Adam McFarland

Lately I’ve been realizing just how fast technology changes. In December I wrote an article about our company embracing the open source software alternatives:

So we came up with a plan. We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative). Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year. We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal. The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

In the comments Anthony from Xonatek and I had a great back-and-forth about taking our mentality a step further utilizing Google Apps and free web based software.  Ultimately, we didn’t change our plan at the time but the conversation left the thought in the back of my mind.

Just before we moved into the warehouse George’s computer died and we lost all of his data.  I personally was doing an OK job of backing up my files, but we didn’t yet have a company backup plan (something I planned on doing once we settled in).  The more I thought of it, the harder the idea of a backup plan became because we’re always on the move.  You can’t set your laptop to auto-backup at midnight if it’s in a different location each night at midnight.  What happens if it’s suspended or shut down?  If it backs up as soon as you boot up that could bother you and prevent you from performing a time-critical task.  If it skips the backup that defeats the purpose.

More and more I decided the route to go was not to back anything up, but to have everything stored on the web.  Aside from not needing to schedule and perform backups, you can also work from any internet-ready device at close to full capacity.  The downside of course is that if you have a slow internet connection many of the apps straight up suck.  We combat this by having the open source alternative installed on the hard drives on all of our computers.  We also still purchase software when necessary:  for example, Mike has a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that isn’t really replaceable  with an open source alternative for the graphics work he does.  We also sort of killed the idea of a super duper master $5,000 PC - what’s the point when almost everything is online anyway?

Here’s how we have it set up:

• We use Google Apps for:
  • Email hosting through Gmail.  This is for our @pureadapt.com emails.  For the rest of the emails (sportslizard, iprioritize, tastefullydriven, etc) I use the mail fetcher to take a copy of each incoming email off of the server and put it in an appropriate folder.  It leaves the message on the server for me to download in Thunderbird (still my email client of choice), acting as a great auto-backup.  I also set it up so I can reply from any of those email accounts via Gmail if I’m on the road and don’t have access to my Thunderbird on my laptop.
  • Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations for our office suite.  We’ve already had quite a bit of great collaboration on some docs and spreadsheets that otherwise would have been emailed back and forth a bunch of times.  Far more useful than I anticipated.
  • Google Sites to replace our Wiki’s.  We have one wiki for just the owners that has critical info in it and a second wiki that employees will have access to that has all of the important processes (like how to pack and ship an order).
  • Google Calendar to manage our schedules.  We don’t use it much, but it’s an easy way to set up a meeting with everyone without having a big chain of emails back and forth.
  • The company start page where you can access all of these things.  I can’t over-emphasize how nice it is to have one login for everything.
  • The Remember the Milk plugin for the company start page as a shared task manager (ironically, I had someone email me the other day ripping Remember the Milk and saying iPrioritize was far better…maybe so, but iP doesn’t have a plugin like this…suppose that’s my fault…)
• Xdrive for storing other files like our Quickbooks backup, database backups, PDF files, PSD files, etc.

So far it’s going great.  The coolest part for me has been that it has opened up a whole new world of devices away from my laptop where I can work.  I went from working solely on my one powerhouse laptop (dual core processor, 2 gb ram, etc) to now sometimes using my desktop for its 22″ monitor when I need more space.  I even pulled the trigger on an ultra portable Eee PC for when I’m on the go.  For $399 I figured I could reduce the wear and tear on my current laptop (especially the hard drive - the Eee has a solid-state hard drive which is much better for traveling) and reduce the amount of stuff I need to carry on a regular basis while still remaining almost as productive as I would be on my lapper.  Linux took some time getting used to, but with the help of EeeUser.com I’ve become addicted to hacking up this little device.  I’d say at this point I could work solely from the Eee PC for a few weeks with very little productivity loss.  I wrote a full review over on the Tastefully Driven blog, but take a look at how much smaller it is compared to my current lapper:

Random happenings not worthy of a full post…

• This weekend I’ll be moving to a new apartment so the posts might be slow for the next few weeks.
• Check out this little analysis I did over on TD:  Gas Prices Got You Down?  Buy Online…Really
• Thanks to the NBA and NHL playoffs my sleep schedule is all f*cked up again. I’m still getting up at 6, but going to bed really late means I need to take a nap in the afternoon….which kind of sucks.

