cool stuff.

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