Sometimes it takes me a while to do things I know I should do. Case in point: in October I read this fascinating feature in Inc. Magazine about Pandora entitled Pandora’s Long Strange Trip: Online radio that’s cool, addictive, free, and-just maybe-a lasting business.

Pandora has developed a proprietary method to analyze music–Westergren calls it the music genome–that lets users create online radio stations generated by the software’s recommendations. Tell Pandora your favorite song is “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead, and within seconds it will create a station–Casey Jones Radio–that streams nonstop songs from artists such as the Youngbloods, the Byrds, and the Beatles, along with stuff you might not expect, like R.E.M., the Jam, and Tom Petty. It’s undeniably cool and completely addictive, but Pandora has never quite found its footing as a business. Indeed, the company has been through an almost unbelievable number of setbacks, a series of blows that would make the most determined entrepreneur throw in the towel. Westergren has run out of money, which forced to him to lay off his entire staff (except for those willing to work for free). He’s been rejected some 350 times by venture capitalists. He has faced bankruptcy, haggled with anxious creditors, and been sued by employees. Deal after deal has fallen through at the last minute.

Sounded pretty cool to me. So what did I do? Completely forgot about it after I read the article…until this morning when I forgot my iPod at home. I’m the only one in the warehouse right now, so I randomly thought of Pandora and decided to give it a shot.

After entering about 10 of my favorite bands I started listening. The first few songs were from the groups I entered. Then it happened: for the last two hours they have not missed once - every single song has been either a group I like (but didn’t enter into the system), a song I like but had forgotten about and don’t own, or a song I never heard before from a group I’ve never heard of but liked. Amazing.

When I clicked the ‘why did you play this song’ tab for one song it said: “based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, melodic song writing, and dirty electric guitar rifts.”

Sure, if you say so. Next time someone asks me what kind of music I like I know what to say

When hulu - Fox and NBC’s joint online video venture -was announced I didn’t give it much thought. ABC already allows people to view episodes of popular shows online, so I figured this would be much the same. Mike signed up for the private beta but I didn’t bother. After getting his invite Mike told me it was awesome so without much thought I decided to put my name in for the beta and see if I could take it for a spin.

Now I’m addicted to it. Seriously, it’s amazing.

Miss an episode of The Simpsons? It’s on hulu the next morning. Want to watch an episode of 24 from Season 1? It’s on hulu too. Do you love old shows like Arrested Development or Futurama? Yup, they’re on hulu.

The best part is that I can login from any web browser and within seconds have an episode running in decent full-screen quality. No software, no downloads, no fees. There are only limited commercials - about 45 seconds per 20 minute episode, all from the same sponsor.

Even cooler, I’ve started discovering new shows that I’ve never watched before. A lot of friends have told me that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is hilarious. I honestly didn’t even know what network it was on yet alone what day and time, but I threw on a few episodes from hulu the other day and loved it so much that I went over to Amazon and purchased the first two seasons on DVD! This is exactly what they hope people do considering it’s a free service, and I’m more than happy to fork out $29.99 for some DVDs if I really like a show…so everyone wins

I’m really excited to see what they’ll do once they come out of private beta. I’m actually HOPING that they start charging. I’d gladly pay $10 - $20 a month if they:

• Made every single episode available all the time (right now it’s spotty at best for most shows).
• Made more movies available….not just a few “classics” like The Breakfast Club.
• Got a few more networks to sign up. I don’t like anything on CBS, so I’d settle for ABC and their family of networks (including ESPN of course)
• Sold me (or rented me) a hulu box that I could plug into my TV to watch. This sort of blends in with the On-Demand service that most cable providers offer, but I think hulu is already better than On-Demand so I’d just assume have my own hulu box. Who needs a DVR when everything is available anytime you want it? Hell, who needs DVDs if everything is available anytime you want it (assuming the quality is on par)? This would kick the crap out of Apple TV

Oh, and you can also embed full episodes on your site:

In my post earlier this morning I mentioned that this was probably the most productive week of my life. It’s partly because I’ve become an early riser, but mostly because we’ve had such success with the Detailed Image shopping cart that it’s eliminated a lot of the questions we had about our company direction. The back-end automation, SEO friendliness, and built-in upsell system have more than doubled sales and we’ve recognized that continued efforts in e-commerce are probably our best chance at using our skills to thrive as a company.

Before doing much with the cart though, we needed to clean it up a lot and add several common features that it previously lacked. Since it’s 100% custom programmed, the end result is a seamless e-commerce experience for both us and our customers that - in our opinion - isn’t rivaled by any shopping cart.

For example, with our soon-to-launch affiliate program you can apply simply by clicking a button in your ‘My Account’ section. There’s not a second registration like most sites require, and you can manage everything DI related by visiting that single ‘My Account’ page.

Anyway, in addition to Mike’s redesign and his blog redesign, I was able to complete the programming (with the aid and advice of our entire team of course) for the following features in this past week:

• Improved upsell system javascript to be more efficient and more visually appealing (example product page)
• Created the aforementioned affiliate program
• Integrated wholesale pricing tiers
• Created phone order system
• Added the ability for us to offer packages of items (and still have our inventory system updated correctly)
• Added gift certificates
• Product review system for every one of our products
• Fixed a pesky SSL problem that was causing a warning in IE7

Far and away my most accomplished week ever. Hell, if we can do all that in a week, what can we do in a few more months?

A little over a month ago I posted about using Mozilla Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement, and how our company is planning on transitioning in to using more open source software.   As I said back then, we’re anticipating having a staff that grows by a handful of people each year for the next few years, and - as any small business should be - we’re concerned about software costs.

So we came up with a plan.  We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007.  Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative).  Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year.  We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal.  The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

At the time of that post we didn’t have a hard time frame for the transition, but when George purchased a new laptop last month he and I decided it was a good time to go OSALT across the board and give it a shot.  There was certainly a bit of trepidation on our parts, but I’ve gone about a month now with only OSALT software on my laptop and I love it.  More specifically:

•  Hands down I now prefer Thunderbird to Outlook.  If they both cost the same amount, I’d buy Thunderbird. It took some tweaking, but now the Thunderbird/Lightning combination work like a charm and is extremely simple to use.  My absolute favorite part is that the spam filter ACTUALLY WORKS.  I get hundreds of spam messages each day, and I had heard great things about the Thunderbird spam filter so I was really anxious to see how it handled my spam.  After about 2 weeks of marking my spam as it came through I got to the point where I’m no longer greeted with more than a few spam messages each day.  There’s also only been one false-positive thus far.  All in all, much better than what I observed with Outlook.
• OpenOffice is much more functional than I expected.  It is a legit replacement for the Microsoft Office suite.  I only found two cases where I go over to my desktop and use Microsoft Office:  mail merges in Word that we use to create labels for Faceup postcards, and an advanced filter in Excel for a SportsLizard product upload.  Now, OO has both of those features, but I have templates that I was using in Word/Excel and those don’t quite work the way I want them too without some tweaking.  I also LOVE the “print to PDF” button in all OO software.  No Adobe Acrobat, and no stupid plugins.  PDF integration is sooooo helpful.
• Paint.net (with the .PSD file plugin for Photoshop files) also surprised me with how functional it was.  If you’re hard-core into photo editing you’ll still want Photoshop, but for the editing I do for images on the web I find Paint.net simpler with more intuitive keyboard short-cuts…meaning I work faster.  I used it for putting that image above together and it took about 30 seconds.

In each instance there are things I like better about the Adobe/Microsoft versions of the software, but there are also things I like better about the OSALT.  Considering the OSALT’s have no trouble opening .doc, .xls, .ppt, .psd, etc files, I really can’t see why the normal business user would need the Adobe and Microsoft counterparts.  If you make your life doing data analysis in Excel or graphic design in Photoshop, than you should spring for the real thing.  Otherwise, I say save your cash and go with the OSALT.  I never thought the transition would be this smooth for us, and I’m thrilled that we freed up some extra cash for our company.

In the next five years we anticipate that we’ll grow to have a somewhat sizable staff, probably 10-15 people. A few programmers, a book-keeper, a “secretary” (or whatever the politically correct term is now), a warehouse employee for Detailed Image for packing and shipping, a customer service rep, etc. One of the biggest hidden costs for an upstart bootstrapped company like us is software. We have the same problem you do: we want to use the open-source alternative but it always lacks the functionality of the paid counterpart.

The solution we’ve come up with is to use Open Source for everyone’s laptop, and have one “master” desktop with legitimate paid versions of every software we need. So our laptops will run Open Office as an office suite, Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client, Paint.net as a photo editing software, etc…and the high performance desktop will have the entire Adobe Suite, the entire Microsoft Office Suite, and any other expensive software we need. We estimate that 95% of tasks can be accomplished with the Open Source version, but if someone really needs Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop they can use our kickass desktop. This will keep us 100% legal with the latest software without spending $20k/year on software licenses.

We’re going to implement this over the course of the next year. Once we find a warehouse/office space (still looking) we’ll build the desktop and make the transition. In the meantime, I’m testing all of the software out for functionality and using it as part of my day-to-day to see which features the Open Source version doesn’t have and if that will be OK.

When we launched Faceup, I decided to do all of my email and scheduling using Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook. I run the two side-by-side now, and I must say I’m VERY impressed with Thunderbird. It does take a little configuration and a few plugins to up the functionality, but I’d have to say if I were evaluating the software packages based on my needs it’d be a wash.

The one thing Thunderbird lacks is Mail Merge, which I love using in Outlook when I have to send an email to 15-20 people and want to insert their name into the message to customize it. No biggie though - I’ll just use the desktop for that for the once every few months I need it. But Thunderbird has one thing that Outlook doesn’t (at least to my knowledge): HTML email signatures. I program the HTML file, including CSS, and just link my email account to the local file that I can change any time I want - very cool.

Thunderbird is the first Open Source software I’ve evaluated to this extent, but I’m wholly satisfied and loving our cost-saving software plan more and more. As I said though, it does require more configuration than Outlook. Here’s a copy of the info I posted on our internal Wiki that we use to share information throughout the company:

Installing Mozilla Thunderbird as an Email Client

1. Download from Mozilla Website
2. Install and start software
3. It will prompt you to add a new email account (or Tools -> Account Settings -> Add Account)
4. It will walk you through creating an account, similar to the way Outlook does. Make sure to make the Incoming User Name your full email address (i.e. adam@pureadapt.com, not adam).
5. Configure account by going to Tools -> Account Settings
   1. To create a signature - make an HTML file with your signature in it and save it to your local hard drive. Under Account Settings, check Attach This Signature and browse to locate your HTML file.
   2. To have mail go to separate inboxes (instead of all accounts going to the global one) - Select Server Settings -> Advanced -> Inbox for this server’s account
   3. For outgoing mail to work - Select Outgoing Server (SMTP). If it’s your first email account, edit the profile to use your full email address again (i.e. adam@pureadapt.com, not adam). If it’s an additional email account, add a new profile for the account.
   4. To handle email replies like Outlook does - select Composition & Adressing -> Automatically quote the original message when replying -> Then, start my reply above the quote -> and place my signature below my reply (above the quote).
   5. Under Server Settings, make sure that Check for new messages at startup, Check for new messages every X minutes, and Automatically download new messages are all checked.
6. To have Calendar and Task list functions, install Lightning
7. To forward messages inline (and not as an attachment), go to Tools -> Options -> Composition -> Forward Messages -> Inline